Heatmaps are visual representations of your visitors’ attention, engagement, and interactions as they browse through your website. You can use free or commercial tools to create various maps to better analyze user behavior and increase conversions.
Defining a Heatmap?
Heatmaps are visual representations of your visitors’ attention, engagement, and interactions as they browse through your website. Warm colors suggest parts on the page that attract the greatest attention or engagement, whereas cool colors indicate areas that are neglected.
Allow your site’s users to point out areas for improvement to assist you to increase sales, then make the necessary changes and track how well it’s working.
When should you Use a Heatmap?
Heatmap tools track visitors’ attention, engagement, and even the amount of clicks they make on your site. They’re an important part of your optimization toolkit (to learn more, read our complete guide to Conversion Rate Optimization).
Here are some of the primary reasons to utilize this software, to provide you some specific examples:
Measuring Engagement: Do you ever wonder when your readers will quit reading your web articles? A heatmap can assist you in seeing the “scroll” of a user and where they engage with your site. It could be time to make a change if you observe that just a small number of users really respond to your CTA.
To measure Actions: What do my visitors do when they come to my site? Is it true that they’re pressing the correct button? Heatmaps show you if your visitors are taking the steps you want them to take and where they could be getting stuck.
To Measure Attention: What are the most attention-getting headlines? What images pique your interest the most? What factors detract from the primary message? Is my form visible to my visitors? You may begin making improvements to improve your conversion rates once you have good answers to these questions.
Obtaining answers to the preceding questions can assist you in answering even more vexing concerns:
- What is the best spot for my most vital content?
- What is the most effective approach to using photos and videos?
- What is causing my visitors to become distracted?
- What is the best place for me to promote my product or service?
Most heatmap software allows you to create maps that depict user activities from various perspectives. The idea is that you should consult all of them in order to learn more about your visitors’ habits.
Clickmap
You can quantify actions using this style of map. It’s a visual depiction of all the clicks on your page by visitors. Because it allows you to see exactly where people engage with your site, this map generates valuable data.
When someone clicks on a specific point on a page, a light dot appears on the heatmap. Large swaths of white indicate where the vast majority of visitors are clicking. You can tell if visitors are clicking where you want them to click by rapidly discovering the “hot areas” on your site. The least popular areas, as shown in the Sumo image above, are ‘SHARE’ and ‘IMAGE SHARER.’
Scroll Heatmap
The scroll-map shows you how far down a page visitors scroll, as well as which areas pique their interest and where they remain. You can use a scroll-map to see if users are seeing the proper portions of your site or if they are being distracted by irrelevant things.
If we look at the snapshot above from a post about SEO, we can see that the image and the two lines of text below it are the most popular: almost 85 percent of visitors have seen these pieces.
Percentage of Clicks Heatmap
The heatmap for ‘% of clicks’ is a nice addition to the standard one. It allows you to check how many clicks a specific picture or CTA generated, element by element. It is critical to be able to quantify clicks per element.
As a result, you can:
- Recognize how important each element is to users.
- Allowing visitors to click on photos that aren’t linked isn’t a good idea.
Confetti Heatmap
The confetti heatmap, as opposed to a view that shows a ‘density’ of clicks, allows you to see each individual click on a page. It allows you to observe if users are attempting to click on non-clickable locations and if so, to correct the problem!
Heatmap vs. eye-tracking
Eye-tracking examines a user’s gaze, whereas heatmaps primarily detect their mouse movements and clicks. The goal of eye-tracking is to examine how your site visitors look at it and assess which areas they pay the most attention to.
The sections highlighted in warm colors, similar to heat mapping, illustrate the locations where readers pay the greatest attention. Eye-tracking, while extremely valuable, is dependent on technology that is more difficult to implement. It necessitates specialized equipment that most agencies lack.
Heat Mapping Tool Features
Keep the following elements in mind when shopping for a heatmap tool:
Segmentation: The tool should allow you to produce heatmaps for specific audiences that you define using targeting and segmentation criteria (for example, new visitors, visitors who converted, visitors from sponsored link campaigns, etc.).
Map Comparison: You should be able to compare the findings of different maps from different user segments quickly and visually.
Page Template: If your page is an eCommerce product page with hundreds or even thousands of products, having a heatmap dedicated to each one can make analysis difficult. You must be able to combine results for all pages of a particular type.
Responsive Heatmaps: The tool must be able to work on pages that are visited via a mobile device. Touches, scrolling, and swipes are examples of actions peculiar to these devices that should be recorded. To appropriately analyze the data, you should be able to distinguish between behaviors and navigation sessions seen on mobile and desktop platforms during the analysis.
Dynamic Heatmaps: You should be able to monitor clicks on dynamic components such as drop-down menus, sliders, and carousels, as well as items loaded using AJAX or a JavaScript framework such as React.js or Angular.js.
Retroactive Heatmaps: Has the look and feel of your website altered since your last audit? Your software should be able to save past results as they appeared on the previous website design, rather than merely superimposing them on your new design — the results would be illogical.
Combine Heatmap and A/B Testing
Assume you’ve utilized a heatmap to learn more about how your website visitors engage with your brand. You’ve discovered your site’s strong and weak aspects and want to make the necessary improvements.
Question: How can you tell if these adjustments were successful? There’s just one way to find out: A/B test your changes.
The aim is to produce multiple versions of your websites, advertising, landing pages, and other marketing materials in order to compare how well they perform.
You can use a 3-step strategy that combines heatmaps and experimentation to:
- Identify issues
- Put potential solutions to the test.
- Select the most effective option.
Wrapping it Up
Heatmaps are an invaluable tool for anyone working to improve the speed of a website.
A product manager in charge of a sales team, a business owner, an online marketer, a blogger, or someone who operates a website is all possibilities.
Heatmaps are a terrific weapon to have in your arsenal of analytics tools since the information they provide is so intuitive and has so many applications. Take use of heatmaps and the data they can expose. They’ll assist you in providing your visitors with an amazing online experience that will keep them coming back!
