What’s So Hot About Heat Mapping?
Heat Mapping at its Best
A Heat Map is created by recording all the clicks and mouse movements of your website visitors. Heatmaps use color the way a bar graph uses height and width as a visualization tool.
If you’re looking at a web page and you want to know which areas get the most attention, a heat map shows you in a visual way. Heat Maps allow you to easily see areas you should improve, which sections you should focus on, and how you should edit your pages to get the most conversions.
The data produced by a Heat Map can offer some focused and unique insights you might not have realized through other analytics. Two insights you can learn once you apply heat mapping to your site are: where your visitors are clicking and what areas of your website they are paying attention to the most.
Three Common Heat Map Reports
- Click Map
- Confetti Map
- Scroll Map
What Are You Clicking About
Click Maps help you visually see which links and buttons are most popular. They can also help you improve usability and identify design flaws.
For example, you might find that people are clicking on something that doesn’t link anywhere, expecting it to take them to a page with more information on that specific product.
Click Maps can also be used to understand where people are dropping off on the site or while filling out forms.
For example, if your form has too many questions, people will leave without completing the form.
Using these user experience findings, you can make some quick changes that will help with site navigation and form completion rates.
Celebrate with Confetti… Maps
Confetti Maps shows where people click,while also providing valuable insights about how they use your webpage. They show each visitor’s click as a colored dot. The colors stand for the categories you have chosen to sort the clicks by (for example:operating system, browser, etc).
You can use confetti to see how users from different referrals behave. All visitors click, but the patterns in which they click and what they don’t click on can tell you a lot about how your webpage communicates with these visitors.
By studying click patterns with the Confetti report, you can see your users’ different behaviors.
You Say Scroll-Map, I say Content Analysis
The Scroll Map lets you see how far down a page visitors scroll. It gives you an idea about how much of your page is visible to visitors. Each section provides information about visibility and time spent on site.
A great example of valuable insight from the Scroll Map is when key page content is located in a low-visibility area.
For example, a call to action button is almost always best suited in the top fold of your page. But, not all layouts look this way. How far down visitors are scrolling is a strong measure to get a clear idea regarding the page structure.
To find advantages, it is required to know how people are interacting with scrollable web pages. Persuading visitors to scroll below the fold is always a challenge, and the data achieved from heat maps can show how effective your design is at encouraging users to explore your entire page.
Whether you need to tweak your design to better entice visitors to scroll or moving the CTA up-page so it’s more visible, tracking scrolls can show you what your visitors are looking at.
Google Analytics
Heat map results are qualitative and once you have analyzed all your findings, be sure to also gathered your Google Analytics data as its metrics provide quantitative information.
Together they can give you a much better picture of your user’s experience and provide you the best options for optimizing your website.
Thank you for reading! I hope this helps you see all heat mapping has to offer. For more context on how to use a heat map, schedule a strategy session with one of our digital strategist, and we’ll be happy to walk you through the tool.
-Venus Morales