Crazy Egg – visual click tracking¶

Crazy Egg is an easy to use hosted web application that visualizes website clicks using heatmaps. It allows you to discover the areas of web pages that are most important to your visitors.

Installation¶

To start using the Crazy Egg integration, you must have installed the django-analytical package and have added the analytical application to INSTALLED_APPS in your project settings.py file. See Installation and configuration for details.

Next you need to add the Crazy Egg template tag to your templates. This step is only needed if you are not using the generic analytical.* tags. If you are, skip to Configuration.

The Crazy Egg tracking code is inserted into templates using a template tag. Load the crazy_egg template tag library and insert the crazy_egg tag. Because every page that you want to track must have the tag, it is useful to add it to your base template. Insert the tag at the bottom of the HTML body:

{% load crazy_egg %}
...
{% crazy_egg %}
</body>
</html>

Configuration¶

Before you can use the Crazy Egg integration, you must first set your account number. You can also segment the click analysis through user variables.

Setting the account number¶

Crazy Egg gives you a unique account number, and the crazy egg tag will include it in the rendered Javascript code. You can find your account number by clicking the link named “What’s my code?” in the dashboard of your Crazy Egg account. Set CRAZY_EGG_ACCOUNT_NUMBER in the project settings.py file:

CRAZY_EGG_ACCOUNT_NUMBER = 'XXXXXXXX'

If you do not set an account number, the tracking code will not be rendered.

Internal IP addresses¶

Usually you do not want to track clicks from your development or internal IP addresses. By default, if the tags detect that the client comes from any address in the CRAZY_EGG_INTERNAL_IPS setting, the tracking code is commented out. It takes the value of ANALYTICAL_INTERNAL_IPS by default (which in turn is INTERNAL_IPS by default). See Identifying authenticated users for important information about detecting the visitor IP address.

User variables¶

Crazy Egg can segment clicks based on user variables. If you want to set a user variable, use the context variables crazy_egg_var1 through crazy_egg_var5 when you render your template:

context = RequestContext({'crazy_egg_var1': 'red',
                          'crazy_egg_var2': 'male'})
return some_template.render(context)

If you use the same user variables in different views and its value can be computed from the HTTP request, you can also set them in a context processor that you add to the TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS list in settings.py:

def track_admin_role(request):
    if request.user.is_staff():
        role = 'staff'
    else:
        role = 'visitor'
    return {'crazy_egg_var3': role}

Just remember that if you set the same context variable in the RequestContext constructor and in a context processor, the latter clobbers the former.

The work on Crazy Egg was made possible by Bateau Knowledge. Thanks go to Crazy Egg for their support with the development of this application.