What if we told you there was a simple way of understanding user journeys and visualizing user activity on your website? A heatmap does just this, and more.
Heatmaps have become an increasingly useful tool for businesses hoping to drive conversions via their website. But what are they, and what are the advantages businesses can expect to gain from using them?
Keep reading for an introduction to heatmaps and an overview of their functionality.
What Is a Heatmap?
Let’s start by answering the most obvious question: what is a heatmap? Heatmaps are visual representations of data that use color to show trends and patterns. The concept has existed for more than a century and has had many different applications, but when we discuss heatmaps today, we use the term in reference to websites.
A number of different software providers exist that offer heatmapping tools. Heatmaps give an almost instant understanding of users’ behavior on a website. They render complex statistical data visually comprehensible and actionable.
The color scale used tends to range from red to blue. Red signifies “hotter” areas of the page, in other words, more popular spots on the website. Meanwhile blue indicates “colder” or less popular areas of navigation.
How Does It Work?
Next, let’s take a moment to deconstruct how exactly a heatmap tool works. Heatmaps copy the HTML code of a website and use the tags and IDs of each website element to measure data.
Every time a visitor navigates to that webpage, the information about mouse movements, scrolling, clicking, and more, is tracked and compiled into a report. A lot of heatmapping software uses code to filter out users’ duplicate visits, so each visitor is only counted once.
This report becomes a master heatmap, which can then be filtered and adjusted to show relevant data according to the user’s preference.
If you’re wondering about which heatmap tool to choose, check out this Decibel guide that details the must-have features any great heatmapping solution should offer.
Different Types of Heatmaps
The term “heatmap” encompasses several different reports that each show a different aspect of user activity. The most popular types of heat maps are as follows:
- Scroll maps
- Move maps
- Click maps
- Desktop vs mobile map
- Confetti report
- Overlay report
We’ll dive a little deeper into the first three of these heat map reports as together, they illustrate the core functionality of heat mapping software.
Scroll maps work vertically from red to blue, displaying how far down a page’s content users reached. The redder, or warmer the area, the more people viewed that section of the website. Scroll maps are incredibly useful for judging how much content of an article users are reading, and also indicating how much of the website people view without needing to scroll.
Move maps track the cursor movement on a page. The warmest areas on a move map are the sections, or likely buttons, that the mouse most frequently moves to. These give a great idea of the website elements that visitors are reading, as we assume people look at where their mouse is.
Lastly, click maps show the points of a website that have been clicked on via desktops, or tapped on mobile devices. Once again, the redder or warmer areas show the buttons that are receiving more clicks. These are great for identifying products, copy, or images that may be underperforming.
Benefits of Using Heatmaps
We can now explore some of the most significant advantages of using a heatmap. These are the areas the clearly correspond to insights that heatmaps provide.
Content Marketing
There is clear room for content marketing to be improved by heatmapping analytics. Scroll maps are a great way to identify how far through written content visitors are likely to scroll. If few visitors are making it to the end of an article, this indicates that the content is either too long, or doesn’t sufficiently engage the reader.
UX Testing
Next, UX and usability testing can also be optimized by heatmaps. Explore the user journey to discover where visitors tend to be dropping off. If you’re finding many visitors are approaching the final stages of making a purchase but the checkout button is blue, perhaps it isn’t prominent enough.
Website Redesign
Last, a great reason to get heatmap software is when your business is considering a website redesign. Heatmaps will help designers prioritize the weak areas of your current design. They can use activity data from your existing customer base to redesign the website that your particular audience will react well to.
How to Read and Analyze a Heatmap?
Last, we’ll review some of our top tips and tricks for analyzing a heatmap report. There are several key questions to keep in mind when studying a heatmap:
- Are people seeing your top-priority content?
- Are there particular devices where content is underperforming?
- Are people getting distracted?
- Are the “right” areas of the website being clicked?
By thinking about the answers to these questions, you can use heatmap analytics to make significant improvements to your website.
One of the best starting places is looking at the average fold position. This is the point of your website that the average user will see without needing to scroll down the page. Consider whether your most persuasive copy is below this line, meaning visitors will need to scroll in order to see it.
It’s Time to Start Your Website Optimization Journey
We’ve now covered the many ways that a heatmap can provide insights into the user experience of a website. These insights translate to important learnings and allow businesses to make their sites as intuitive and clickable as possible.
They help businesses achieve real results in terms of conversions, in-store visits, and user engagement.
For more information about essential digital marketing tools make sure you check out the rest of our blog posts!
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