Crazy Egg or Clicktale?



I used clicktale couple years ago and I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Maybe i wasn't using all the features they offer (only used the video capture thing). In those videos all you see is your page and people scrolling through it from reading it. Its hard to get any real useful data out of it, but I guess you can try and analyze where people stop reading and leave your page, but most of the time its random so any data you do get from it is still taking a shot in the dark as to why they left (at least for me anyway). You might have better luck with more day and night results from it(ex. most people leave after getting to this paragraph) I personally didn't.
 
I use CrazyEgg a lot, and it's good for showing what's working on a page.

However, I've started using Visual Website Optimizer which does heatmap tracking AND split testing.
 
I used clicktale couple years ago and I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Maybe i wasn't using all the features they offer (only used the video capture thing). In those videos all you see is your page and people scrolling through it from reading it. Its hard to get any real useful data out of it, but I guess you can try and analyze where people stop reading and leave your page, but most of the time its random so any data you do get from it is still taking a shot in the dark as to why they left (at least for me anyway). You might have better luck with more day and night results from it(ex. most people leave after getting to this paragraph) I personally didn't.

Finally someone who shares my sentiment!
 
The problem with cool tools like this is that they're data pukers. The real $$$ is made from being able to produce a strategy based on your analysis. Avinash says that 10% of your analytics budget should be spent on the tools and 90% on the rockstars who can produce actionable insights from that data.

My whole point is this - it doesn't really matter which tool you use if you can't take the results and come up with an improvement plan based on the data. That's a skill that I think is going to be in huge demand at all web companies in the near future and worth 6-7 figures of salary.

But it's hard as fuck to do well.
 
However, I've started using Visual Website Optimizer which does heatmap tracking AND split testing.

I stumbled across this today after seeing a competitor using it and wow, it's ridiculously good and I haven't even ventured into the heatmap and clickmap yet.
 
Heat mapping can be helpful, but there are better ways to help determine why your conversions are low.

Heat mapping is really good to see if people are clicking on things they think are links, but are not. This is common with images. People will click on images expecting something more, but it is not a link. Knowing this, you might want to link an image to what you think people want to see when clicking on it.

The opposite also happens. There might be links on your site that you think are obvious links, but no one is clicking on them.