CrazyEgg & RobotReplay- Get more out of your site statistics

I’m always interested in who actually visits my sites – not just only where they came from, but how they used my site. Traditionally you could measure which pages were visited and maybe for how long, but that seems to fall short of making it more meaningful. Cue CrazyEgg and RobotReplay!

CrazyEgg

I’ve used CrazyEgg in the past for my projects – It’s not just about the usual stats of “where did someone come from?”, “are they using x browser?”, etc. This gives you real, meaningful measurement of where people are clicking and why – it also enables you to see how your current site design is or isn’t working.

Features include:

• HeatMap – One of my favourites; Allows you to see where the most active clickable parts of a page are, thus allowing you to revise your web design if needed.
• Confetti – Where your referrers clicked (e.g. all google referrers), by top referrers
• Overlay – Stats about the various elements on your pages
• List – the more low-level set of data on your page
• RSS & Email notification

The great thing about it is that it’s free to try – for the first 4 pages and 5,000 visitors – I think that’s a great way to start looking at more meaningful ways to make sites user friendly and drive traffic up!

RobotReplay

What a great site – complimentary in some ways to CrazyEgg. RobotReplay says that it:

“….lets you record and watch your website visitors in action. View recorded sessions of every mouse movement, click and keystroke:

• Improve your site’s usability
• See where your readers get bored
• Convert more visitors to buyers

It’s usability testing for the rest of us.“

And it’s free! I found this tool invaluable to track the actions of my users – it’s more of an observational tool, but valuable nonetheless as it can really show you how people moved their mice in real time to get around the site.

Conclusion

Given the choice, I’d have Google Analytics, CrazyEgg and RobotReplay all running together – however that bogs down the performance somewhat with several external javascripts being referenced. Day to day I let Google do their magic for me with CrazyEgg and / or RobotReplay in use when either a new design element is posted or some meaningful content is available – to measure how effective its’ placement is.