| As told to J.J. McCorvey
From the October 2011 issue of Inc. magazine

My Favorite Web Analytics Tool

Entrepreneur Andy Crestodina explains how he uses Crazy Egg to analyze web traffic.

 

Courtesy Subject

Andy Crestodina, co-founder and strategic director of Orbit Media Studios, Chicago

My partners and I run a Web design and video production firm, so it's essential for us to know how visitors are using our clients' websites. Earlier this year, our SEO partner recommended an analytics tool called Crazy Egg, and now we're huge fans.

Instead of using numbers to report site traffic, Crazy Egg uses color-coded maps. The heatmap, for example, shows the "hot" and "cold" spots on a site: Areas getting few clicks are blue; popular spots are red. The confetti map displays clicks as tiny speckles, with each color representing the source of the click. I can filter the view based on the source or the search terms visitors used to get to the site, which is really helpful for SEO. When I show clients maps of their websites, they understand our design suggestions immediately. We also use them to analyze our site. For instance, using a combination of both maps, we noticed that two portfolio examples on our homepage weren't getting many clicks from key sources, so we redesigned the page.

We recently upgraded to Crazy Egg's standard plan, which costs $19 a month and tracks 25,000 users on 20 active pages. The service makes it easy to analyze and explain Web activity, which makes my job a lot easier.

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