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.
24 Comments
Rob Kerry - http://www.ayima.com/
I don’t think they’d need to buy in this technology, it’s quite a simple thing for them to implement in-house. The code to do this is already available for free and Open Source:
http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/heatmap.html
DaveN
@rob is that he one that used to get bundle with phpmyvisites in the day ?
Rob Kerry - http://www.ayima.com/
Yeah, I believe it is the same one. I’m not sure if phpmyvisites ever bothered updating the PHP class though – the latest version seems to work quite well.
Jignesh Gohel - http://www.eltalearning.com
I am totally agree with rob, For google it wont be difficult to implement same technology and it will be more easier to integrate inhouse technology with analytics rather than integrating third party technology.
DaveN
@rob sweet the old one used to miss report lol.. going to give it a sopin write now 🙂
David Whitehouse
I think we are all in agreement though, they need some heatmap software, whether they acquired a company or integrate something themselves…
Rob Kerry - http://www.ayima.com/
@David – Yeah, would def be handy. I’ve never seen the point in paying for Crazy Egg though, needs more meat on those bones.
Gareth - http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/
You’ll soon be able to just get an app from the GA application gallery, there’s already a visualization app there.
zoran
I wonder is this paid article 🙂 Neil Patel is good and kissmetrics is taking up but I agree he needs to get to rid of an old product that can be re-done in a very short time with few developers
Allen - Personal Brander - http://spotlightportfolios.com/
Seems like you tried to analyze the difference between Crazyegg and Google Analytics rather what you mean in the Title Anyways, its always appreciative when there is something relevant,may be more what the Dominant Search Engine offer!
Tom
Being in leadgen I’ve just gone for clicktale over crazyegg! Having the ability to see what fields people drop out of forms is pretty priceless !
The only downside is the increased load time these can have on your pages especially now google taking site speed into account.
Jorgen Sundberg - http://jorgensundberg.net
Completely agree with Google site overlay, I am not even sure it’s that accurate. Will check out Crazy Egg, never heard of it before.
Chande - http://www.croatiapictures.net
Crazy Egg is a great tool and would be nice if Google would buy it and incorporate it into Analytics, but I think there is even better tool that Google should buy: http://www.clicktale.com
It already has many customers (but I believe that they would not want to give their user data to G (read: booking.com)) and Google could use some of the features both in Website optimizer and Analytics
David Whitehouse
@zoran no it isn’t a paid article! LOL
We’re actually “crazy egging” this article 🙂
Thomas Kupracz
On This:
>>>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.
You can determine what was clicked – you can use event tracking to monitor all clicks.
David Whitehouse
Thomas, does it show the position of the link on the site overlay? If it does then I’d very much like to see that, otherwise I think your suggestion is likely to be a bit impractical…
Thomas Kupracz
@DW – you’re right – not by default. It doesn’t give you position. That’s a definite crazyegg advantage.
The position of the link can be inserted – just depends on how much effort you’re willing to put in. For example:
onclick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘HOME-SECTION-SUBSECTION-POSITION-ID’,’SUBPOSITION-ID ‘,’EVENT’)” ….
David Whitehouse
Cool so does that show up on the site overlay report?
Thomas Kupracz
No – it doesn’t. Prolly should – which makes me re-think my position 🙂
David Whitehouse
You can actually get separate pages to show up on the site overlay report by using separate query strings, for example:
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/pages/get-in-touch.html?link=main-menu
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/pages/get-in-touch.html?link=footer-menu
This is basically what Brian Clifton suggests in his book, “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics” – but my main gripe with this is that it isn’t spot on for SEO, although you can use the REL canonical tag, but still, not perfect…
sam
I use clicktail, it helps me know what is happening on my site and its heatmaps and videos show me i can increase my conversions
mark - http://new2london.net
google analytics has heat map functionality – i found it just the other day!
David Whitehouse
Mark, are you talking about a work around? I know Google Analytics doesn’t offer this functionality at the moment – it would be great if they did…
Lee Colbran - http://www.freshegg.com
I completely agree Dave, we’ve been using Crazy Egg for a long time now. Merging it with GA has always been in my wish list of making a great tool even better.