Adzerk Team Blog

We love user data here at Adzerk. We really can’t get enough of it- we’re running at least five different metrics gathering tools in our application and on our marketing site. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but Crazy Egg is our go-to tool for visualized user information.

What it is & why it’s awesome

Crazy Egg is a hosted service that provides a variety of visual representations of click data. It’s awesome because click data can be time-consuming to analyze. Sometimes we just need to know if a particular button is being used, and we need to know inside of 5 minutes. Having access to this level of information already conveniently organized is extremely useful in our quest to provide an intuitive user experience.

Getting up and running

The initial setup was a bit of a challenge. Crazy Egg is easiest to use for websites that don’t require a user login. adOS is completely hidden behind authentication, in addition to using a unique url for each customer. So, we needed to include the Crazy Egg tracking code in the application, but in such a way that it could still talk to Crazy Egg from behind authentication.

In order to get around this, we followed this post by Patrick McKenzie of Kalzumeus Software, which provides a great hack. We added a bit of black magic to the tracking code which I won’t delve into in the interests of security. (But seriously, please don’t hack us. You wouldn’t like our DevOps guy when he’s angry…)

Since most of our pages use dynamically generated urls, we set up a series of CrazyEgg snapshots using wildcards. for example- to add tracking to our Channels page, the url on my production account is http://sarah.adzerk.net/network/89/channels. It’s as good a pattern as any to point Crazy Egg at, since every single account has a different url.

I set up a wildcard pattern of http://*.adzerk.net/network/*/channels to match Channels pages across all Adzerk customer accounts. The only other thing you have to set is for how long you’d like the snapshot to run. Some I set to be ongoing, but if I want to test something specific, I might set a user limit (say, 1,000 users) or a specific set of dates, if I know we’ll be rolling out changes.



This is cool because you don’t have to go through and aggregate all the data yourself, you just point to a page and it does the rest.

What it can do

Here’s what we can find out from this one snapshot:

Areas of the page where users are clicking

How much users are scrolling

We often use this to determine if the page is too long and users aren’t finding things because of it, or if they’re scrolling because they aren’t seeing the content that’s actually above the fold.

Clicks, by location and by referrer (which is super useful for us, and possibly my favorite feature)

The Confetti map also allows you to display clicks by a variety of other variables, including browser, operating system, various units of time, and custom metrics that you can set up yourself.
Cases where we use this could include, “Hey, is anyone clicking this link?” Crazy Egg: “Yes, Big Customer X is clicking that link”. “Well alrighty then.”

Clicks by percentage

“95% of the users on this page think this graphic is clickable. We should do something about that.”

List of elements on the page, by type and percentage of clicks, both visible and invisible

You can also compare snapshots in the same window

In a nutshell, Crazy Egg can take a lot of the thinking out of analytics, and we love using it. What tools do you use to visualize your user data?