Blogs, Design, Tools
Sep 1, 2006
Todd Zeigler
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Some Things I Learned About Our Blog (and Blogs in General) from Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a pretty cool tool that allows you to see visually how people are using your website (what page elements they are clickign one). Read a full review of Crazy Egg on Techcrunch here.

Seeing as how we build websites for a living, we implemented it on our blog homepage as a way of giving it a test drive. Here’s what we learned:

(1) No one cares about our sidebar. Like a lot of bloggers, we like to screw around with WordPress plugins and widgets. We should probably stop since it appears no one uses them. Out of around 500 visitors during the test period:

  • 1 clicked on a Most Popular post
  • 1 clicked on a single month in our archive
  • 1 clicked on one of the sites listed on our blogroll (congrats Media Shift)
  • 0 clicked on our tag cloud deal

People did use our search and our RSS feed attracted some clicks. But I think we need to realize that the sidebar toys are for the blogger and not the readers. Or it could be that our plugins are just lame. One of those.

I’d be interested if other bloggers have plugins/widgets that actually attract clicks.

(2) People read the comments. Five of the nine most clicked on links on our homepage were to comments on our posts. For folks trying to make money on their blog or website, the lesson here is that allowing (and attracting) comments increases page views.

(3) We should take the Home link off our blog homepage. Sort of stupid to have that link there to begin with since people are already on the homepage and all. Eight people clicked on it, probably expecting something other than for the page they are on to reload. I suspect they were looking for our company homepage and weren’t clear on how to get there. We’ll have to play with this.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff and have a website, give Crazy Egg a try.

  • http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com/blogs/leobottary Leo Bottary

    I’ll have to give it a try.  Thanks for sharing!

  • http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com/blogs/leobottary Leo Bottary

    I’ll have to give it a try.  Thanks for sharing!

  • http://thebogstandardblog.blogspot.com CyberScribe

    "No one cares about our sidebar." That’s interesting because I reckon sometime there is a lot more information available via a sidebar than even in the main blog.

  • http://thebogstandardblog.blogspot.com CyberScribe

    "No one cares about our sidebar." That’s interesting because I reckon sometime there is a lot more information available via a sidebar than even in the main blog.

  • http://adamkaras.com/blog/2006/09/02/site-visualization-by-crazyegg/ world according to ack ~ adam karas » Site Visualization by CrazyEgg

    [...] Got the word from the BivingsReport. [...]

  • http://www.crazyegg.com Hiten Shah

    Thanks for taking the time to explain what you have learned through the use of Crazy Egg.  This was the reason we built Crazy Egg, and I am glad that you made a post about this, and also improved your website according to what you learned.  We would love to hear any feedback from you on how we can improve Crazy Egg.  Thanks!

  • http://www.crazyegg.com Hiten Shah

    Thanks for taking the time to explain what you have learned through the use of Crazy Egg.  This was the reason we built Crazy Egg, and I am glad that you made a post about this, and also improved your website according to what you learned.  We would love to hear any feedback from you on how we can improve Crazy Egg.  Thanks!

  • http://www.bivingsreport.com Todd Zeigler

    Hiten,For me the main thing would be to figure out how to test out templates in addition to single pages.  This works great for the homepage but for many sites no single second level page will get enough data to really see if your template is effective, unless you did the test over a long period.Good luck.

  • http://www.bivingsreport.com Todd Zeigler

    Hiten,

    For me the main thing would be to figure out how to test out templates in addition to single pages.  This works great for the homepage but for many sites no single second level page will get enough data to really see if your template is effective, unless you did the test over a long period.

    Good luck.

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