What is a website heatmap in 2022?

The website heatmap is an effective means to understand what your visitors are doing on your website. It lets you tell where your users click, what they spend most of their reading watching, or reading, how far they scroll, and the likes. There are a wide variety of website heatmaps that you can create to boost your conversion rate optimization. Use any of them that you find best suits you.

What is a heatmap?

Heatmap is a graphical representation of data where color is used to depict values. The mapping tools make it incredibly easy for large and small brands to visualize complex data and understand how to improve their conversion rate. Since heatmaps are graphical representations, they present a detailed summary of useful and actionable information and save users time.

What is a website heatmap?

The purpose of a website heatmap is to visualize the most unpopular and the most popular webpage elements and present them using the appropriate colors.

There are also many website heatmap providers that you can choose from.

Types of website heatmap

The term “heatmap” can be classified into several heatmap tools, which are named depending on the action they quantify or track. Here are the most common types of heatmap:

ClickMaps

As the name suggests, click maps show you the parts of your site that most users are clicking on to find useful information. You can tell the highlights or the ‘hot points’ of the website by evaluating the elements that have been colored in bright red. The sections that your users are least likely to click on are in dark blue.

If you are analyzing the onsite behavior of mobile users, you will notice that the most tapped-on elements are colored in red. At the same time, the least clicked-on or tapped-on areas are shown in blue.

ScrollMaps

These graphic representations illustrate how far users scroll down on the site. The information can help you to establish your targeted audience’s level of interest. It can also represent their attention span.

In the present age of instant gratification, the attention span of many people has significantly decreased. 

Statistics show that the average attention plan in the early 2000s was 12 seconds. By 2013, it had already dropped to 8 seconds. The chances are that it is still declining, as most people, especially millennials are increasingly getting accustomed to the prevalent culture of immediate satisfaction. Unlike in the past, one can access lots of information within a second due to the advancement of technology.

With theinformation you gather, you can tell whether you need to give your audiencemore or less information. Besides, you can determine the complexity of theinformation that suits your audience. If the users are not willing to scrolldown the website, you can do the following:

• Present the most important information first
• Ensure the content is easy to scan
• Make use of white space
• Be short and brief
• Make the content relevant and  useful to the audience

Move orHover Maps

Whenever you produce content for your users, you must think about their intention. If they are relatable to the information, your conversion rate is likely to skyrocket. Unfortunately, digital markers are not able to know their plans entirely. Many of them use advanced SEO tools to remedy this. The devices are useful but cannot accurately predict user intention.

Hover andmove maps offer you the best way to determine whether you are meeting yourusers’ intentions and influencing their behavior or not. Move maps areeffective at tracking the movement of the mouse. There is a correlation betweenthe sections of users pause their mouse and where they intend to go. You canuse the information to establish what raises the interest of your users and howthey are scanning or reading the web content.

By usingyour analytics tool and heatmap, you can unlock the potential of your marketingeffort.

How does a website heatmap work?

MakesComplex Information Friendlier 

Heatmap tools make digital marketing easy. It aggregates enormous amounts of data and converts them into a much more friendly form that you can visualize and implement with incredible ease. The truth is that we are visual beings. When data is presented with this fact in mind, we find it friendlier and more useful.

PresentsHard Facts

Website heatmaps also gather vital information associated with particular web pages and display it over the relevant pages. This way heatmaps identify the elements that attract your targeted audience and help to convert them. The cold hard facts keep you away from guesswork, which is time-consuming, costly, and guarantees no results.

How to Use Website Heatmap

You add efficient tracking software to your site. To be paying attention to the right metrics, you check a few boxes. You then focus on your business's core activities, as the heatmap does the hard work on your behalf.

The softwaregathers all the relevant data and then creates a map featuring all the elementsyour visitors can interact with. If you check the dashboard, you find anoverview of the activities of the users. The graphic representation of userengagement revealsopportunities and pain points. Moreover, it shows the areas where you need totake some action to improve.

To get more detailed findings, you can combine the heatmap with A/B testing and visitor recording programs. By doing this, you combine quantitative and qualitative data on one map. This helps you to have a complete picture of what is working for you and what is not.

Where Should You Collect Your Website Heatmap Data?

The pages on which you collect your heatmap data have a direct impact on the final result. With a website heatmap, you can carefully analyze your web pages’ performance and find useful results. But it makes sense if you start with pages that can give you the best returns within a short period. As a business-minded person, read on for the best pages to gather this information.

Landingpages and Homepage

 Thelanding pages and homepage are your site’s most important entry points. Sincethe first impression counts, these are the pages that you must invest a lot ofyour resources on to increase your CRO. This way, you will reduce your bouncerate.

The best way you can avoid losing many of your potential customers is to create website heatmaps on these pages. You will be able to find out the amount of information that your leads see and engage with whenever they visit. Besides, the marketing tools will let you know the elements that the users click on and those they ignore. When using the information, you can improve your landing pages and home page, as you give your visitors the desired first impression.

Top Pages

Every performing website has top pages. These are the most viewed pages. Blog post with a high number of engagements and others doing something right also falls under this category. Creating a heatmap on these pages is the only practical way to eye-track and discover what is working. You can use the discoveries to improve the performance of other pages or sites.

Under-PerformingPages

Your underperforming pages are also relevant as the top pages. They are all working together to help your business achieve its goals. The fact that something is wrong with them may simply mean you have a lot of unexploited business potential. By creating a heatmap on the pages, you can uncover the cause of the low performance and boost your business's success.

New Pages

In mostcases, new pages have a limited amount of data. But that is nothing wrong withadding a heatmap to these pages. Many experienced marketers appreciate the needto gather some initial information about how your new pages of performing.Through this, you can mitigate a lot of problems before things go out of hand.A few SEO mistakes, for example, could make Google ban your site if you fail tocorrect them in time.

Why Heatmap is a Special AnalyticsTool

Analyticstools, such as Google Analytics, have been quite helpful in providing metricsthat indicate the web pages that users visit. Some people might think they canuse these tools but ignore heatmap. That is not the case.

Traditional marketing tools are still valuable. But they cannot give you a comprehensive understanding of how your visitors engage with your pages. If you want a detailed, actionable report on how your users behave, you cannot do without a website heatmap.

The fact that the website heatmap is also more visual than the other reports is another thing that you need to consider. This feature makes it easier for you to analyze the reports at a glance. Besides, individuals who are not accustomed to analyzing a large amount of data can also find them incredibly accessible.

What’s more, many website heatmap tools can enable you to segment as well as filter the data. As such, you can find it quite easy to see how users interact with your specific pages.

Conclusion

Website Heatmap answers our need for visual content that we can interpret and assimilate with ease. You can choose click maps, move maps, or scroll maps, depending on the type of user behavior that you want to track. The timely, actionable, and relevant insights you get will help you to improve your decision-making process and unlock many business opportunities for you.