Go Deep When the Heat is On

Understand Your Website with Heat Maps

Yes, we’re talking here about advanced website analytics and measurements and not anything else, so if you’re still interested to continue, you’ll find this article beneficial as it will introduce you to a new website measurement tool.

Measuring your website activity is a crucial task. Probably you have excellent traffic report on paper that shows your website is clickable and helps you answer which stage along the funnel your losing or gaining your clients. It shows you the overall view of which pages your users are leaving your site and which pages are getting high conversions. However, the story shouldn’t end here.

Honestly, it gives you almost everything you need to know about your website and the activity around it.

But “almost everything” is not actually everything, so what’s missing?

What if you are able to really track what sections of your page your visitors are engaging with? What if you were armed with a simple insight that help you optimize your website and increase the engagement?

Well, this “what if” ladies and gentlemen is what we call Heat Map.

By definition, a Heat Map is a visual representation that show how users engage with specific sections in a single webpage. It uses colors to illustrate which sections of your web page that captures hot engagement, and which sections are cold.

In simpler words, with heat maps, you’re now able to jump behind your webpage and see which sections of your web pages your visitors are engaging with.

Heat maps uses a warm-to-cool color spectrum. The brighter the color is, the higher it’s receiving conversion, the cooler it is, the lower it’s getting engagement.

Image Credit: Crazyegg.com

So, what are the types of heat maps and what can they tell you?

Scroll Maps

The scroll maps show you how much people are scrolling your web page and where they’re stopping. It is important to know such information so you can simply put your Call-to-Actions (CTA) or any conversion tool where it’s hottest. It also can help you to move some important information from cold sections to hot ones.

Click Maps

Click maps show you the exact section where you’re getting the highest number of clicks on your web page. Again, the higher it is the brighter it will show. Click maps will help you determine which section you should add your CTAs and whether the current ones are performing or not.

Mouse-Movement Maps

Mouse-movement or hover maps show you users are reading content on your page and which section your visitors are hovering their cursor on. This is really important as it will make you understand what types of your web page is the most readable. The mouse-movement maps can be used to highlight your important content and squeeze in conversional content in the red sections.

How to start?

To start understanding your website’s heat map, you need to use one of many tools that are available online. Here’s three that I find interesting to explore:

Mouseflow.com

Hotjar.com

Inspectlet.com

Now, it’s time to bring the heat on!

Heat maps might be a game changer to you. Studies reported that by using heat maps, you will make solid decisions based on studies that will increase heavily your conversions and make you make the best out from your website.