You can learn a lot about visitors to your site from studying your log files. There are numerous statistics services (like Google Analytics) and software packages (like Mint) to help you view your information in a variety of ways. But Crazy Egg (still in beta) provides more immediate insight into how users actually use a Web page.

Crazy Egg offers a simple, free tool that shows you visually where users click on your pages. Results are displayed as an overlay on page. You can toggle the results to display color coded icons (blue icons indicate fewer clicks, red icons more frequent clicks). Toggle the display and you’ll see clicks displayed as a percentage (see below).

You can also view the results in a list (see below).

It’s easy to use: just register, start a new session, paste a piece of code into your Web page and upload a script to your Web server, and Crazy Egg will begin tracking your clicks. Each session can run for as long as two weeks or up to 10,000 clicks; closed sessions are archived so you can review the reports at any time. Run a session, tweak your design, run another session and compare.

It’s too early to tell (I just started a test session), but I’m already rethinking my design of Futurosity. I have a lot of information in the sidebars and it doesn’t appear that people use those menus very often.

If you’re a web designer, this information can be invaluable. And even if you just have a blog, it’s fascinating to see how users actually use your site. Add one more addiction to your obsessive checking of site stats and Google AdSense reports.