Crazy Egg

Overview

Crazy Egg is a conversion optimization platform that provides heatmaps, scroll maps, click reports, session recordings, and A/B testing. Founded in 2005 by Neil Patel and Hiten Shah, it is primarily used by product managers, UX designers, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) teams to understand how visitors interact with web pages. Crazy Egg captures detailed behavioral data at the individual session level and aggregates it into visual reports for identifying friction points, testing design changes, and improving conversion rates.

What This Script Does

Session recording and interaction capture: The Crazy Egg script loads from script.crazyegg.com (typically a versioned path like //script.crazyegg.com/pages/scripts/XXXX/XXXX.js). Once loaded, it instruments the DOM to capture mouse movement trajectories, click coordinates, scroll position over time, element hover events, and text input interactions (inputs are masked by default to avoid capturing sensitive data). A complete session recording is assembled from these events and transmitted to Crazy Egg's servers.

Heatmap and click data: Individual click events include the clicked element, coordinates, scroll position at time of click, and timestamp. These are aggregated into click heatmaps showing where visitors click most frequently, confetti reports showing individual clicks by source, and overlay reports showing click counts per element.

Scroll maps: Scroll depth events (percentage of page scrolled) are recorded continuously throughout the session and aggregated into fold maps that show what percentage of visitors reach each section of the page.

Cookies and visitor identity: Crazy Egg sets a _ce.s cookie (13-month expiry, first-party) and a _ce.clock_data cookie to identify unique visitors across sessions. A is_returning_visitor cookie (5-year expiry) distinguishes new from returning visitors for segmentation in reports.

A/B testing: The A/B testing component fetches experiment configurations from cdn.crazyegg.com and injects DOM modifications to serve page variants. A variant assignment cookie persists the visitor's assigned bucket to ensure consistent experience on repeat visits. Variant assignments influence which page elements are shown, which pricing is displayed, or which CTAs appear — directly affecting the user experience.

Data transmission: Session recordings and event data are uploaded to data.crazyegg.com in batches during the session and on page unload. Recordings are stored on Crazy Egg's cloud infrastructure and accessible only to the account holder.

Consent & Compliance

Crazy Egg is classified under analytics and functional consent categories. Session recording is the most data-intensive component: it captures fine-grained user interactions including mouse movements across the full session. This level of behavioral monitoring goes beyond aggregate analytics and constitutes detailed user surveillance under data protection frameworks.

Under GDPR, session recording collects personal data (behavioral profiles, interaction sequences that may indirectly reveal sensitive information through content interactions). This requires a lawful basis — typically consent under Article 6(1)(a) given the level of detail involved. The ePrivacy Directive requires consent for the _ce.s and is_returning_visitor persistent tracking cookies. The Article 29 Working Party (now EDPB) has noted that session replay tools require careful scrutiny given their scope of data collection.

Several DPAs have issued guidance relevant to session recording tools: the Austrian DSB (2022) ruled that Google Analytics constituted unlawful transfer; similar reasoning applies to session recording tools transmitting data to US-based processors without adequate transfer safeguards. Crazy Egg's US infrastructure requires Standard Contractual Clauses for EU/EEA data transfers.

Under CCPA/CPRA, the detailed behavioral data captured by session recordings constitutes personal information. The granularity of interaction data (mouse movements, click sequences) may rise to the level of sensitive personal information in some interpretations.

Should You Block This Without Consent?

Yes. Crazy Egg captures detailed behavioral monitoring including full session recordings and mouse movement trajectories. This level of data collection requires explicit consent under GDPR and ePrivacy. The A/B testing functionality also sets cookies for variant assignment that require consent. Block until the visitor grants analytics consent.