Use Heatmaps To See How Visitors Are Interacting With Your Site

Drew Hendricks

Contributor

Analytics are effective in showing how many clicks your website gets and how they got there. While this information can be useful in tweaking your search engine marketing efforts, you still may be missing a very important piece of the puzzle. Once your marketing has done its work and sent potential customers your way, how do you know which sections of your site are successful? A guest could leave halfway through scrolling through your main page due to a small issue that could easily be tweaked.

Heatmaps are a great way to gather insight on how visitors are interacting with each page on your site. Through the right tools, you can determine which elements might need to be tweaked, moved to a different area of your page, or removed altogether. Here are a few ways heatmaps can help you improve your site.

Instant Feedback

At one time, it was a given that you’d be waiting a while to see if your marketing efforts were working. But as technology has evolved, we’ve grown to expect instant feedback. If your business launches a new campaign, you don’t have time to wait months to find out whether that campaign is working. You need to know as quickly as possible how customers are reacting to your message to determine whether you need to make changes.

Tools like Heatmap provide results in real time to let you see how new changes are performing. “Analytics data only tell part of a story,” says Pek Pongpaet, CEO of Silicon Valley Design firm Impekable. “What most analytics solutions don’t tell you is what happens while the user is on the page. What are they looking at? Where are they moving their mouse? Quantitative data is only half the picture. The qualitative data of watching the user move their mouse and scroll around provides a much richer context.”

One example would be the change of a photo on your website. If you swap out the photo, you can see instantly the percentage of interest that photo is getting when weighed against the rest of the page. This real-time feedback is especially beneficial for sites that are updated regularly, such as news sites or product pages.

Readership Data

What if you could see exactly where your customer’s attention is focused when looking at your page? While technology isn’t quite that advanced, solutions like ClickTale show exactly where a user’s mouse goes on a page, including hovers and clicks. This data is presented in video form, which shows how the mouse moved across the page.

Since research found a 84 to 88 percent correlation between mouse movements and eye movements, ClickTale believes this is an accurate way to gauge where a person’s eye is traveling on a page. This type of analytics is most effective for product pages and sites with numerous photos, since users are more likely to use the scroll bar to read extensive text.

Visual Reporting

Presenting marketing data to business teams can be complicated at times. All too often analytics are presented as numbers and bar charts, with marketing teams required to gather the information into an easy-to-understand format. Webtrends points out that heatmaps are a great way to provide a visual representation of how your website is connecting with visitors, even to non-technical audiences.

Look for a heatmap solution that provides a comprehensive suite of reporting tools if you have a regular need to demonstrate results. Many services will provide a dashboard to allow you to extract information in an easy-to-read format. This aggregate data can show you how visitors are interacting with your page on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These insights can prove valuable in creating future marketing plans.

Increase Conversions

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons for using heatmap software is to increase conversions on your website. Businesses are understandably frustrated to see a site logging numerous visitors each month, only to have those visits never convert to sales or subscriptions. Services like Crazy Egg specialize in helping businesses understand why visitors aren’t taking action. It’s possible a particular element on your page is sending potential customers scrambling for the back button without you even realizing it.

It’s possible your decision to autoplay a video with sound is scaring customers away, especially if they’re visiting your site while at work or on a mobile device in public. Realizing this video is costing potential customers could prompt you to mute the video by default or remove it altogether. You may also notice that you’ve placed the most interesting information at the bottom of your page, which customers never see because they only scroll to the midway point.

Heatmaps are an advanced form of analytics that offer visual insight into how customers are interacting with your site. By making the most of these tools, you can improve your site to make it more effective, resulting in increased success in attaining your goals.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhendricks/2014/10/01/use-heatmaps-to-see-how-visitors-are-interacting-with-your-site/