As any digital marketing agency or an organization working to boost their conversion rates, understanding where your site gathers the most attention from its viewers is an important step.
To understand these attention hotspots, we can make use of heat maps. Today, there are two amazing tools in the market called Crazy Egg and Hotjar that help you find these spaces and make the best use of it.
In this article, we are going to compare Crazy Egg vs Hotjar to help you determine which out of the two tools would work best for your organization’s website.
We intend to cover the following:
- What is a heatmap?
- How do heat mapping tools measure attention?
- Crazy Egg vs Hotjar
- Registration
- Compatibility
- Usability
- Heatmaps
- Scroll maps
- Support
- Pricing
Without further ado, let’s dig in!
Table of Contents
What is a Heatmap?
To put it simply: A heatmap is a tool to show you which sections or parts of your website are catching the most attention.
If you’re wondering how the answer is: colours!
Heatmaps look a lot like storm maps that you see on your daily weather report by the meteorological department on any news channel.
Parts that are subject to the worse end of a cyclone or storm appear in intense colours while the calmer regions are displayed in cooler colours.
Similarly, bright colours on a webpage heatmap are an indication of getting more attention and the ones with duller colours are on the lower end of the attention spectrum.
So, what is the significance of knowing which parts can gather the most viewership?
Once you know which section catches the eyes of visitors first on the website, you can place the elements that you want them to see and interact with, like a Call-to-Action Button.
These elements are more probable to get lots of clicks in the attention red zone rather in the cooler areas of the webpage.
Heatmaps are a great way to use your site elements carefully to get the best conversions by placing them at just the right position.
How Do Heat Mapping Tools Measure Attention?
The mechanism of the heatmap tool is pretty neat – it uses the HTML code of a webpage and analyzes the sections which receive most viewer interaction to measure attention.
Let us look at an example for easier understanding.
A webpage consists of several links to menu options at the top, clickable content to interact with, slides and dropdowns, a call to action button and a few links at the footer.
The job of a heat mapping tool is to monitor the clicks made by visitors in any of these areas and create a colour based heatmap of which parts get the most number of clicks. The places where the tool notices the highest amount of user engagement appears in the brightest colours on the map.
Using a heatmap saves you the time and effort of making your code to give you the same results by compiling data, which is a tough task. This is where Crazy Egg and Hotjar come to your rescue.
Crazy Egg vs. Hotjar
With better insight into what is a heatmap and how it works, let us discuss the two best heat mapping tools in the market.
Hotjar claims to be an “all in one marketing analytics and feedback tool”. Good for us marketers out here to know that the “all-in-one” concept is Utopian. It would be nice to have something like this, but there isn’t!
However, Hotjar does have its list of jazzy benefits by combining the services of a few other marketing tools such as SurveyMonkey, ClickTale, and Qualaroo.
Since we are only talking about heatmaps here, we’ll stick to Hotjar’s heatmap. It turned out to be effective and helpful for all its claims.
Crazy Egg is another heat mapping tool that competes with Hotjar where it started glitching while working with Javascript as a combination. Javascript is used to bring animated elements on a webpage, and with Hotjar involved, there were a few buttons that stopped functioning.
Crazy Egg has three separate categories of features, i.e. snapshots that consisted of heatmaps and scrollmaps, an editor and recordings. Crazy Egg compares its tools to a pair of x-ray glasses that shows you what exactly people do on your website using heatmaps and recordings.
For instance, it shows you recordings of how people engage with the content on your website as proof of parts getting the most attention.
You can also conduct split-testing on this tool to check the changes in visitor behaviour subject to changes in the website’s display and interface.
Registration
To access the features of both the tools, you’ll require registering as a new account. Crazy Egg and Hotjar both provide a free trial period for a month for you to test the waters.
The signup forms of Crazy Egg and Hotjar both are detailed and the tools guide you through the process with ease.
You’ll also need to install a code onto your system, so if you’re the apprehensive type, use the help of a developer.
Once, you sign up and install the code, you’re good to go.
Compatibility
Both the tools work well with your websites except a few glitches here and there.
- Hotjar JavaScript files may cause a conflict with your JavaScript libraries on the website. You may want to move to Crazy Egg if you face this compatibility issue.
- Neither of the tools has an integration with Google Analytics today since they are the alternatives of Google Analytics. We would advise marketers to use Google Analytics in collaboration with one of these tools.
- Not being able to save your analytics reports and maps using Crazy Egg and Hotjar on to Google Drive and Dropbox.
- Neither of the tools can be integrated with Salesforce Cloud, Facebook, Slack or Twitter.
- Crazy Egg is compatible with Bitium, Boast and Optimizely.
- Hotjar is compatible with Hubspot and Shopify.
- While Hotjar gives access to API, Crazy Egg doesn’t.
Usability
Both Hotjar and Crazy Egg have a few quirks when it comes to user experience.
- Going about Crazy Egg’s scrollmaps may cause temporary discomfort which gets sorted once you get the hang of it.
- Crazy Egg also provides separate screenshots for desktops and mobile use of the tool. They charge you per screenshot taken, so that is a clear disadvantage.
- Hotjar screenshots enable you to view all the three modes together, namely desktop, smartphone and tablet.
Heatmaps
There is not much of a difference when it comes to Crazy Egg vs. Hotjar heatmaps. Both of the tools similarly display data except for a few substantial differences.
- Hotjar covers the visitors’ cursor movement along with the mouse clicks captured.
- HotJar also shows you the number of clicks per area when you hover over it.
- Crazy Eggs requires you to visit separate detailed reports to view mouse clicks and the frequency over a zone.
- Crazy Egg sports the Confetti View, where your heatmap is segregated into details such as:
- New Visitors
- Returning Visitors
- Country
- Time of the week
Scroll maps
Both Crazy Egg and Hotjar have scrollmaps available in different displays.
- Hotjar only shows you how far the site visitor has scrolled down your page on a red to yellow scale.
- Crazy Egg shows you exactly how long a visitor has spent on a particular section on the webpage on a yellow to white scale.
When it comes to Crazy Egg vs. Hotjar in scrollmaps, you’d prefer the latter if you need quality support since Hotjar is available for live chats and phone support. The technical support provided by Hotjar has all positive reviews.
Support
Crazy Egg provides you with different levels of support based on the plan you have subscribed for. You can’t expect top-notch guidance if you pay for the lowest scheme in the tariff.
This ruffles the feathers of several marketers since even though Crazy Egg made a sensible business choice; customer satisfaction takes a back seat in a few aspects like this. Crazy Egg reviews were not positive in this criterion.
Hotjar does not distinguish between the plans you have opted for. Each marketer receives the same premium quality support no matter what pricing they have subscribed at. Hotjar reviews of support are positive in this aspect.
Pricing
When comparing the pricing between Hotjar vs Crazy Egg, the latter turned out to be more affordable. Crazy Egg pricing ranges as low as $24 per month to $99 per month.
Hotjar pricing in comparison is extremely expensive ranging between $89 and $989 a month.
Ultimately, both of them have a range of different pricing plans that cater to the different needs of the audience who need various levels of expertise. With a limited budget, Crazy Egg is the best LPO and CRO tool for marketers.
Wrapping Up
The bottom-line of the comparison between Hotjar vs Crazy Egg is to consider which aspects you wish to integrate into your marketing strategy. Since both have their sets of pros and cons, we hope this article will help you make the right call for which heat mapping tool suits your business needs the best.