Friedbeef’s Tech

If you want to get more out of your site analytics, set up a free trial with CrazyEgg, a service which tracks your readers clicks so you know what they like, and how to optimize your page to suit their needs.

You’d be surprised at what you can learn with just a simple session.  Here are 5 types of analyses you can perform with it, and how I’ve applied it to my site:

Lessons from the Home page:

Friedbeef.com (1000 visits 241 clicks)

Issue: “What topics are my readers interested in?”

Observation: Freeware and Firefox are the most popular categories on my site taking up a 6.2% total of clicks. 

Action: Perhaps I should consider skewing my writing towards these subjects.

Issue: “Which areas of my site should I focus on to improve a readers overall site experience?”

Observation: ‘Popular posts’ and ‘Links’ pages get a fair amount of attention

Action: I’ve left these pages static.  I need to work out ways to make them more interesting so it rewards the reader more.

Lessons from the most popular single page:

Google + Firefox = Free Music Downloads (1000 visits 471 clicks)

Issue: “Are users navigating my site effectively?”

Observation: 6.3% of clicks was on the post title link

Action:  Clicking the link above essentially brings them to the same post – adding no value whatsoever to the user! Perhaps I need to remove the title link for a better site experience.

Issue: “How are readers subscribing to my site?”

Observation: Many more readers used my dropdown menu to subscribe to my site than my Feedburner button.

Action: I need to add the number of readers which can be selected via my dropdown menu to increase the subscribers.

Issue: “Should I consider implementing more image ads?”

Observation: People like to click on the pictures even though they aren’t links!  (see above heatmap of clicks) - A whopping total of 19.7% of clicks was on an unlinked picture in the post!

Action:  I’ve always limited my Google ads to text ads.  Perhaps image ads within the post would get a higher click rate than I initially thought.

…Which leaves me with a whole long to-do list to optimize my site.  Unfortunately for me, analyzing is one thing – finding time to do the fixes are another… Nevertheless I know where to start :)

Note: All percentages are based only on identifiable clicks which is why they may not tally with actual clicks

Did you discover any interesting observations with Crazy Egg on your site?  Leave a comment and tell us about your experience!