August 21st, 2006

Crazy Egg = Click Tracking + Heat Maps for Your Blog

Crazy Egg – a click tracking service with all the fluffy features demanding publishers will love – just launched today. It isn’t the first entry in this space, with a (completely or very much) similar service in clickdensity (available to the public since June), plus semi-similar services in Google Analytics (has a Site Overlay feature, but no real heat maps) and MyBlogLog (click tracking, but no overlays or heat maps). But unlike its closest competitor, clickdensity, it has what we all love (and what I call hype fuel) – a completely free plan (though clickdensity does have a 30-day trial).

Basically, the service allows you to setup tests to monitor what your visitors click on, for a set amount of time and/or number of visits, and display those results whether as a simple list, an overlay, or a heat map (the coolest method by far). Ideally, you could use Crazy Egg to perform general things like simple usability tests to more specific things like ad placement tests – both of which are relevant to bloggers.

The free plan gives you up to 5000 visits/month (for all tests BTW) and up to 2 pages to track. That’s probably good enough if you’re running an average blog and just want to test your home page, but I’d wager bigger blogs will finish that allocation in less than a day. The overhead of the script it calls is pretty good too, ~3kb (based on tests with the Web Page Analyzer). So, there’s really only one thing that bugs me: Their steep pricing plans. The lowest level paid plan will set you back US$19/month for 25,000 visits/month and unlimited pages to track, compared with clickdensity’s Starter plan which only costs £2.50 (~US$5) for 10,000 visits.

For more information on the service, I suggest taking a look at Solution Watch’s coverage, Mashable or TechCrunch’s early previews (which highlights another potential competitor, Map Surface) or Devlounge’s preview of the service.

Edit: Forgot to add that clickdensity has a 30-day trial.

If you found this post useful, keep updated with future posts by subscribing to blogHelper (for free) through RSS or email.

Remember to share this post as well (if you liked it, of course): These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • digg
  • Fark
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb

Posted by ZMAng

9 Comments

Filed under News, Tools, Usability

9 Comments

Leave a Reply