What is website heatmap?
Website heatmap is a data visualization tool that allows you to see key areas of your website's performance. This blog post will provide an introduction to the topic and look at why it is important for businesses to know how their websites are performing.
The idea behind the website heatmap is to give you an easy way to see which areas your website needs to improve on. By seeing how users interact with your content you can see where the problems are and what is giving users a great experience or leaving them disappointed.
Website heatmaps can be useful for business owners looking to understand how their content works best with customers and what areas they should focus on to improve the user experience. Once this information is identified you can use it as a metric to help determine what should be improved upon, focusing first on the areas that are problematic.
A website heatmap is a visual representation of which parts on a web page are visited the most and which ones aren't. This gives you information about how visitors interact with your site as well as insight into what your visitors want to accomplish on your website. It uses colors to indicate the intensity of visitor engagement on different sections of a page.
Start your free trial on Crazy Egg or Lucky Orange
Why should you use website heatmap?
There are two equally important aspects of web analytics: the quantity and the quality. With traditional or quantitative user analytics tools, you can only tell how many visitors came to your page and how many converted, but fail to answer what happened during those two steps that led to the resultant actions. This is where understanding the quality of those interactions comes into play. Say, an eCommerce store sees about a thousand new visitors a day with about 20 new customers buying something - this might be great success for them! However, it might be even better if they can figure out why these people found what they did on their website so compelling that they made purchase decisions on it.
As we understand, content is still king. But to be the king of your industry and earn more visitors and customers, you need to make sure not only that you’re capable of meeting your audience’s expectations and needs - you also need to surpass them and delight them. This is where Heatmap comes into play. It helps you get a better understanding of visitors’ interactions with your website. It helps you get a better idea of what works for them and what does not exactly meet their needs.
How does Heatmaps work?
An important factor to consider when setting up website heatmaps is to inform your visitors about the cookies that track anonymized click behavior for website performance analysis. With this information in mind, it’s crucial that you take their consent before installing or continuing to use these technologies. You don’t want to violate any regulations set in place which are mainly there to safeguard your audience's information and privacy.
Heatmaps are great for identifying the common user behavior on your website, but they are equally useful for identifying errors in your website’s design. This is because heatmaps show you what users are doing on the page, not only what they want to do. By allowing you to see how users interact with elements on your page, you can identify which components of it need improvement.
When should you use heatmapping?
Companies in all industries are striving to do the same thing: understand visitors, and modify their websites based on that understanding. Bottom line? You should use heatmaps all the time. No matter how big or small the requirement, heatmaps help you understand the “why” behind visitor behavior.
Using heatmaps at the right time can significantly increase your leads. If you’ve ever seen a heatmap, you know that they are incredibly valuable tools for identifying visitors’ path through your site. When used correctly, they empower you to identify the problems plaguing your website, and fix them without having to look at raw data.
The right tool for the job
Heatmaps are not just for large corporations, either—because they may not have access to huge volumes of data or all that much IT support. They are also not just accurate enough for big corporate sites that have dedicated IT departments—many small enterprises use them too, and find them useful as well.
To understand better when to use heatmaps, if you are still unsure, let's look at some specific instances when using a heatmap would be advantageous:
Redesigning your website. You can look at your collection of heatmaps to see what is working and what isn't. How are you to know what your customers like to use one your website unless you know how they use the website. With the help of heatmaps, you can uncover how different elements on your page, such as content placement, color choice, CTA text, and the likes impact visitor behavior.
Reducing bounce rate. Your website may be generating traffic but if your bounce rate is at 100%, you are not going to be converting anyone. Knowing why a page has a high bounce rate is a heatmaps job. Why are you losing people on a particular page.
Increasing sign-ups. Are people getting to your forms or do they find content to run away from all of those forms you have? Are they using it correctly or is it too complicated and hard to use. These are all questions that can be answered by a heat map.
One of the most difficult hurdles for businesses to overcome is building a website that converts. It's not easy with all the websites out there that want your attention and money. The ever-changing world of digital marketing means that even with the best website, their success is ultimately always in flux and up to chance. One way you can ensure your website conversion rate is by using heatmaps and other website analytics tools. Heatmaps can show you exactly what users are doing on your site - clicking links, moving around, typing in search boxes, etc - and give you a lot more information about how they're interacting than just waiting for them to click "submit".
Comments