Do you remember what an eye opener it was when you first saw the Google heat map and how intense the action became in certain sections of the results page? Perhaps you’ve heard it referred to as the Golden Triangle due to the shape and intensity of the results. Finally, advertisers had clear and concise evidence for what many had already suspected – there were several hot spots on the Google results page and that it pays to position your ad within them.
Stepping sideways a little, wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could run these sorts of tests on our own websites without the need to employ special research and analytical companies such eyetools.com? Wouldn’t it be great if we could visualise our site traffic, see exactly what links people are clicking on (or not as the case may be) and then present this in heat map form? Well now you can thanks to a great visual analytics tool from Crazy Egg.
As an affiliate one of the most crucial factors that can make or break a campaign is the ability of your website to convert traffic into sales. If you’ve spent money via paid search delivering customers to your landing pages its crucial that these visitors then click your affiliate links in order to set the tracking cookie. With the Crazy Egg plug-in it makes it easy to do the following:
- Test different versions of a page to see which works better
- Discover which ad placement gives the best results
- Find out which design encourages visitors to click deeper
- Learn which content leads to improved sales
By no means does Crazy Egg compare to more stats heavy applications such as Google Analytics but that for me is the whole point. This is a visual exercise not a maths class!
There are several subscription options available starting from as little as $19 but if you’re just after a quick test then you’ll be pleased to know that there’s also a free option. The free version allows you to test up to 4 landing pages and track up to 5000 visitors which should be more than enough to test, evaluate and optimise a landing page.
I’ve also discovered that there’s a wordpress plugin available for CrazyEgg so I’ll be installing that right here on the fishandclicks blog and will report back with findings on a later date.
If you end up using CrazyEgg, post back and let us know how you got on.
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Paul Wright
Forest
peter bordes
Emma
Fraser Edwards
Lee McCoy
Alice Honey
Yep it looks like a fantastic way to display this kind of information and great that there is a free option.
Hope to meet you next Friday Paul :)
Now that sounds like a plan, I’ll keep an eye out for you or failing that you could grab my mobile number from the contact page and let me know where to find you :)
I posted about this on the A4U forum, but thought i’d contribute here as well.
Firebox has written their own program for doing this, and it is a very good tool for seeing where people are clicking visually. Its really helped us out with site design etc, so this ‘ready to use’ version would be just as useful for people.
I’d be interested in hearing how people get on with this version.
Anyway, see you on Friday (hopefully)
So far the test set up on this blog is looking good (report to follow). This test is purely out of curiosity to see how the CrazyEgg tool performs. The real benefit will lie in split testing landing page designs for some of my own PPC stuff. Looking forward to that one.
Thanks for the info. Don’t know how you discover these amazing things Paul :)
By spending waaaaaaay too much time on the internet clearly :)