When you build a website, content and SEO are very important, but what’s even more important is how your visitors like and interact with your website. To get this insight, we use heatmaps. Heatmaps show us where our users click, scroll or spend time on our website, which gives us a good idea on how to optimize our website.
The optimization can be anything from using more images and graphs, to improving our UX design, to improving our headings and keeping the visitor more engaged and ultimately leading them to make conversions.
What is a Heatmap?
A heatmap is a simple tool that shows how people use your website. It uses colors to highlight where visitors are clicking, scrolling, or spending time. Warmer colors like red or orange show areas with a lot of activity, while cooler colors like blue or green show less activity.
It looks a lot like topological maps, or weather maps, where the bright colors mean more activity, and the blue/green combinations means no change.
Heatmaps help you understand what parts of your website are getting the most attention and which ones are being ignored. For example, if people are clicking in certain spots, it means those sections are interesting or easy to find. If important areas, like buttons, aren’t getting clicks, you might need to make some changes.
The “hot” areas, i.e. those that generate the most interest, are marked in red, while the places that engage users the least often, i.e. “cold”, are marked in blue. The heat map is also complemented by intermediate colors, such as orange, yellow, green or purple.
It looks a lot like topological maps, or weather maps, where the bright colors mean more activity, and the blue/green combinations means no change.
What is a Heatmap used for in Analysis?
Heatmaps are used in analytics for the simple reason that they give us feedback and help us improve our marketing strategy. Everything about our website from the branding and site structure to the content we have put up is recorded in real time, as our visitors inteacts with it.
Many times heatmaps give us feedback on things that we haven’t even thought of. They give us information on how our visitors get their first impression of our website and what menus do they use to get to the information they need.
Other analytic metrics like views, clicks, engagement also give us information about how our visitors like our website, but they are not as precise as heatmaps, and we can’t see where the visitors are clicking in real time. So heatmaps help us with:
How Visitors like our Content
By knowing the “hot” areas of your website, you can more effectively plan the layout of content, such as an offer description or a call to action. At the same time, scroll tracking analysis allows you to assess how far users can see and, based on this, adjust the length or formatting of the text based on their preferred way of receiving the content.
How Scalable is our Website
You probably know that a modern website should look just as good on a large computer screen as it does on a small smartphone screen. The Heatmap provides important information about the usability of the website on a phone or tablet. For example, it can be used to check whether accessing important information or elements does not require scrolling for too long.
Identify Problem Areas
Creating a heatmap also allows you to indicate areas of conflict, such as broken links or other elements that need urgent repair. This is especially important because Internet users have long memories. A user who is discouraged by the lack of expected features may never return to your website.
Improved Navigation
How visitors click (or don’t click) on individual links, CTA buttons or menu items is an equally valuable source of knowledge about navigation on your website. Maybe some tabs are hidden too deep in the menu, so people can’t access them? Or maybe the most frequently clicked links don’t lead to subpages that are crucial from a sales and conversion perspective? Heatmaps will help you check this.
Test the Effectiveness of the Product/Content Suggestions
This feature should be of interest to you, especially if you run an online store. Many e-commerce sites include suggestions for similar products at the bottom of product pages that customers might also like. The red color on the click map signals that your suggestions are being noticed by users. However, if this part of the website is not popular, it is worth considering changing the location of the section.
Benefits of Using a Heatmap
Heatmaps can be understood and used by anyone, even without advanced computer skills. But understandability doesn’t stop with the benefits of a heatmap. Here’s why you should use a heatmap to analyze your data.
- Instant Clarity: Heat maps provide a clear view of your site’s performance, immediately alerting relevant parties if there are any issues.
- Speed of Information Transmission: They transmit the necessary information much faster than complex pages of data, allowing rapid elimination of problems and the search for effective solutions.
- Effective Communication: Heatmaps facilitate communication between publishers, advertisers and all stakeholders.
- Growth Tool: Heatmaps play a vital role in measuring growth. They help businesses improve lead conversion, increase awareness and engagement, and many more aspects.
In short, heatmaps are a great way to get real feedback on what engages and frustrates your audience on your site.
Types of Heatmaps
From both an SEO and UX website optimization perspective, there are three basic types of heatmaps.
1. Click and Tap Heatmaps: This is a map that allows you to identify the most frequently clicked links, buttons, and other active elements.
2. Scroll and Move Heatmaps: Shows where users move the content of the page with their mouse. This way, you can check which area of the website users are reaching.
3. Engagement Area Map: Uses eye tracking, which is research that allows you to check how users navigate the website with their eyes and where they focus their attention.
How to create and use a heatmap?
Heatmaps are incredibly useful and here’s how you can create your own.
Step 1: Tool Selection
Choose a third-party tool or app that specializes in creating heat maps. These tools are designed to simplify the process, making creating your own heat map accessible to everyone.
Step 2: Entering Data
Once the tool is selected, enter your website URL or insert the HTML code, accessible via the “view source” section of your browser.
Step 3: Automatically Identify Elements
The application will automatically identify the elements on your page and display the results. If some elements are not captured correctly, most tools offer an option to edit the entry.
Step 4: Regular Monitoring
Make sure every movement, click, scroll, and move is regularly tracked. This will allow you to evaluate your site’s performance over time and make continuous improvements.
Heatmaps can be used for many functions and in many ways, combining them with other analytical tools, etc. They are used in A/B testing, useful in website redesign, content marketing, assessing audience usability, performing analysis to optimize conversions, etc.
Tools and Applications for Creating Heatmaps
You already know what website heatmaps are and what are the benefits of analyzing them. You are probably wondering how to prepare them and which heatmap tool is right for you. You will find many online tools that will help you create your own heatmap. Below we present the most interesting and popular of them.
Inspectlet
This tool records user behavior on a website and the search queries people use to find it. Inspectlet also determines what catches the attention of website visitors and what causes them to abandon the site.
The tool monitors user behavior in real time. Filter settings will help you categorize your audience’s actions according to a specific key. You can see the behavior of users who came to the website from a Google ad, customers who have already made a purchase, or users who added something to the cart but did not complete a payment.
Hotjar
Hotjar stands out from a simple heatmap creation tool. It is primarily a platform for analyzing and optimizing customer conversion. Session recordings, analysis of website forms, surveys and questionnaires complete the generated heatmaps.
Yandex Metric
Yandex , which is the equivalent of Google Analytics, is a completely free tool that offers all the most important HotJar features. A certain drawback may be the impact of the tracking code on the loading speed, but this is a common weakness of all applications offering heatmap creation.
Microsoft Clarity
With Microsoft Clarity , we don’t stop at Google Analytics figures, we can observe how navigation works on your website (with the mouse and its movements). The data accumulated on the visitor’s navigation will thus be converted into the visual mode of the famous “heat maps” and will allow you to identify key areas, such as where the user spends the most time without clicking, where the most frequently used page button is located, etc.
If you have any difficulty using the information provided by your heatmap correctly, contact us immediately. We run the best web agency in Montreal and we can help you!
