It would be great if website owners can get to know those most favored parts of their website. Getting to know which content is the most read, which calls to action are the most clicked, what page length viewers scroll, etc. will give them valuable insights. This in turn can help in creating website designs and content and making decisions that are appealing to their online audience.
This is where software called heatmaps can help. This blog tells answers your questions like “what is a heatmap?”, “How does it work? and “Why should you use it?” in detail. Read on to know how your online business can benefit from this software.
What is a Heatmap?
Heatmap is a website data visualization software that graphically presents how visitors are interacting with your website. It uses a warm-to-cold color scheme to show how different elements on a web page are performing.
It employs warm colors like bright orange and red to indicate the areas of high visitor engagement and cool colors like blue and green to represent the regions of low visitor engagement. Because it eliminates the usage of raw data full of numbers, it is attractive and easy to understand.
Heatmaps collect all the data relating to how visitors behave on your site to help you make informed decisions regarding optimization. Thus, they’re highly useful and powerful website analytic tools essential for online businesses and their managers.
What are the different types of heatmaps?
Now that you know the answer to the question “what is a heatmap?”, it’s time you know that heatmaps can give you several types of information. Based on the type of info they give, heatmaps are of the three following types.
- Click heatmaps: These give you an idea of those elements (like images, links, CTAs, navigation, etc.) on your webpages that are the most and the least clicked. These also help you identify issues regarding site navigation.
- Scroll heatmaps: These give you info about your visitor’s scrolling behavior on each page. So, you get to know how far they scroll down a page and also identify those areas they spend a lot of time in.
- Mouse hover heatmaps: These give you info about where your users are hovering on their screen using their mouse. So, you get to know how each of your web pages is performing in terms of answering your visitor’s queries and delivering a good user experience.
A good heatmapping software combines all these types of heatmaps to give you a comprehensive idea of how visitors are interacting with your site. It even has a unique feature to show you user sessions just like a movie clip. You can see all heatmaps on your webpage itself rather than on a screenshot of it.
What’s more, is that it gives you real-time analytics as well. Therefore, you can understand on-site user behavior and find ways to enhance the user experience. This in turn will help you gain more website traffic and better conversions.
How does a heatmap work?
A heatmap software works by gathering data from a web page and showing that data over the webpage itself. It transforms the numeric data thus gathered into overlaid color shades with varying intensity. This resembles a weather map that describes rainfall regions. As mentioned earlier, the webpage data is spread across a warm-to-cold color scheme.
The highly intense regions of interaction are colored in bright red. And as the intensity of activity lowers, the color gradually fades to blue.
Why should you use a heatmap?
Heatmaps are valuable tools for website owners. For, these help them comprehend how people interact with their website pages. This in turn helps them find answers to vital business questions and goals such as “what actions should I take to get more website visitors” or “why aren’t my visitors converting?
Using heatmaps, website owners can determine if their visitors are:
- Finding and using a page’s buttons, CTA, opt-ins, main links, etc.
- Reaching crucial content or failing to see it.
- Facing issues with navigation.
- Experiencing issues across devices.
- Getting distracted from important content.
- Trying to click on non-clickable elements.
- Engaging with your site through different devices.
Thus, heatmaps help you discover various insights. This way, you can make informed, data-based decisions for redesigning, updating, or A/B testing your website. Heatmaps also help you easily convince your team members and business partners that you’re making the right decision with regard to business, technology, and design.
So, website owners can use heatmaps as diagnostic and monitoring tools. It can help you figure out if something is wrong with their website’s performance and regularly audit user behavior to keep it abreast of current customer experience trends. This way, you can ensure a user-friendly site and increase conversions.
Who could benefit from using heatmaps?
Any website owner or manager could benefit from using heat mapping software. You may be a business owner, a blogger, a sales team, a UX designer, a digital and data analyst, a social media specialist, or an online marketer. The info generated by heatmaps can be intuitive and be of value to you in several ways.
Heatmaps are definitely one to be in your set of analytic tools. They can reveal insights to help you ensure an admirable user experience that keeps your site visitors coming back. One of the best examples of an online business benefiting from heatmaps is Netflix. It has been using this tool to obtain insights about user behavior and enhance user experiences.
They use it to recognize the streaming interests of their target audiences. They delivered personalized experiences to each viewer by gaining ideas on the kind of movies and shows they watched and the different genres they identified themselves with.
Just like Netflix, any online business on the globe can use heat mapping software to understand users, analyze data better, identify loopholes, recognize navigation issues, optimize search recommendations, gather more leads, enhance brand presence, post pleasing content, improve website performance, improve user experience, and increase conversions.
Wrapping up
Heatmaps are website data visualization tools that help you understand how users interact with your site. It works by gathering data from a web page and showing that data over the webpage itself using a warm-to-cold color scheme. By looking at it, you can understand what’s working and what’s not on your webpage.
This in turn helps you in accordingly manipulating different elements like content, CTA, colors, design, buttons, links, page length, and more. Thus, you can enhance the user experience to increase traffic and boost conversions.