I know, I should have put more in the title. Crazy Egg is a web page traffic analysis tool that focuses on visualization. You sign up for an account (starting at $10/month), add a line of code to the page you want to monitor (or your master page), and then configure a page to watch. As it accrues data you can go into the dashboard and visualize the results as your actual page with the number of clicks/percentage overlaid. It’s a really easy way to understand what parts of the page are being clicked.

It reminds me, again, that it’s not enough to just capture data, you have to be able to report on it meaningfully. A great report just instantly explains the story the data is telling, “ok” reports answer the question but make you work a lot harder to understand the story. Sometimes it’s a line graph or a funnel, but sometimes you need something more specialized.

Technically this works and I like the visualization, but I’m not sure yet that I can derive the kind of value that it feels like it delivers. Not their fault, I’m the one who has to decide what behavior I like/don’t like and come up with a UI change to try to get to the goal. I think it might be pretty interesting for bloggers who want to do better but don’t want to really get immersed in traffic analysis.

Let me know if you try it, would be interested to hear if it helped.