Is your website struggling to generate leads and conversions? It won’t help to make random changes to your pages. Instead, you need a website analysis tool that can pinpoint the exact issues your visitors are experiencing.
Unfortunately, only 55% of companies conduct user experience (UX) testing. Without testing and analysis, the changes you make might hurt rather than help your website.
Instead of attracting new leads, you could scare off potential customers.
In fact, 44% of shoppers tell friends about a bad experience they had online. That could hurt your company’s reputation. Meanwhile, better UX design could boost conversion rates by up to 400%.
Want to generate more traffic and leads this year? Consider using heatmaps to learn more about your customers.
What are heatmaps and how can they help your business? Keep reading to find out!
What is a Heatmap?
First, let’s answer the question that’s probably lingering in your mind: what is a heat map, exactly?
Heat maps allow you to visualize website data. They can help you better understand how each page on your website is performing. Heat maps help marketers visually determine how visitors interact with each website page.
Heat maps work by representing complex data sets with colors.
You can place user behavior on a scale between red (warm colors) and blue (cool colors). The warmer colors indicate high levels of engagement. Cooler colors, meanwhile, indicate lower levels of engagement.
Different Heatmaps
Before you choose a website analysis tool, it’s important to know there are a few different heatmaps you can choose from.
For example, click maps help you visualize where users click while on a given page. For example, visitors might click on:
- The navigation bar
- A logo
- CTA buttons
- Images
- Internal links
- Videos
A scroll map, on the other hand, determines how far visitors made it down the page before they left. The redder spaces indicate more people have read to that spot on the page.
You might want to look into hover maps, too.
A hover map tracks where visitors placed their cursor on a page. The redder areas indicate visitors pause on that portion of the page more often.
Exploring different heat map examples can help you find the heat map with the data you need.
Reasons to Use a Heat Map
Now that you have a better understanding of how a website analysis tool like heat maps works, let’s discuss how it can help. Here are a few benefits you can experience by using heat maps when reviewing your website.
1. Understand Your Customers
Before you can improve your website with customers in mind, you need to understand your customers. Otherwise, you’ll fail to make UX design changes that will benefit your users.
Using a website analysis tool like heat maps can help you learn more about how visitors behave on your website. For example, you can determine where they’re lingering and clicking on each page.
As you study your website analysis reports, think about:
- Where do visitors leave the page?
- What pieces of content do people focus on?
- What sections do they scroll through without looking?
- Which pages in the navigation do they click on?
- Which buttons do visitors click on and where are they placed?
You can use this data to improve your website design for:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Landing pages
- Blog posts
Using heat map data can help you make adjustments to your buttons, ad copy, content strategy, and social media. As you learn more about your target audience, you can make changes to appeal to their needs.
As you make these changes, you can reduce your bounce rate. At the same time, you can improve your clickthrough rate and dwell time.
A low bounce rate with a high clickthrough rate and dwell time can improve your search engine ranking. A higher search engine ranking can help you reach more customers.
2. Optimize Your Pages
How you structure your pages and impact the user experience, too. You can use your website analysis to make improvements as to how you organize your pages.
For example, how do visitors interact with your CTA buttons? How do they move throughout your website? Do visitors click on sidebar banners or chat boxes?
Use your heat maps to determine where to place certain items, including images and CTA buttons.
3. Better Understand Analytics
You can also use website analysis tools to understand data from other resources. For example, maybe you use Google Analytics to collect data regarding:
- Website traffic
- Referral traffic
- Pageviews
- Bounces
- Abandoned cart rates
Do you understand why these numbers change? You can use your heat maps to determine why people click on buttons but don’t convert. Study how visitors interact with each page.
For example, maybe your CTA button is at the bottom of the page, but your heat map shows they don’t scroll that far. You can move your button up to increase conversions on that page.
4. Choose the Right Page Length
You can also use a website analysis tool like heat maps to improve your content length. How long is too long?
One study found that longer landing pages receive 638% more conversions than shorter pages.
You can use your heatmap to determine what information to place at the top of a page (before the fold).
5. Distribute Link Equity
Internal links direct visitors to other pages on your website. It can also benefit your SEO strategy.
You can use heat maps to determine which internal links visitors click on. Then, look at link placement statistics to determine where to place your buttons and links.
Adjusting your pages can help you structure your site with the user experience and shopping process in mind.
6. Avoid Frustrating Users
If people are structured with your website, they’ll leave. Your bounce rate might rise, which can hurt your search ranking.
Instead, you can use your website analysis report to determine why people are leaving your site. Then, you can make changes to avoid frustrating your users.
Here are a few other ways you can remedy user experience issues with heat maps.
Instead of feeling frustrated, visitors will see you have their ease and convenience in mind.
Heat Maps as a Website Analysis Tool: Your Guide to a Smarter Strategy
Don’t make assumptions when improving your website’s performance. Instead, use a website analysis tool like heat maps. With heat maps, you can make changes to your website with your visitors in mind.
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