Crazy Egg vs. Optimizely Web Experimentation

Crazy Egg is great if you have static content and want to be able to easily set up heatmaps and scrollmaps to see how people interact with your webpages across different devices types. Straightforward and reliable. In circumstances when you want fast turnarounds, Crazy Egg isn't the right tool as the visualisations often take the better part of a day to generate. It also doesn't perform well if your site has dynamic content - either AJAX-driven or dynamically expanding.

Incentivized

I think it can serve the whole spectrum of experiences from people who are just getting used to web experimentation. It's really easy to pick up and use. If you're more experienced then it works well because it just gets out of the way and lets you really focus on the experimentation side of things. So yeah, strongly recommend. I think it is well suited both to small businesses and large enterprises as well. I think it's got a really low barrier to entry. It's very easy to integrate on your website and get results quickly. Likewise, if you are a big business, it's incrementally adoptable, so you can start out with one component of optimizing and you can build there and start to build in things like data CMS to augment experimentation as well. So it's got a really strong a pathway to grow your MarTech platform if you're a small company or a big company.

Incentivized

• Shows us exactly where users click on a page. Literally, the exact spot. This is useful in many different ways. You can see what links/buttons are clicked the most. You can see if a key CTA on the page IS NOT clicked - maybe you need a new design or the placement of that CTA is poor.
• You can see if users are clicking a spot on the page that is not actually actionable. Maybe your treatment of some text or an image makes it appear that an item is linked, but it is not actually linked. You can see that people are clicking on that item, and either go ahead and link it, or else change the design to look less 'clickable'.
• You can see what percentage of users actually view the different areas within your page. This is very useful when you run into a key stakeholder that demands certain content be above 'the fold'. Trying to explain to a non-technical person that 'the fold' is entirely dependent upon the user's screen size and resolution can be frustrating for both the stakeholder and yourself. Instead, using Crazy Egg's scrollmap feature, you can visually show that stakeholder that, for instance, 80% of users view the content that appears within the top 600 pixels of page height.
• The design of both the heatmaps and scrollmaps is fantastic.
• The 'page camera' software they offer works very well once you get the hang of it. This allows you to run tests on pages that include dynamic content (like a shopping cart product category page).

• The Platform contains drag-and-drop editor options for creating variations, which ease the A/B tests process, as it does not require any coding or development resources.
• Establishing it is so simple that even a non-technical person can do it perfectly.
• It provides real-time results and analytics with robust dashboard access through which you can quickly analyze how different variations perform. With this, your team can easily make data-driven decisions Fastly.

Incentivized

• Sometimes the snapshots record fewer visits as compared to another page variant even when traffic is evenly distributed between the two.
• Crazy Egg has limited heatmap visualizations.
• Need to delete snapshots after it reaches the max limit. It happens fast if you are taking both mobile and desktop views of pages.

Incentivized

• The results view is dense and difficult to package easily for leadership, and when filtering by segment it's hard to read comparative outcomes without clearing or swapping filters
• The organization of experiments and statuses is a cluttered list and the search is limited in use - would love to see that improve with time
• There are so many other MarTech products out there, would love to see more dedicated integrations so we don't have to invest in something like Zapier or Tray to build hacky automations

Incentivized

It's a great tool considering how inexpensive it is. If used correctly and you have a plan for tracking your websites, this tool can make a world of a difference. If you are not going to sit down and take the time to make a plan for how to use this tool, I would say it is not worth your time. Yes, you can look at items on your website that need to be changed, but without a consistent plan, other important items that need changing can be lost in the mix. Make sure you have enough time and energy to invest in this and it will be well worth it

Because it's an incredible and essential tool for my line of work as a conversion optimization specialist. Really couldn't do my job nearly as effectively without it. It's paid for itself many times over and I feel like I'm only beginning to unlock the tools potential.

It's not clear what features there are. The navigation icon is not labeled. It's hard to know where to start when you're first logging in as a first-time user. It's hard to know how to set up anything and there aren't many helpful tutorials in-product. I don't want to be kicked out of a help center or read the documentation.

