Tool for journalists: Crazy Egg, for heat mapping web pages

What is it? A heat mapping tool for web pages, so you can see how people are engaging with your site.

How is it of use to journalists? Crazy Egg produces heat maps, scroll maps and other kinds of visual analytics to show where visitors are clicking on your site.

The tool would be useful for journalists (and developers) to test new site layouts, designs and content to find the best place for say, an embedded video or an ad.

To activate heat mapping on your site, you will need to add some JavaScript below the closing tag or in the footer of the site. There is also a plugin available for Wordpress users.

Web pages are tracked via 'snapshots', which you can create simply by inserting the URL of the page you want to track.

You can also schedule how long you want to track a web page for (either by time and date or after a number of visits) which is useful if you want to compare site usage on different days.

Once a snapshot is set up, it will take around 22 hours for the results to come through. You can then view five different forms of web page mapping, accessible on the top right of your snapshot.

Heatmapping visualises the areas of your site that are getting the most clicks. The brighter the area, the more popular it is. For example, the screenshot below shows that the jobs tab on the Journalism.co.uk navigation bar is one of the most popular areas of the site.

You can also compare the results of two different heat maps, which is particularly useful for  testing different site layouts.


Screenshot from crazyegg.com

The scrollmap uses rainbow-like stripes to show the number of times each part of the web page was visible through a browser window.

Again, brighter areas receive a greater number of impressions, with yellow and red being the 'hottest' areas on a page.


Screenshot from crazyegg.com

Crazy Egg can also produce a rather pretty confetti report, which pinpoints exactly where a person clicks.

Confetti uses colour-coded dots to reveal more useful information about site visitors, such referrers, search terms, search engine and browser.


Screenshot from crazyegg.com

There is also an overlay report, which shows the specific number of clicks that each link receives using plus sign markers, which you can open to reveal the exact number of clicks.

Finally, the list function reveals all the elements on a particular page in order of the amount of clicks they got.

Crazy Egg allows you to track multiple domains with one account, and also supports secure sites, Flash clips and iframe objects such as ad-sense.

The dashboard itself is intuitive enough to use, but for anyone who needs a bit of extra help Crazy Egg also has a training section, where you can learn more about setting up a page or how the dashboard works.

New users can try out Crazy Egg with a 30-day free trial, after which plans start from $108 [£64.66] for a basic plan, which allows you to track up to 10 pages and 10,000 visits a month.

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