Usability toolkit: visualize clicks with Crazy Egg

Do you know where people are clicking on your pages? If you’re using Crazy Egg, then you do.

This very affordable service starts at $9/month with a 30-day free trial.

The heatmap may be the heart of the service, but I find the confetti breakdown (distinguish between clicks by referral source, search term, browser and other variables) more useful. CrazyEgg also offers scroll maps as well as overlay reports that provide specific information about each link on a page.

A heatmap illustrates where people have clicked on a page. This lets you see what’s hot, but you may also see a lot of empty clicks. If you’re a marketer, these data can help you make changes that increase conversions. If you’re a service, these data can help you make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

crazy egg heatmap — A heat map visually highlights the most clicked area of a page.

If you are interested in knowing about browsers, operating systems or devices (desktop, tablet, mobile), then the confetti view is your friend. You can also customize the variables (Google campaigns, for example).

This CrazyEgg confetti view provides a snapshot of this page by browser.

Confetti can also differentiate between new and returning visitors.

It’s important to note that the data are webpage-specific. You would need to measure visits to all pages and then aggregate the results if you were looking for sitewide data.

How does it work? You need to add a snippet of javascript to each page that you want to track. Then you set up the parameters for measurement in the Crazy Egg dashboard. And yes, you can use Crazy Egg with self-hosted WordPress sites (there is a plugin, but it’s easy to add the code to the header.php file). There are also plugins for Drupal and Django.