To get the most comprehensive insights into how your website performs, it's essential to use Google Analytics and Crazy Egg together. These tools build on each other to provide you with the information you need to optimize your website effectively. Say you had a forest in front of you. Google Analytics would help you map out a path through the forest and find individual trees. Crazy Egg's tools would allow you to examine the grain on these trees and see if people have climbed the trees or completely ignored them.
Google Analytics is a free tool and ideal for getting a holistic view of your website, including learning the pages people are interacting with most and which pages have the highest exit rate. At this point, your Crazy Egg Snapshot Reports and User Recordings will help you drill down into the finer details of your user behavior. For example, you would be able to visually explore which elements are causing people to convert or abandon your site.
Another value to using both of these platforms together is that you can cross-check your data. You never want to base website improvement efforts on faulty information, so having access to two different analytics tools will ensure that your hypotheses are sound.
Quick Start Tip
Use Google Analytics to see the journeys that users are taking through your site to understand what pages people are engaging with most frequently. Then switch to Crazy Egg to look at how users behave on those pages so you can see what content is the most valuable and what content can be removed.
Ideal Workflow for Google Analytics and Crazy Egg
Here is a recommended process to help you get started.
- Step 1
- Start with Google Analytics. Use your flow visualization reports to look at the common journeys users take from your homepage so you can understand which pages are generating the most click-throughs. Once you've identified your most popular pages, you can further dig into your user behavior by looking at the Exit Rate and Time on the Page. These two attributes will help you understand which content needs to be refreshed or promoted.
- Step 2
- Now that you know where to start, create Snapshots of the pages with the most click-throughs. This will provide you with five Snapshot Reports, including a Heatmap, Scrollmap, Confetti, Overlay, and List Report. With these reports, you can now visually see information like browsing patterns and even break down your website clicks into various segments.
- Step 3
- If there is a specific action that you would like your users to accomplish, and you're unable to track this through our preset data parameters, create a custom user variable. This will help you better understand the factors causing users to take or not take a specific action.
- Step 4
- Once you've narrowed down trouble spots or holes in your buyers' journey, explore User Recordings to see exactly how people are interacting with your site. Uncover the exact data you need by filtering recordings by attributes, including the Number of Pages Viewed and Ad Campaign information. You can even filter recordings based on the custom user variable you created to see what's happening on a one-to-one scale.
- Step 5
- After you've identified low-hanging fruit or high impact areas of improvement, start planning your A/B test hypotheses. Once you've started launching your A/B tests, we'll take care of the rest by carefully monitoring the influence your changes have on your conversion rates. You can also set up Snapshots of your A/B tests to get a fuller picture of how people respond to your updates.
Practical Use Case
To put the five steps to the test, here's how you would use the tools together to improve your sales funnel. Your goal is to find the leakiest page where customers are dropping off the most frequently. You can then use your Crazy Egg Snapshots on these leaky pages to better understand how you can optimize conversions.
Going back to the funnel, start by analyzing and spotting where users are exiting. Remember to focus on your Exit Rates rather than your Bounce Rates in Google Analytics. Once you've identified which page the culprit is, create a Snapshot and then review your five Snapshot Reports.
Start by asking yourself these questions:
Heatmap
What are they not clicking on this page that is crucial to this particular part of your funnel?
Scrollmap
How far are the majority of your visitors scrolling? Where are the most popular spots on the page with the most impressions? Do impressions drop off rapidly after your Average Fold?
Confetti Report
How are visitors finding your site? What search terms are they using? What is your average time to click?
Overlay Report
What audience type makes up the clicks on your most valuable CTA?
List Report
What are the most popular links that people are clicking? Do you see trends in the type of content that interests visitors?
As you explore your reports, answers to these questions and others will help you start to understand what's causing people to abandon your website.
User Recordings
Now that you're better positioned to know where to look and understand what to filter for, it's time to set up User Recordings. Recordings let you see which users make it through your funnel so you can understand what they interacted with that caused them to move onto the next step. It will also let you see people who don't progress so you can understand what they might have missed or what caused them to stop. With this information on hand, you will be in a great position to optimize this page for conversions.
A/B Testing Analysis with Crazy Egg and Google Analytics
Now that you have a good idea of what is happening and some theories as to why you can launch A/B tests. Plan out your tests and modify your page using the Crazy Egg A/B Test Editor. Try to choose only one or two elements to experiment on to ensure that you know exactly what's causing improvements in your conversion rate. You'll be given the option to create Snapshots of your A/B tests so you can see how visitors are interacting with the new variant page(s).
Keep an eye on your A/B Test Results Dashboard as we calculate how your website visitors respond. It would be best to use Google Analytics to monitor your exit rates and look for changes in your funnel as the test runs. Check-in on if your website visitors are switching up the order in which they visit pages.
This process can then be repeated for the second leakiest part of the funnel!