I’m spying on you…

Rich Pav General

A while ago I learned about the site Crazy Egg through a writeup on TechCrunch. Crazy Egg is similar to Google Analytics but more visual. You add a line of Javascript to your blog’s template and Crazy Egg will keep track of exactly where your visitors click and show you through a heatmap or an overlay of click statistics. With a free account you can track up to 5,000 clicks per month. For bloggers, that’s plenty. Frankly, if they offered only 2,000 I’d probably end up paying for an account instead of leeching.

From the roughly 3,000 clicks in the past 20 days I’ve learned a few things:

  • More people click on my Technorati Profile than I expected. I should make an “About Me” link at the top with short profile page.
  • People can’t resist clicking on images that accompany a post, so I will be sure to always link them to something.
  • Far more people read comments than post them. I had no idea. But the “Recent Comments” sidebar isn’t used as much as I anticipated.
  • People need to be re-introduced to I’s CUBE. That post didn’t get nearly as much attention as I expected. I know visitors are interested in music because they click on the “music” category in the sidebar.
  • The links to other gaikokujin podcasters are frequently used. That’s some pretty prime real estate! Maybe I should put the Google ads above it instead.
  • Interestingly, far fewer visitors go for my links to other video blogs, although they do click on the videos I post. I might link my videos to pages with ads. (Don’t complain. I’m paying more than you are for all this. The Ninja makes $300,000 a year, mind you.)
  • A heck of a lot of people hit the “next” link at the bottom of the page. That’s a very good sign.

So as you can see, Crazy Egg is offering quite a useful service for free. I suspect it won’t stay that way forever.

Rich Pav

Richard has been living in Japan since 1990 with his wife and two teenage sons, Tony and Andy.

15 thoughts to “I’m spying on you…”

  1. I actually use the Google Reader keeping up on blogposts. So that’s generally how I keep updated on your blog here.

  2. Interesting. You’re gonna hate me for saying this, but that makes me think I should look into RSS text ads.

    Ooooh, you’re gonna get angry. I just know it.

  3. I was looking at some of your old videocasts again and I saw the one where New Years was at your house and you were talking about Dreams Come True the band, well they have a new album, I try to keep up with Oricon, you should know what that is, right?

  9. This may sound like a dumb question but I noticed in my NoScript plugin a cetrk.com to allow or disallow. Does having that blocked mess with the stats?

    -Jay

  11. If anyone come and complains about the ads on it they should be (people fill in the blank), and should realise that you are doing this for free and in your own time, with (mostly) your own equipment. And the current ads on here are actualy related to the stuff you may talk about (japan ads) and it could be worse. When I looked at your Technorati Profile when I first came on here I found that it didn’t really have a lot on it about you (or thats how I felt anyway). I found that some of the links weren’t as interesting as your stuff was so I have only clicked on a few of them… maybe it would be good to put a discription after them or put on something like aternative text on them (like what you have when you move over pitures). I also really loved on your pitures the Image maps… being one of the things we are learning in xhtml class at the moment (Or are going to learn in the next class). Oh one other thing I dont like is when I download music files they come up with herroflomjapan_***** I sometimes have no clue what I have downloaded later on so I tend to download stuff twice… I usualy change the name of it afterwards (cause I use firefox and I dont know how to get it to change the file name at the begining as it just saves directly to desktop), is there any thing that can be done about that? I feel bad now… too much critasism. BAD BAD BAD!!! Means all things positivly… I mean it!!!

  12. “The Ninja makes $300,000 a year”
    It si not with link’s to pages with ads.
    HOW DOES HE DO IT ?

  13. It might have something to do with the ads he puts into the podcasts. Like “this episode is brought to you by…” and the occasional spots at the end of his podcasts. And it looks like he took the wisdom from SpaceBalls. “Merchandising!”

    -Jay

  15. People who make money advertising are the leeches that are sucking the very life out of our economy.

    They make nothing of value, and not only that, derive an income not from actually REDUCING the value of something that would have been much more enjoyable in a totally ad-free environment.

    I’m so much happier not using a mind-numbing TV and running my own DNS and using adblock on top of all that; I haven’t been conditioned to feel a need to own a bunch of what basically amounts to outright crap; I stick with a cellphone and plan that works exactly how I need it to, my fiancee drives the Civic, rated #1 for its design instead of some glitzy but unreliable sports car or gas-guzzling death-trap box SUV on wheels… etc etc

    Long story short: We make decisions based on the facts we learn rather than the lies we are told by the people paid to tell those lies, but its only possible my making an effort to block those invasive pricks out, because if there’s any hole at all in your attention span, the advertising people will make every effort to rape it…

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