Improve Your Conversions With Tools That Let You See How You're Losing Prospects
Google Analytics and similar tools have been collecting visitor data for years now. And the potential to track mouse movement has been around for just as long. But it's only recently that we have a visual and user-friendly tool for tracking the behavior of your site's visitors.
Unscrambling Page Analytics With CrazyEgg.com
An innovator in this field has been CrazyEgg. It took the useful data that most lay people would find difficult to understand, and they designed a useful interface to use that information.
Your current website hosting service already gives you basic data about the traffic to your page, but CrazyEgg goes further by packaging it into something useful:
Heatmap.
One very useful CrazyEgg innovation is the heatmap, which overlays a screen over the webpage to give you a visual overview of which elements on the page are getting the most clicks. The more clicks, the "hotter" the image. The heatmap let's you analyze the hot and cold elements on your page. Confetti.
CrazyEgg lets you see each click as one "confetti" dot on the page screenshot. This allows you to see EXACTLY where people are clicking on your site. In addition, you can track from which other page or search engine that visitor-click originally came from. Filter out irrelevant visitors.
Clicks by you and your employees can skew the data on your webpage analytics. Same goes for clicks from competitors checking you out. CrazyEgg lets you filter out those irrelevant clicks, so you can focus on the visitors that count.
The best thing about CrazyEgg is that it's free for small users. It'll track up to 5,000 visitors on as many as four pages - at NO cost. If you don't have a lot of visitors yet and you're only concerned about a couple of landing pages and your home page, it's a near-perfect opportunity.
How to Make It Work For You
CrazyEgg and similar programs are tools for getting the optimal web page design for meeting your conversion goals. It does this by letting you run continuous tests on your page elements. Here are tips to put it into action.
Turning it on. Before turning it on, finalize your goals and objectives for your web page. Do you want more clicks on certain elements? Are you looking to take out unnecessary elements? Also, hold off from making any changes to the design so that you can use the initial results as a benchmark. Analyze where they're coming from. Check where the visitors who do click through are coming from? Are your pay-per-click ads delivering visitors who stay? If not, you'll want to adjust the ad. How about your search engine visitors? Do you need to adjust your keywords and SEO content? Analyze where visitors are going. Use the heatmap and other tools to see where your visitors are clicking heavily and lightly. Is that what you expected? If it isn't, you'll need to make adjustments. Tweak. After a week or two, you should have a decent idea of the overall behavior of your web page traffic. Now start to make the small tweaks and watch the change in behavior. Resist making a lot of changes all at once. If you do, it may be difficult to see which ones really worked and which ones didn't. Repeat. This is a continuous process of testing, analyzing and tweaking. If something doesn't work, change it. If something works, keep it. But keep the cycle going.
Competing Programs
A good thing never goes unchallenged. In addition to CrazyEgg, check out these six competitors to see if they're a better fit for you:
TapeFailure, ClickTale and RobotReplay also offer you the opportunity to watch a total replay of each visitor's mouse movement. That can get tedious, but it can help you get an idea of the order in which visitors clicked items on your page, where you lost them when they decided to go to a different website, and how to prevent it in the future.
For example, if your visitor leaves your site by typing "HSA definition" into the Google search box on your page, you should consider adding a pop-up or in-line definition of HSA to your page.
Start Upgrading Your Website Design
CrazyEgg and similar online programs now make it easy to make quantifiable improvements to your web design. You'll no longer have to make changes to your site based solely on guesswork.
And with more of your competition on the web, these improvements are no longer just options to make your site look pretty. They're necessary improvements to get increased conversions and fewer drop-offs.
Take advantage of CrazyEgg's FREE subscription to see how these tools can quickly make a difference with your conversion ratios and bottom line.
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