Businesses do well to incorporate heatmapping as part of their website optimization strategy. A heat mapping tool is a simple yet powerful way to analyze user behavior and make data-driven decisions. When employed correctly, they can help teams reduce cart abandonment on an e-commerce website, get users to respond to a CTA, or see if site visitors like your website content. Ultimately, heat mapping can be a great tool to help achieve your goals.
So, how do you do it? Take a look at our in-depth explanation below.
What Is A Heat Map?
Heat maps are a visualization tool that can translate the user behavior of website visitors into a geographical representation that your team can later analyze. The graph can help your team determine your website’s “most popular” areas, whether a button, web page or otherwise.
Software designer Cormac Kinney originally trademarked computer heatmapping technology in the early 1990s, when he designed a program to display real-time financial market information graphically.
Fast forward to today, and heat mapping tools use various color schemes, including grayscale and rainbow. However, because humans can discern more shades of color than shades of grey, rainbow-themed maps are frequently favored (though there are drawbacks).
The Different Types of Heat Maps
There are many different website heat maps, but click maps, scroll maps, and mouse-tracking heat maps are the most common. Each performs the same job of measuring user behavior on a website, but they differ in key ways.
Dead Click Heat Maps
Unclickable items on a website or app are sometimes mistaken for buttons, and users press them expecting anything to happen, resulting in a dead click. Dead clicks identify which non-functional items on your site or app are being mistaken for buttons, allowing you to determine how to minimize user confusion and irritation.
They can also assist in identifying new opportunities by identifying behavioral trends over time and proactively weeding out user misunderstandings to improve conversions.
Scroll Maps
Scroll maps track user behaviors and make suggestions about a web page’s length and format issues. For example, if a user stops scrolling halfway down the page, you may reasonably conclude that they have lost interest or encountered difficulty with something on the page. Therefore, lost traffic could be due to the length of the page or the difficulty of navigating it.
Click Map
A click map indicates where users most frequently click on a website and its many web pages. A heat map might help you understand how users interact with your website and which prompts and calls to action (CTAs) they find most appealing when applied correctly.
Click maps can also aid in the detection of issues with your website. These trends will be documented on a website’s click map if very few people connect with a particular CTA or if their clicks signal the presence of a bug, broken link, or other site problem.
Mouse-Tracking Heat Maps
Mouse-tracking maps monitor overall mouse movement rather than mouse clicks. They can help identify angry users by displaying where their cursor is hovering, hesitating, or thrashing on a web page.
According to research, there is a link between where consumers gaze and their mouse pointer, so mouse-tracking heat maps are useful. Mouse-tracking can also discover hover patterns that indicate visitor friction or irritation areas, optimize complicated websites with dynamic parts, and assess the relevancy of search results based on click volume.
Though there is a link between where users look and their cursor, the two are not identical, which might lead to inaccurate conclusions.
Information You Can Get From Heat Maps
Heatmapping can give your company valuable client insights, but it may also assist you in addressing major web design flaws that may be harming your company’s online performance. Here are a few of the ones worth noting!
Determine Navigation Improvements
Your website’s navigation can make or destroy your conversion rates. For this reason, a heat map becomes crucial in proving that customers are clicking the right menu items to start their journey into the sales funnel. Data should show users going away from top-level information pages and into locations where they may request more information or make a purchase.
In contrast, a poor rating could indicate that you need to update your navigation to guide site visitors better and let them know where they can go to take additional action.
Gathering Customer Insights
Businesses frequently use heat maps to reveal clicks and taps on a web page, with each page element color-coded according to its popularity. The elements that have been most clicked or tapped may appear bright red, while the ones that have been less clicked or touched may fade to cooler colors.
For example, if you know that particular products sell better during certain seasons, you may develop timely email marketing or paid search campaign for those periods.
Creating a Heat Map of Your Own
There are several great heat mapping tools on the market, meaning business owners have their work cut out to decide. You’ll need to know which pages on your website you want to study and what sort of map will best display the data.
It would be best to look for a platform that offers the largest variety of heatmaps, with options extending far beyond scroll or click maps. Businesses may then use the information from each to make the best decisions for their website.