Example crazy egg heatmap

Crazy Egg heat maps to actionable insights

Website heat mapping is a great way of understanding how users interact with our content; where they click and how far they scroll. This Easter we reflect on some of what we’ve learned via heat mapping in Crazy Egg.

What is Crazy Egg?

Crazy Egg is our chosen heat mapping and click tracking tool. We have used it to generate snapshots of our key content such as landing pages and top level navigation pages.

Crazy Egg offers a more visual alternative to Google Analytics data tables and provides additional tracking of dead clicks, rage clicks and scroll depth with no additional configuration needed.

  • Dead clicks: a click on a non-clickable item or page location. These clicks do not result in any action.
  • Rage clicks: repeated, aggressive clicking on a specific item or page location.

Some examples of standard Crazy Egg reports:

Crazy Egg heat map showing click concentration
Crazy Egg heat map showing click concentration
Crazy Egg confetti map showing specific clicks by country
Crazy Egg confetti map showing specific clicks by country
Crazy Egg scroll depth heat map
Crazy Egg scroll depth heat map

Actionable insights

When reviewing a snapshot set up on our main /study/ page we spotted a large number of dead clicks and rage clicks on the body of our signpost content type.

Crazy Egg confetti report showing rage and dead clicks on our signpost content type.
Signpost content type confetti report in Crazy Egg – Rage clicks in red and normal clicks in white (note: only the CTA button is clickable so any white clicks not on the CTA button are dead clicks)

From this we were able to understand that users expected the entire item to be clickable ie the text, the icon and the call to action (CTA) button. We can also see that when the content type didn’t behave as users expected, they became frustrated.

We amended the signpost content type to make the entire item clickable and we were able to re-submit this page to Crazy Egg to see the impact of our changes.

Results

After allowing enough time for the new snapshot to collect a comparable amount of data we checked back in to see if there had been any reduction in dead clicks and rage clicks.

We were really pleased to see that both dead and rage clicks almost entirely eradicated (dead clicks on this content type are no longer possible now the whole item is clickable).

This means users had a better experience when using our signposts!

Next steps

This content type was updated across the site, meaning user experience was positively impacted by this change on a much broader scale than just the one page.

We’ll continue to test our content types in Crazy Egg and monitor landing pages to identify areas for improvement.

Published by

Katie Shearston

Search, Analytics and Digital Advertising Specialist at the University of York. I get to dive into data analytics, SEO and our digital marketing campaigns.

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