There’s a kind of grim irony in exploring Crazy Egg, only to discover that the very thing that would make their website and service useful for me would never be able to be detected using the tools that they provide.
Crazy Egg is designed to help you continually test and improve your site.
They do this by capturing where on your site people are clicking and providing you this information in a range of formats, from a simple list, to an overlay (which we’ve seen a fair bit of now, and is even included in Google Analytics these days), to a ‘heat map’ that looks a lot like something you’d generate from eyetracking, but is of course based on the volume of clicks in various parts of the page.
There’s obviously a lot of interesting information you can gather from this kind of data, and it’s particularly digestible thanks to the visualisations. It is only one of very many ways that you can establish what people are doing or not doing on your website, and it is far from telling you what is working and what is not. Crazy Egg says their data can help you:
- Test different versions of a page to see which works better
- Discover which ad placement gives the best results
- Find out which design encourages visitors to click deeper
- Learn which content leads to improved sales
I don’t have a huge problem with most of these claims… except for the first one – how on earth do you define what ‘works better’ based on clicks?
What Crazy Egg doesn’t tell you, though, is why something that you’re *not* doing is making people unable to use your service.
Case in point – me!
I got an email from Crazy Egg this morning to tell me that they’re up and running and inviting me to register and have a play with their service. It’s a particularly interesting service for someone in my line of work – might be another quick, cheap tool to add to the research kit. I’d love to use their services if only they’d make it a little easier for me!
I couldn’t find a word of ‘support’ or ‘help’ content on their site, nor did their blog appear to have a search facility so that I could see if they’d address the issue I was looking for help with.
My problem is that I want to try Crazy Egg, and I want to use my WordPress Blog as a test. I’m guessing that I won’t be the only person they’ve emailed today with this question. I’m guessing they’ve emailed a lot of people who blog today.
At the moment, I’m at the point of abandonment with Crazy Egg because of their lack of support. Surely an FAQ or a discussion board or a Wiki could be in order? OK, so they’re new and they don’t necessarily know what people need to know… let us all help each other. OK, so they do have a ‘Contact Us’ form… eh, at a pinch, perhaps, but I’m still disappointed.
Is lack of help content a bug? (They want us to report bugs… what do you think?)
For now, I’m hoping that someone out in blog-land can help me?!
I have my Crazy Egg Code and I was thinking of putting it on my blog homepage. Anyone got any idea where in the template code I should be putting this code? I had a quick look at places that seemed logical and couldn’t see anything that matched Crazy Egg’s instructions.
Seriously… not even an FAQ on their website. Who do they think their customers are?!
Technorati Tags: crazy+egg
Hi,
To get Crazy Egg running on your WordPress blog, check this WordPress plugin out:
http://zeo.unic.net.my/notes/where-is-my-egg/
We are also working on a “help / FAQ” area (probably a wiki), as well as making it clear that someone (Zeo) has created a WordPress plugin to allow you to easily insert the Crazy Egg script onto your website. I apologize for our delay in making some of this stuff clear.
hi Hiten,
thanks for stopping by and thanks for the link to the plugin. I think a wiki or a forum is a great idea as it allows people to help each other as well as themselves (and you get really get a feel for what people are struggling with!)
next question for the panel is:
who knows how I change this:
http://zeo.googlecode.com/svn/wordpress/plugins/crazyegg/crazyegg.php
into something that looks like a wordpress plugin I know and love?
Don’t know about you, but usually my wordpress plugins come in zip files… I know what to do with them. Am I supposed to do a save-as or something?
Yep, what do i do with that plugin? It looks to me ike thats the code but I too am used to a file to upload to the server. What do I name this file and where do I place it. Mabe this is as simple as name it whatever you want and place it in the plugin directory?
Is this done to keep bandwidth costs down so people are not downloading this file?
Ill try to get it working and try to report back if I figure it out.
Casey
Okay so its easy. Just open the page, do a save as and it will default to naming it crazyegg. Then upload it to your plugins folder.
Simple and easy.
I have used crazy egg with some success..it seems to me that much of the data can be gotten through other analytical tools.