Why Google Should Buy Crazy Egg

I don’t know about you, but I would love to see Google buy Crazy Egg and incorporate it some how into Google Analytics. It makes sense to me, hopefully it is just a matter of time. For those of you that haven’t used Crazy Egg, I urge you to give it a try, it really is very useful.

There is nothing in Google Analytics that can replace the functionality Crazy Egg provides – Google Analytics have the site overlay report, this tells you what percentage of people clicked through to what page – but it can’t tell you which part they clicked. Crazy Egg shows you where everyone has clicked, whether it was on a link or not – this highlights usability errors and often areas which could result in an improvement in conversions.

Crazy Egg has a number of features, but there are two I like to use. The first one is the most popular feature (I believe), the heatmap – this shows you where people are mainly clicking and in what density (see pic below):

From this heatmap you can see that the bottom right category and the middle left category are getting most clicks – this happens to be parter of a larger template, so the bottom right category is actually below the fold – so you might conclude from this that it needs moving up above the fold and possibly more to the left.

Another feature that is particularly good is confetti, this feature allows you to segment clicks according to various metrics – and for SEO the most useful is probably the clicks by keyword.

Why Google Site Overlay is Largely Useless
Ok first up, if you have a change in design, you’re site overlay gets updated – the problem is, when you look at data before the design change, it uses the existing design – so this makes any historical data largely inaccurate and useless, especially if changes are made regularly. This is our site overlay for January 2009, which should be the old website:

Secondly, say you have two links to the same URL on one page, in Google Analytics you cannot determine which one was clicked, so both links get an equal click through percentage, which is obviously misleading and therefore useless.

So to me it makes sense that Google Analytics incorporates something like this, one big aspect will be the fact that those running heatmaps such as Crazy Egg will likely make increases in conversion rates and be able to bid more on AdWords as a result, win win.