Heatmaps: Find Hot Opportunities for Growth

Heat mapping – what’s hot is finding visual data about your website’s users.

Google Analytics data remains a useful tool, but, did you know that you can also gather much more visual data about how your users actually engage with your website’s content and structure?

Using heat mapping tools, we’re able to generate visual data about key pages on your website that show us exactly where users are focusing their attention and clicking – and it’s eye opening.

This software allows us to visualize behavior – understanding better what users want, care about and do on your site by reviewing their clicks, taps and scrolling behavior – which are the strongest indicators of visitor motivation and desire. Pairing this information with Google Analytics allows even greater insights. Using the data gathered from the heat map, we can form a hypothesis about what the user is looking for or expecting. We then create and test modifications the website to give users a link to what we think they’re expecting, and monitor changes in site usage. A/B testing comes into play for testing the results of the assumptions that we make.

Heatmap software allows us to look at click/tap patterns, mouse movements, and scroll patterns, on desktop and mobile views.

Frustration clicks

Sometimes, users may be clicking in places that you wouldn’t have expected, where there isn’t even a link. Example: client logos at the bottom of a page might be clicked on by users, expecting to go to a case study, whether they’re actual links or not.

On-page search

If we see a lot of activity around a search field, this tells us that users aren’t finding what they’re looking for by browsing. A deeper dive into Google Analytics data will provide more information about the types of queries being typed in, and may inform a product filter, hint text for “search product number” or other browsing paths.

Identifying “the fold”

We can also easily visualize and quantify the percentage of people making it to a certain point in the page as they scroll down; a higher than average amount of visitors reaching the bottom show that your site has good engagement and users are reading the content. If few users are scrolling down the page far enough to find key information or links, we can modify the approach and place that information higher.

More strategic lead generation

If a call-to-action button isn’t receiving the click activity that we expect, it’s an invitation to test alternate treatments or labels and look for better engagement.

Beyond recording click and scroll behavior, we can also measure mouse movements (which show where a user is concentrating their visual interest). Data is gathered for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

Are you interested in learning more about this new tool? Contact us today to discuss how this technology can apply to your website needs.