2006 / October 7^th/ Using CrazyEgg for goal optimization

By now, I’m sure that all of you have heard of the fantastic CrazyEgg. I’ve been a huge fan of this service for a very long time now and think they’ve really nailed a missing niche in the analytics market. I’m sure you’ve seen more heat-maps than you ever thought possible in the past few months — but what of it? Is there more than just seeing where your users are clicking? You bet there is!

One of the greatest benefits of this service is the ability to analyze how users interact with your site and optimize their usage so you can accomplish specific goals. Remember, this is what analytics is all about — optimizing your site so that you can achieve specific goals.

Start a before test-case

The first rules of any experiment is to start off with a baseline test. I suggest month-long tests unless your site gets a ton of traffic. The idea is to get a good idea of how your user-base is interacting with your site. So go ahead and start up an account and get a test running. You can do the next step while this is going on.

Define your goals

This one’s actually pretty simple. What is your goal you’d like to optimize? Do you want more people to buy product X? Maybe read brochure Y? For me, I’m going to use my little fun project Total Spore. For my initial results, I wanted to see if I could get more people going to the forums.

Review results from your before test-case

This one’s easy. Go ahead and go to your CrazyEgg Dashboard and view the site in the windshield. You’ll get a good rundown of what percentage of people are clicking where — but the most visually informative option for me is the heatmap. So let’s take a look at what I got:

Develop a hypothesis

Alright, so now we’ve got our before test. Eeek! Almost no one is clicking on the forums link — no wonder we’re not getting any sign-ups! So what are they clicking on? It’s actually a pretty obvious mistake on my part — one easily overlooked in the design phase of the website. I put the most important link (for user-interactivity and stickyness) last! My hypothesis is that by moving the forums link to position #2 I will get more people clicking on it.

Decide on a course of action

Since I still want to focus this site on the content — I’m actually going to keep Game Info as position #2, and move forums up to #3, leaving the News & Elsewhere at the end.

Re-run your test

Lucky for you, if you’ve left the javascript code from your previous test in place, all you have to do is go back into your CrazyEgg Dashboard and use the test a new version link. Be sure to add some descriptive text describing what you changed, because in an ideal world this is a never-ending tweaking process.

Analyze the results

Let’s take a look at how the heat-map comes back after tweaking the navigation.

Score! It looks like my hypothesis was right. I’m getting a significant increase in the traffic flow to the forums. Also — I’ve even got a little bonus surprise in there. It looks like a lot of people are clicking on the date icon next to each post. Right now, they’re just images that aren’t linked. If I link these up, I should be able to get a few more page-views out of people and reduce user frustration.

It’s how you use the tools, not the tools themselves

Hopefully now you’ve got a nice little basis for how to actually use CrazyEgg instead of just looking at those pretty heat-maps!

1. 

   Hiten Shah

   October 8^th | #

   Great writeup on how you used Crazy Egg, we are glad you wrote this post, it will definately help people understand what we are all about.

   “It’s how you use the tools, not the tools themselves” - You really nailed that one!

2. 

   Jim Whimpey » Using CrazyEgg For Goal Optimization

   October 8^th | #

   [...] Using CrazyEgg For Goal Optimization [...]

3. 

   SR

   October 8^th | #

   Great post. Off to do some testing now….

4. 

   Eric

   October 8^th | #

   And here I thought CrazyEgg would only be good for ad placement.

5. 

   jjfoley

   October 26^th | #

   I just tried a similar thing with clickdensity’s ab testing stuff. Its great to have all these new tools coming through.

6. 

   Kara

   November 7^th | #

   i love it

7. 

   Markus

   November 29^th | #

   Nice writeup. Are you still continually tweaking your pages or was it more of a one time test?

8. 

   Kyle

   June 20 | #

   Thanks for this, it was really helpful. We are looking at CrazyEgg right now and your post helped us understand what we were looking at.

   Kyle Flaherty

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