You may have heard us talk about Hotjar (now Content Square) in the past, and whilst it is still a good product, we’ve recently decided to be Crazy Egg partners. Why, you ask? Well because we believe its features are really great. Here are some of the ones we love and why.
P.S. click here to start your 30-day free trial of Crazy Egg.
Page speed
Whilst you can use PageSpeed Insights to get a deep understanding of your website’s speed performance, Crazy Egg gives you a helpful quick snapshot every time you create a Heatmap for the page you are interested in.
This is important as users won’t stick around on a page that loads slowly. As you can see from the analysis of our homepage, the longest it took for this page to fully load was 2.18 seconds, which is quite slow. But overall, our median page speed load time was good.
Page bounces
A page bounce happens in Crazy Egg when the user stays on the page for less than 10 seconds, doesn’t click or scroll, and doesn’t navigate to another page. This is similar to (though not quite the same as) how Google Analytics 4 measures a bounce.
Measuring bounce rate in Crazy Egg is really important for understanding if your content is aligning with user expectations and if it is persuasive enough above the fold to keep them engaged. (Above the fold is the bit of the page that users see as soon as the page loads).
Heatmaps
There are 5 different kinds of heatmap within Crazy Egg. Perhaps somewhat confusingly it calls its Click maps heatmaps. So, for now, we are going to call that kind of heatmap a Click map.
On all heatmaps, you can breakdown who has left the clicks or scrolled by using the filters for things such as new versus returning users, browser, country, and even time of day amongst many others.
This segmentation makes it easy to understand how user behaviour differs depending on where the user is coming from and their browsing behaviour.
You can also compare two different heatmaps to see how users behave on similar pages, which is great if you are running a split URL A/B test!
Click map (heatmap)
The Crazy Egg Click map shows us which areas of the page are being interacted with and the popularity of these elements with brighter colours indicating higher interaction.
You can see from our Click map of an A/B test we are running that users have clicked on CRO Audits, Blog, and Contact in the menu. There are also ‘dead clicks’ these are the clicks on the parts of the page that are not interactive, such as those around the header
You can overlay a Scroll map to the side of a Click map, so you can combine your view of both clicks and scrolls.
Scroll map
The Crazy Egg Scroll map is a little different to scroll maps you may have seen elsewhere on platforms such as Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity. Unlike those maps which just show you how far down a page users have scrolled, the Crazy Egg scroll map shows you which areas of the page users were most interested in and therefore if your key content has been a user focus or not.
Areas of higher engagement (more popular) are shown in brighter colours. An ‘impression’ is counted if a user pauses on that part of the page, so the higher the number of impressions the more users who stopped at that section.
The ‘popularity’ score is “the number of impressions that of the page received, as a percentage of the most popular part of the page” (Crazy Egg support). Or as I understand it, if a segment of the page has a popularity score of 100, all users who didn’t bounce paused at that segment. If a different segment has a popularity score of 50, half of all users who didn’t bounce paused at that segment.
Confetti map
A Confetti map is a view of individual clicks on your site. This is really useful for detailed analysis where every click counts.
It is particularly useful for determining where user segments have clicked by using the filters provided.
Overlay map
An Overlay map lets you target clickable elements on the page to see how many clicks the element got, how many people these clicks came from, and what percentage of the clicks on the page the clicks on this element makes up.
This is helpful in understanding if a certain area of your page has been lit up by many users clicking on it, or by just a few.
An example of when this could be helpful is if you have an image carousel. As people will likely be clicking multiple times on an image carousel arrow, this will show as a bright colour on your click map. It may also gather a higher click percentage, but the number of people clicking that element could be low, meaning the aforementioned engagement identifiers would be misleading.
List map
This one could be a little confusing as it isn’t really a ‘map’ per-se, it is simply a list of the elements on your page and how many clicks they received.
This is helpful when you want to quickly see a ranking of the most clicked elements in a numerical format. For example, if you wanted to see where your CTAs sit in the list, you could use the Overlay map and click them one by one, or you could use the List map to pinpoint them.
Recordings
Recordings are great for qualitative investigations into how your users are behaving on your site and help you uncover points of friction that are stopping them from converting.
They can be difficult to watch in bulk, as this takes time. But you can filter recordings to make sure you see the ones that are most relevant to your research.
For example, you may decide to filter by a specific page, new or returning users, if they completed a conversion (which you can set up within Crazy Egg), or viewed the site on a specific device type.
On some recordings you can even generate AI analysis of the recording, which neatly summarises what happened and gives you suggestions on what to focus on.
Funnels
Funnels allow you to track progress towards an end goal by using ‘conversions’ which you set up within the platform.
Conversions can be viewing a particular page, completing a form, clicking on a button or link and more.
Funnels are great for seeing where users are dropping off, so if you had a funnel of add to cart > start checkout > complete checkout, you could see where users are abandoning their purchasing journey.
Google Analytics 4 data
We all know Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can be a bit difficult to navigate sometimes, which is why you can link up your GA4 with Crazy Egg to see an easy to understand snapshot of your data. This is called Web Analytics within your Crazy Egg dashboard.
Web Analytics uses AI to help you interpret the data and give suggestions for improvement as well as showing you the data highlights.
If you want a slightly more detailed view, you can click into most of the overview reports to see more data.
CTAs and banners
Have you ever wanted to add a simple promotional banner or call out to your WordPress or custom site and not wanted to spend ages figuring out how to do it?
Well Crazy Egg has you covered. Simply head to the CTAs section of the platform and create a new CTA. You can browse a range of templates to get you started and once it’s set up, you can see stats on how many people have interacted with it.
For example, you may want to use a banner to advertise a sale or free shipping on an e-commerce site, or redirect users to a webinar sign up page on a SaaS site.
Surveys
Unlike some other platforms, gathering survey responses with Crazy Egg is unlimited, so you can run a closed question or open question survey without worrying about response limitations.
Again, they have a wide selection of templates to choose from, or you can start from scratch, applying your own conditional logic to your questions to guide users down the most relevant line of questioning.
Get started with Crazy Egg - 30 day free trial
It should be noted that whilst the AI additions to Crazy Egg are super helpful, as with any AI conversion rate optimisation advice, I do recommend always running these past someone trained in conversion rate optimisation if you can.
Why not start a 30-day free trial and give Crazy Egg a go for yourself? I’m sure you will find it a valuable tool. If you would like help with all things conversion rate optimisation, get in touch with us below to set up your free consultation.
Hi, I’m Charlotte. I love writing about user psychology and tips I’ve picked up from leading user research and CRO projects. Get in touch if you’d like to work with me to improve the user experience on your site or click here to learn more about your future CRO team.