Published in Marketing on Sunday, October 8th, 2006
Kyle Neath provides an excellent write-up of how he used Crazy Egg to help test how users use a website, and one of the results saw an increase in click thrus to his forum on Total Spore. We've been using Crazy Egg's service since it was in the development stages to test the effectiveness of different types of copy on a webpage.
If you haven't heard of Crazy Egg, check out the demo here. Also see this comprehensive review at Solution Watch.
Rather than run month long tests as Kyle successfully used, with some clients we've run short tests (hours to days) on a fixed amount of traffic in order to how evaluate how different types of copy perform in various hotspots on their site.
We used to track this by using a unique link for each piece of copy and storing the click-thrus in a database, and we still do this in snapshots now and then. This method allows us to randomly serve different copy and track each one for comparison later.
Crazy Egg, however, allows for a quick snapshot of how different copy performs on it's own within the confines of the page itself.
What this does is allow us to provide the site owners with rapid graphical feedback to ideas or brainstorms that may have only been dreamed up hours earlier. Numbers don't lie, and the heatmap presentation makes it easy to make a decision that we can always test more in depth later on.
This has come in particularly handy during new advertising campaigns, as we test the performance of different copy during the early stages and run with the winner for the bulk of the campaign.
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Comments and Feedback
Another useful way to use Crazy Egg, sounds like you guys are on a roll :-)
Thanks for pointing this one out, we are really happy to see people finding uses for our tool that go beyond the "cool" factor, since making a useful tool has always been our goal.
Hey Hiten, Thanks for the great tool. It works very well for testing images and calls to action, and the brass take to the heatmaps quite nicely. Keep up the good work!