Hey. Jug here. Sorry guys if I (myself!) can’t post yet. I’m really busy concentrating on my exams, so PLEASE bear with me. Don’t worry though, I’ll be back in no time on March 28, 2008. See ya then! For now, let Louis entertain you. Give him a round of applause now.

This post was guest posted by Louis Liem from HomeBiz Resource. This is about how using CrazyEgg to find out what’s in your reader’s head and which are their favourite spots so you can better optimize your site!

What is your reason to change your blog’s layout, re-placing menus and ad spots, swapping text links with image links? Unless you blog for yourself to read, one of the obvious answers is to make your blog a better place to visit and increase your readers’ enjoyment. And how do you decide on which elements need to be removed at all, and which to be re-placed only?

I’ll bet that you use some of the website analyzer tools scattering in the internet to find out. Using those tools, how long does it take for you to read numerical data or bar graphs and find out the better placement before implementing the change? No matter how fast someone reads numerical data, I’m sure that a visualized version of data reporting provides an easier reading and faster understanding of whatever information contained.

This is why CrazyEgg hatched a visualization version of information on how visitors behave on your site.

Enough with short text explanations, let’s head to the visualizations

In order to use CrazyEgg, you need to be registered first. CrazyEgg provides 5 membership options as you can see below. They are differed by the number of visitors, pages to track, advanced features and live reporting. Let’s sign up for a free account for now.

When you’ve completed your registration, you can access your Dashboard. You can manage all your pages here as well as adding new pages to track. Each pages listed (if any) is completed with a summary of its last test date, number of tests ran, and its current active status. If you have a page listed, click on its name to view tracking results or decide to end, delete the current test, or to start a new test.

Been wondering what kind of report you can have with CrazyEgg? CrazyEgg enables four kinds of visualization, they are “Overlay”, “List”, “Heatmap” and “Confetti” view. Here’s a snapshot of mine (click to enlarge):

Overlay View

See the different colors? They say something like “The darker the red, more clicks were there. The lightest blue, has the least click. Green has more, but not as much as yellow” If you click on the picture, you can see that my Story page gets the most clicks than the other links on the nav bar. This can tell me that people are curious about somebody behind a blog and I should have and make a very good use of the “About” page. Or, I need to make the other menu looks more appealing :).

You can also find out which category appeals your readers the most. So you may want to make your site focus to that category, or balancing interests by creating great contents on other categories.

Still on the same Overlay view, notice the “more +” link on the top-right of every color sign.

Click on it, and you’ll see where all the people clicked that particular link comes from . Any idea how long does it take to figure out the same thing using raw numbers and text reports?

List View

The view lists all the clicks happen on the page. Each of the items are given an identification like “A” for clicks on texts, “IMG” for clicks on images, “INPUT” for clicks on text boxes, etc. The other columns provide the number of clicks happen on the element and the its share of total clicks made. You can also export the data as CSV and store it in your local. The List view can help us determine which type of links tend to generate more clicks, while the Overlay view above, can tell us which is the better place to put links.

Heatmap View

The Heatmap view presents the area with the most clicks. Almost similar as the Overlay view, with the most clicked area has the most significant dots. Another important information can be obtained from the Heatmap view is, since it describes where people click, you can start to figure out where you should place your link. People often click on a plain image because they think it should be a link. Get what I mean? Overlay view can’t do this. It only counts clicks on pre-defined links.

Confetti View

The Confetti view (click the picture above) works alike the Heatmap view, with different details. It shows where people click. But instead of displaying clicks density, it presents which site sources the visitors clicking the spot. So gives an easier picture of how traffic from a certain site will lead to. The difference it has from the Overlay view, is it’s easier to get a portrait of where a certain group of traffic accumulates.

Not only source of traffic, the Confetti view also able to tell you people’s activities on your page based on their browser, keywords, and even how long they’re on the page before they made a click. If the time span is high, maybe people are having difficulties trying to understand how they want to go somewhere. The same data may be available with text based website analytics, but think of how long before you can summarize them into valuable information. CrazyEgg delivers them in no time!

Now it’s time to build your first click tracker. It should be easy!

First, click “Add new page” or something like that, and you’re required to fill up some description on your new test. One of them is how long the test will run. You can choose to end the test after a number of days or visits. Click “Save” and you’ll be shown a block of code you need to attach into your template. It’s just a simple copy-paste and takes less then 10 minutes. Login tomorrow or a few hours later to see rainbows on your own account on your own site!

Let’s say your first test is through and you’ve decided to make some changes. You want to test the new design as well on the same site. All you need is clicking “Test a new version” on your page details (expand it if necessary by clicking on the page’s name). If you create a new test before the previous test is through, you’ll need to end the previous test. Proceed with entering test duration and save it. All tests will be listed so you’ll easily compare one another.

To show test results, simply click on “View Results” and you can choose views (Overlay, List, Heatmap or Confetti).

Here are some ideas on how you can use information you see from your test results:

• Put an ad or links to your affiliate page where people click on places they thought there’s supposed to be a link.
• Track flash based website clicks, find out where people click.
• Test different ad positions and designs, find which is the most appealing.
• Find out what kinds of link a particular group of visitor like Diggers, Stumblers or Googlers would prefer to click. Find out each group’s destination to optimize your site for them!

However, I didn’t find an explanation on how I can exclude my own clicks from being tracked.

Well, that’s a minor problem, in my opinion. With all the benefits, I think it’ll be wiser to put the attention into what CrazyEgg has to offer and make a good use of them. What do you think?

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Why Your Blog Isn’t Getting Anywhere
• Blogger Sweatshop
• Better Safe than Sorry!