Last Updated on July 6, 2024 by Team Experts
Have you just started an online business? Are you trying to build a website that adds value for your customers? And one of the ways to achieve that is through website heatmaps. This is the easiest way to determine exactly who’s visiting your site.
But what are website heatmaps?
Website heatmaps are data visualization tools. They help companies understand how a particular page on their website works. They collect data on how visitors to your website behave to help you make informed website optimization decisions.
How can you use website heatmaps in optimizing a website? Here’s everything you need to know.
Highest Traffic
Do you want to discover which areas of a website have the highest traffic retention? Or perhaps which visitors click the most on CTAs? And what about whether they get down to the bottom of the fold?
This gets to the heart of how to optimize a website: a website heatmap is a way to go. Analytics tools like attribution heatmaps eliminate the confusion caused by numbers and present the data in an easy-to-understand manner.
They use a warm and cold color scheme. Warm colors indicate high visitor engagement, while cool colors indicate low visitor engagement.
A heatmap helps you gain insight into visitor behavior, so you can use it to tailor your website to visitors’ expectations. There are five main types of heatmaps: click map, scroll map, mouse tracking heatmaps, and eye-tracking heatmaps.
Performance and Clickmaps
This shows how well the various pages on your site perform to deliver the best user experience and respond to your visitor’s queries. For example, Vodafone’s free heatmap tool helps people understand which visitors are most likely to engage with the elements of your website.
Click maps show which parts of your website are clicked least and most, which elements of your website are most popular, and help identify gaps in navigation on your website.
Imagine this scenario. While browsing your e-commerce store, a visitor clicks on a non-hyperlinked product image and expects to be redirected to a page with a product description. But the image leads him to an image that is not linked to another page.
This can lead to confusion. Using a click map, you can identify these patterns and make data-driven changes accordingly.
For example, suppose that you set up a click map for one of your pages and run it for a specified period. When visitors browse between pages, you may find that they click on section elements that aren’t linked from the start page instead of going to the start page.
This could indicate that the structure doesn’t meet your visitors’ expectations, and it’s time to change it. Use click maps to see when visitors expect certain links and place them according to their expectations.
Number of Visitors
A scroll map is a visual representation of the scrolling behavior of your visitors. It shows you the number of visitors who scroll to the bottom of the page, whether they scroll up to 50% of the page (not 100%) and how often most visitors leave the page.
It also shows how often users scroll down the page to the section where they spend most of their time.
Scroll maps do not show data, but the different colors make you aware of the number of users moving around your website compared to those who don’t move their mouses. Use scroll map reports to place critical elements of the web on the page or in the section where visitors are most present.
With a scroll map, you can identify where visitors spend the most time and where they lose interest. You can then use this information to place key information elements such as the CTA.
What Do Visitors Want?
Gain insights into what visitors are looking for when surfing your websites by analyzing where visitors stop with the mouse and where they move fastest.
Mouse tracking heat maps, also known as hover maps or attention maps, show the areas where visitors are moving with their cursors instead of simply clicking. Interestingly, visitors tend to stay in areas they find engaging or exciting, especially if they take longer to understand confusing messages.
For this reason, the heatmap can help identify the areas where visitors spend the most and the least time. Identify the areas where visitors go the most and place key content, primary CTAs, and advertising in these sections.
It’s important to remember that the above does not only apply to online news sites.
Keep in mind that there’s also a particular type of user called a “Parker.” A Parker is a visitor who leaves their cursor in one place while reading through the section they’re in, regardless of what they’re reading.
Eye Tracking
The mouse tracking heatmap is often confused with the eye-tracking heatmap, but they’re actually quite different in terms of the data they present.
Eye-tracking heatmaps help determine who is dealing with specific images on a website. You can use them to track visitors’ viewing patterns and place the most important content and images in the most eye-catching sections of a page.
Traditional quantitative user analytics tools tell you how many visitors come to your site, but they don’t answer what happens in the two steps that lead to the resulting action.
Website Heatmaps Are the Way Forward
Website heatmaps help business owners see where visitors are clicking and work out how to guide them toward products, resulting in increased sales. From eye-tracking to helping you compile statistics on Parkers, heatmaps allow you to understand your users better and why they are (or why they are not) purchasing your goods.
If you’re interested in learning more about website heatmaps and all things tech, be sure to check out the rest of our site.
