What Are Website Heatmaps and How Can They Help Your Business?

Do you ever wonder if you could be doing more to promote your business? Or how you could enhance your website to drive higher traffic and sales?

Learning about customer experience is a great way to optimize your website and your business. And using heatmaps is the perfect place to start.

Website heatmaps allow you to see and understand how customers use your website and what you could be doing to improve their experience. Ready to learn about website heatmaps and how to use them to accelerate your business?

Keep reading!

What Are Website Heatmaps?

A heatmap is a visual representation of data. You’ve probably seen a heatmap before showing things like temperature or elevation. The goal of a website heatmap is to show you data about customer usage of your website.

Imagine your website’s homepage. A heatmap will show you what areas of that site customers use the most using color-coding. The areas that customers use more will be darker colors like red or orange (“hot” colors) while the less popular areas will be cooler colors, like blue and green.

Heatmaps are an easy learning tool because you don’t have to look through tons of spreadsheets or numbers. Everything you could want to know about how customers react to your site is depicted using colors.

There are several types of heatmaps to choose from depending on what you want to learn. The next few sections will cover each type and which is the best heatmap for websites like yours.

Click Maps

As the name suggests, a click map shows where customers click on the site page. A click map of your website homepage might show you that your call-to-action (CTA) isn’t getting as much attention as you’d hoped. Or it could show you that a lot of website visitors are clicking on a certain blog featured on the homepage.

These insights are the reason you want to add a heatmap to a website. You can now use what you learned to create a better CTA or feature additional blog posts on the homepage.

Mouse Tracking Maps

Mouse tracking heatmaps show where and how a customer’s mouse moves during their site visit. It’s also known as a hover map because it shows where a customer may have left their mouse for a few extra seconds.

Tracking maps can tell you about the areas of the website that people spend time looking at. For example, you might notice that people are frequently hovering over a particular product and product description. This could be a good sign of interest in the product unless people aren’t following through and buying it.

Then the question becomes how can you get interested customers to buy the product? Mouse tracking apps are part of the greater puzzle-solving process that heatmaps provide.

Scroll Maps

The last basic type of heatmap is the scroll map. A scroll map shows how a website user scrolls up and down on your website pages. Most often, this information is used to find out if the length and format of your website could be improved.

In our modern digital world, people want things fast — including information and products. So if your website homepage has a 6-paragraph introduction about how the company got started you’re probably losing a large group of impatient customers.

If your scroll map shows that people stop reading halfway down the page, you’ve got a problem. Either your site is too hard to navigate or people are disinterested.

Behavioral Heatmaps

Now you have a good handle on the basic types of heatmaps — click, tracking, and scroll. Are you ready for something a little more advanced?

Behavioral heatmaps can tell a complete story about a user’s experience from the page load time to scroll speed to device orientation. Behavioral heatmaps can fill in the gaps that any of the other heatmaps may have left.

If you want to learn more about using a website heatmap generator showing customer behavior, check out decibel.com.

How Can Heatmaps Help Business?

Heatmaps are the key to customer behavior data. And that data can inform decisions you make to your website, marketing materials, or social media sites.

Below are a few of the ways to use heatmaps for your online business.

Identify and Fix Website Layout

Let’s say you’ve built a website you’re very proud of. It’s got loads of great information, helpful links to products, and an easy-to-use contact page. But after a few months, you notice that your site traffic is less than impressive. So, you use a heatmap analysis website.

You find that people aren’t scrolling down the page and that mouse hovering is unpredictable. Well, something with the layout of your page is displeasing to the audience. So you simplify it, add an eye-catching image, and change the layout so that the CTA appears on the first half of the page.

And just a week later, your website traffic and sales are on their way up.

Push Product or Service

A heatmap can show you where your site is lacking, but it can also tell you what you’re doing well. Consider a click map that shows visitors are interested in a service that you offer. But once they click, they are not purchasing the service.

So, you run a special on the service and offer it for 15% off. Suddenly, service sales are booming! All you needed to do was offer a price incentive to turn those clicks into purchases.

Test Hypothesis

Another useful feature of heatmaps is to test different layouts or content. You can build two versions of your website and test user behavior on each one. Sometimes you might think you know which version customers will prefer but it’s always better to collect the data and know for sure.

Whichever performs better on certain heatmap metrics is the one you’ll want to use moving forward.

Get Started with Website Heatmaps

You know what website heatmaps are and how they can transform your business’ online presence. It’s time to see the benefits for yourself!

Start with one of the heatmap varieties above and take notes about interesting customer behaviors you notice. Then, brainstorm how you can improve the customer experience and ultimately your success as a company.

You can find additional ways to boost your business and make the most of business technology in our other blog posts!

The post What Are Website Heatmaps and How Can They Help Your Business? appeared first on Home Business Magazine.

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