Getting to the point where visitors start to flow in on your website is great, but it is also the point where you need to take the next crucial step. You can take advantage of your newfound traffic by starting to analyze it and draw some important conclusions as a result.
There are various website optimization tools that can help you do that, one of them being heat map analysis. You can get the feedback you want without actually having to ask your visitors what they think about their website. In fact, it is even better because you can get a sneak-peek into their experience in one of the most direct ways possible.
In this article, we are going to talk about heatmaps and how they can help you work towards perfecting your website.
What makes It Worth using a Heatmap Tool?
You can finally get a clear picture of how users interact with your website. Heatmaps allow you to see where they click and how they scroll while uncovering those parts of your website that attract their attention the most.
This, in turn, will allow you to position your content and CTA (call-to-action) in a better way, which will result in an increase in conversions. Yes, it is that simple. You are going to know exactly how much of your blog post your viewers have read and whether they reached the bottom of the page or not.
All this is going to be available for you via a graphical representation. Once the software has collected enough user data, you will be presented with a colorful picture that deciphers the on-page activity of your visitors.
Without this clever representation, you would only get a data sheet full of numbers that are hard to understand. Heatmaps, on the other hand, are much more straightforward and just as meaningful (given that you have enough data to work with, of course.
How to Analyze a Heatmap after Generating It?
This is also simple, as warmer colors such as red and green will cover those areas where your users are the most active. Inactivity is represented with colder colors such as blue and green. While it is enough to look at a heatmap for a few seconds to understand it, it would require much more time to decipher raw coordinates.
What makes this tool so awesome is that you only need to look at pictures in order to understand user behavior on a deeper level. Now, as we mentioned above, you need to have enough data to work with. This is why you need to focus on attracting visitors first, then analyze, and then grow your audience even more as you have some valuable information at hand.
Unlike with Google Analytics which includes tools that collect data about user actions, you are going to take a look at their behavior. At this point, you might already take a guess that we are talking about psychology here, and you are right.
There is a lot of psychology in online marketing and with a heatmap tool, all your website visitors can participate in your own experiment. By understanding their behaviors, you are going to be able to create better content for them and figure out what they are looking for with great precision.
The 5 Types of Heatmaps You Need to Know About
In order to understand the 5 types of heatmaps and how they work, you need to be aware of the 5 main questions that need to be answered. Here they are:
- Is your important content getting the attention it deserves?
- Do people eventually spot and click the call to action on the page?
- What about the non-clickable parts of your site? Do users try to click some of them?
- Are there any distractions on your site that drag people’s attention away from the main content?
- When your visitors land on your site using different devices, how do they interact with it?
Each of the questions above can be answered by a set of different heat maps. These are:
- Scroll Heatmaps – This shows you the scrolling behavior of your users. When this heatmap is generated, you can clearly distinguish the parts of your web page that is the most preferred by your visitors.
The usual trend is that readers hardly get to the very bottom of the page. You need to work for it by drawing the right conclusions and improving the content and layout of each page. - Click Heatmaps – This one allows you to distinguish between those parts of your page that get the most clicks from those that don’t get any.
- Hover Heatmaps – Besides clicking, it is also important to know where your users hover their mouse. You might discover that they find areas of your website interesting where there is no button to click. Such a heatmap can also help you understand which elements distract the user on the page.
- Traffic Segmentation Heatmaps – This heat map is crucial if you want to divide your audience into different categories and understand them that way. You can analyze them segment-by-segment based on age, location, demographic and such.
- Mobile Heatmaps – The great thing about these tools is that you can run them for mobile users as well. It generates data by taking mobile snapshots and giving you a visual representation of how smartphone users interact with your site.
Before you start, you need to have a plan. Approach it strategically and focus on those of your web pages that are the most crucial for your business. In most cases, it is the home page that has to be focused on first. After that, you can switch your attention to other important areas such as your blog page or subscription page.
Then you can continue with pretty much any web page that does not perform well. The goal is to figure out what holds the user back from buying in your sales funnel.
How to Make Improvements based on Heatmaps?
Heatmaps can help you find the most problematic parts of your website. Then, after a little brainstorming, you can start working on those weak spots and improve your conversion rate as a result. Such design and technology decisions can be crucial for a growing online business.
To simplify things a bit, heatmaps are a lot about discovering those parts of your website that users tend to ignore. Then, it is your job to change those areas in a way so that your visitors become more engaged. For example, a call-to-action can never stand out if people don’t scroll down to see it.
If you have a few great ideas at hand but you are not sure which one to use, you can actually use both. A/B testing allows you to create two or more versions of the same page based on your heatmap results. Then, you only need to wait a bit more until you can generate more heatmaps and find out which version works best.
Many online brands prefer to combine heatmaps with other tools such as customer feedback surveys or screen recording. The more information you have, the better you can understand your own audience. Utilizing heatmaps does not mean that you don’t need to communicate with your visitors ever again.
You can still take the opportunity to collect feedback from them by asking questions. You don’t even need to invest in an analytics tool for this. While you get some on-point data about their behavior, you can also reach out to them and collect their valuable feedback.
Obviously, this requires some time and effort but still, a heatmap tool is far faster and more cost-effective than many other methods out there. Once you feel like you have significantly improved your website, don’t stop there.
There is a lot of work to do and the iterations should never stop. Continue by monitoring your website on a regular basis and make sure that you keep your conversion rate as high as possible.
Final Thoughts
If your goal is to change your website for the better, then a heatmap tool is one of the best things you can invest in. It will not only save you a lot of time and money in the long run but also allow you to share content that actually makes an impact.
A heat map software is a website analytics tool that we can recommend for any website owner. Whether you have a blog or a business website, utilizing the power of heatmaps can help you build up the traffic you deserve.
It is also really straightforward, as such website analytics tools do most of the work for you. All you need to do is to check out the results and start drawing conclusions. Hopefully, this article has helped you understand heat maps better, as it will surely come in handy on your online marketing journey.
The result will be an awesome website experience that your readers are going to remember and come back for more.
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