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Sometimes it's exactly what you need, sometimes not. Great for the price.
April 16, 2015

Sometimes it's exactly what you need, sometimes not. Great for the price.

Chris Grant | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

current

Modules Used

  • n/a

Overall Satisfaction with Crazy Egg

Our information architects and IA's who are employed by our clients use it, to analyze behavior and make page design decisions. Senior managers are another audience when we are trying to discuss or persuade.

Other TrustRadius reviews give excellent summaries of how it can be used as an analytics tool.
  • Shows where people click
  • For some reports, allows segmentation of visitors --- by browser, time of day, referrer, etc.
  • Shows how far down people scroll
  • Has numeric output (the List report) as well as a visual heat map
  • In our testing, it's become clear that CE doesn't capture all clicks. Not sure why some are missed. This may not be a huge problem since you really want to get a few thousand visits before doing any analysis, and since the missed clicks seem to be random, I think the end result will be perfectly all right.
  • I'd like to see just the visitor's FIRST click on a given page, as one of the alternative views.
  • Better and more detailed documentation on how the tracking actually works. There is some confusion about whether the screen coordinates of the click are tracked, or the element being clicked on. The former method seems to be used in the Heat and Confetti views and can get thrown off significantly by different screen aspect ratios and resolutions. The Overlay and List views seem to be based on the element being clicked on, and these views disregard clicks that don't happen in a hot area. A detailed explanation, with implications for different site technologies (responsive, tabs, other dynamic elements) would be really helpful for a minority of customers to whom this is critical.
  • Scroll map is nice but not really useful because it doesn't take into account where the fold is for the individual visitor. At least, I don't think it does (see previous comment about technical documentation). Great additions would be seeing the average fold line for all viewers, AND being able to segment like the Confetti View does. Also, it's not clear whether the scroll is measuring the middle point or the bottom of what's on their screen.
  • The main positive impact is sped up decisions about whether to change a page's layout. We can throw statistics at decision makers all we want, but one well placed set of Confetti Maps will pretty much bring an end to arguments that would otherwise be based on assumptions. Really has paid off for us this way.
ClickTale is the big competitor. It has more features such as mouse tracking which is super valuable. When we use Crazy Egg, it's for the following reasons: 1) a lot cheaper, 2) the quantitative Overview and List reports, 3) the fact that often what's offered by Crazy Egg is plenty enough.
Crazy Egg is perfect for HTML pages with no tabs, expanding elements, or responsive implementation. It is questionable for anything else ... but better than nothing and worth the price.

Using Crazy Egg

Information Architects, page designers, and site behavior analysts (web analytics).
2 - Somebody has to be able to put it into the page code.
Testing requires an analytical headset and good communication abilities.
  • Deciding whether to change a page layout.
  • Giving people a clear idea of what happens on a page. MUCH better than statistics or even Google Page View stuff.
  • Figuring out activity on different links that go to the same place, without having to mess with the tracking code for general analytics programs.
  • We never expected clients to want to see heat maps with every monthly analytics report. The Crazy Egg images have contributed to getting our analytics contracts renewed.
  • We're probably going to spotlight a different page every month or so.
We have a lot of clients. Some are appropriate for it, some not. It's 100% likely that we'll have some who can use it at any given point in time.

Evaluating Crazy Egg and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
I'd do more testing before promising anything to the client. There are some pages and sites (thick pages, pre-rendered pages ... whatever ... not sure) where it just doesn't work at all, or the resulting reports are badly distorted.

Crazy Egg Implementation

Test, test, test. (I talked about this in two other places in this review)
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
  • The basic implementation is very easy. Works great with tag management also.
  • Crazy Egg seems to have some excellent advanced implementation possibilities that we have not used yet, so can't evaluate them.

Crazy Egg Support

When I get an answer to my questions, it's very fast and usually very competent. But follow-up questions don't always get answered.
ProsCons
Knowledgeable team
Quick Initial Response
Not kept informed

Using Crazy Egg

If it's installed on appropriate pages it's highly intuitive and usable. If the pages aren't appropriate, it's very frustrating and confusing and disappointing for the client.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Quick to learn
Feel nervous using
Lots to learn
  • Obtaining the tag and putting it into the page.
  • Understanding most of the reports. The exception might be the Scroll Map.
  • Making it work and/or interpreting the reports for a responsive page or a page with tabs, expanding sections, etc.

Crazy Egg Reliability

Its reliability (not scaleability, as the question asks for, sorry) is pretty good but through our testing we know that some clicks do not get recorded. It doesn't bother us a lot because we look at the aggregate of thousands of visits, but we do know it misses things.

As for scaleability, it's about right. You really don't want zillions of clicks per snapshot - the screen just turns to 100% dots and you lose the ability to differentiate different screen areas. We find that 25,000 clicks for a page gives us a really good view.
It's slow to post data, and slow to get a snapshot to finally be active (i.e. not pending). Not intolerable, but would be nice to see data within a couple hours. Often have to wait to the next day.

Upgrading Crazy Egg

Yes - The main upgrade is more snapshots and it happens instantaneously. Have done this numerous times as clients or internal people get addicted and want more and more pages tracked. Also, once we realized we could have three snapshots for one page (one for each device type) we had to buy a bunch more.
Yes - Going from free to paid happened after the first use. No-brainer.