Incentivized

Optimizely Web Experimentation's visual editor is handy for non-technical or quick iterative testing. When it comes to content changes it's as easy as going into wordpress, clicking around, and then seeing your changes live--what you see is what you get. The preview and approval process for sharing built experiments is also handy for sharing experiments across teams for QA purposes or otherwise.

Incentivized

I never had any issues with CrazyEgg being down or not working when i need it, and I use it pretty much everyday

Incentivized

I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's availability as a 10 out of 10. The software is reliable and does not experience any application errors or unplanned outages. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.

Incentivized

I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's performance as a 9 out of 10. Pages load quickly, reports are complete in a reasonable time frame, and the software does not slow down any other software or systems that it integrates with. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.

Incentivized

I think support is an area where Crazy Egg is lacking. I would love to have a quarterly check-in with a Crazy Egg rep to understand what kinds of changes have been made to the platform and what is on the horizon. I also think a quick consulting sessions with a rep could be extremely beneficial, as I'm sure there are ways to use the tool that we haven't even thought about yet that would be extremely insightful for our team.

Incentivized

They always are quick to respond, and are so friendly and helpful. They always answer the phone right away. And [they are] always willing to not only help you with your problem, but if you need ideas they have suggestions as well.

Crazy Egg is the best CRO and LPO tool for performance marketers who have a limited budget!

The tool itself is not very difficult to use so training was not very useful in my opinion. It did not also account for success events more complex than a click (which my company being ecommerce is looking to examine more than a mere click).

It is simple. JavaScript code needs to be added to any pages where you want to run tests. That's it.

The implementation through the tag management system took a bit of trial and error at first, mostly due to the asynchronous nature of the TMS. We had to manipulate the implementation to assure that the Optimizely code was written to the page at the right time to allow the experiment content load in the browser without showing any of the original content first. We also needed to make some adjustments to the TMS code to get the integration with Site Catalyst timed appropriately.

There are a lot of tools with similar feature and closely equal pricing- This factor is the most confusing. As we need something for our website and not every tool has everything and it took time for us to understand this. We choose Crazy Egg for its ease of using and anyone can be trained to use it. The main reason to chose Crazy Egg is the ease of creating snapshots and downloadable features. For me personally -the "confetti" feature helped a lot and its the main feature which is like a ALL IN 1.

Incentivized

The ability to do A/B testing in Optimizely along with the associated statistical modelling and audience segmentation means it is a much better solution than using something like Google Analytics were a lot more effort is required to identify and isolate the specific data you need to confidently make changes

Incentivized

Its reliability (not scaleability, as the question asks for, sorry) is pretty good but through our testing we know that some clicks do not get recorded. It doesn't bother us a lot because we look at the aggregate of thousands of visits, but we do know it misses things. As for scaleability, it's about right. You really don't want zillions of clicks per snapshot - the screen just turns to 100% dots and you lose the ability to differentiate different screen areas. We find that 25,000 clicks for a page gives us a really good view.

It's incredibly flexible and adapts well to organizations of all sizes, whether you’re running a single site or managing multiple departments and platforms. The ability to deploy experiments seamlessly across different environments is a huge plus, especially for growing businesses. While it’s highly scalable, the last point would depend on the right team leveraging its full potential.

Incentivized

• Positive Impact: Answering questions that analytics cannot. i.e. Are people seeing the PayPal button? We can measure how many people start the PayPal process on our site. However, its hard to know if low numbers are because of low interest or because our customers are missing the option.
• Positive Impact: Measuring user engagement for page types to determine what elements on the page are most important to our customers.
• Positive Impact: Lower cost than competitors to use helpful engagement tracking software. Currently, we're not consistently using Crazy Egg for user engagement so the $50 a month is perfect for our current needs.

Incentivized

• we saved money by not implementing certain copy/design
• we learned that customers from different states react different to a variation
• we are slowly learning where conversion happens and where to fix the frictions
• Testing shorter vs longer journeys increased funnel conversion in some states - we avoided implementing this nationwide

Incentivized