Heatmaps tool is an effective tool for determining what users do on your website pages, such as where they click, how far they scroll, and what they look at or ignore.
This guide will introduce you to various types of heatmaps as well as how to create and analyze them. You’ll also get case studies and practical examples to show you how valuable and helpful heat maps are for improving and growing your website.
Keep reading this guide provided by SEO Agency to learn more about heat maps.
Table of Contents
What Exactly is a Heatmap?
A heatmap (or heat map) is a graphical representation of data that uses color to represent values. They are critical in determining what works and what doesn’t on a website or product page.
Heatmaps tool allows you to evaluate your product’s performance and increase user engagement and retention by conducting experiments with how certain buttons and elements are positioned on your website as you prioritize the jobs to be done that increase customer value.
Heatmaps make it simple to visualize and comprehend complex data:
Heatmaps are thought to have originated in the nineteenth century when manual gray-scale shading was used to depict data patterns in matrices and tables.
The term “heatmap” was first trademarked in the early 1990s, when software designer Cormac Kinney developed a tool for graphically displaying real-time financial market data.
Heatmaps can still be created by hand today, using Excel spreadsheets or product experience insights tools.
What is a website heatmaps tool, and how can it help you improve your product?
The website and product heatmaps tool use colors on a scale of red to blue to depict the most popular (hot) and least popular (cold) elements of your site’s webpage content.
But who employs heatmaps and how do they function?
Heatmaps provide product teams, marketers, digital and data analysts, UX designers, social media specialists, and anyone who sells anything online with deep insights into their customers’ behavior on their site, assisting them in determining why users aren’t adapting their product, using call-to-action (CTA) buttons, or converting.
Heatmaps tool facilitates data analysis by aggregating user behavior and providing a snapshot understanding of how your target audience interacts with your website or product page—what they click on, scroll through, or ignore—helping you identify trends and optimize your product and site to increase user engagement and sales.
Heat maps typically show the average fold, which is the portion of the page that people see without scrolling as soon as they land on it.
The Features of Incorporating Heat Maps into your Website
Heatmaps tool assists product managers and website owners in understanding how visitors interact with their website pages in order to answer critical business questions and goals such as “why are my users not converting?” or “how do I get more visitors to take action?” You can use the heatmaps tool to determine whether users are:
- Reaching or failing to see important content.
- Finding and using the main links, buttons, opt-ins, and CTAs on a page.
- Distraction from non-clickable elements.
- Problems with multiple devices.
Heat maps, as a visual tool, assist you in making informed, data-driven decisions for A/B testing, updating, or (re)designing your website. Heat maps are also useful on a larger business scale: they allow you to show team members and stakeholders what’s going on and gain their buy-in more easily when changes are needed—difficult it’s to argue with a heat map!
Continuous Heatmaps tool allows you to filter data and create special heatmaps based on user attributes such as the user’s role or title, the date they created their account, whether they’re on a trial version of your product, and more, allowing you to quickly find targeted insights.
Product teams, for example, may use the heatmaps tool to test how users interact with a new feature or prioritize bug fixes, whereas UX and UI designers may use heatmaps to measure the popularity or dislike of a page design and implement changes to make it easier for customers to navigate their website.
You can ‘favorite’ and quickly share specific insights of a heatmap with other departments or individuals in your business using the heatmaps tool Highlights feature, resulting in successful cross-functional collaboration.
You can also create a ‘collection’ of heatmaps to highlight specific elements that your company or team should prioritize.
A digital marketer, for example, might create a heatmap collection to test a landing page and then decide to move a CTA button above the average fold to reduce churn and increase sign-ups for their website or product.
What are the various types of heatmaps?
Heatmap is an umbrella term for various heatmapping tools such as scroll maps, click maps, and move maps. Knowing the distinction is useful because each type allows you to investigate a slightly different aspect of your website’s and product’s performance.
1) Maps that scroll
Scroll maps show the exact percentage of visitors who scroll down to any point on the page: the more red the area, the more visitors saw it.
2) clickable maps
Click maps aggregate where visitors click their mouse on desktop devices and where they swipe their finger on mobile devices (in this case, they are known as touch heatmaps). The map is color-coded to show the elements that have received the most clicks and taps (red, orange, yellow).
3) Reposition maps
Move maps track desktop users’ mouse movements as they navigate the page. The hot spots in a moving map represent where users have moved their cursor on a page, and research suggests that there is a correlation between where people are looking and where their mouse is—which means that a moving map gives you an indication of where people may be looking as they navigate through your page.
4) Heatmaps for desktop and mobile
Desktop and mobile heat maps allow you to compare how your website performs on different devices. For example, content that is prominent on a desktop page may be much lower down the page on a phone—and you must determine whether and how interaction differs.
How do I make a heatmap for my website?
There are numerous tools available on the internet. You should compare the tools available before deciding on a heatmapping tool. You’ll need to know which pages of your website you want to analyze and what kind of map will surface the data you require.
You should also look for a tool that offers the most different types of heatmaps. You don’t just want scroll maps or click maps; you want as many of the map types listed above as possible. You can then combine the insights from each to make the best decisions for your site.
Who will benefit from heatmaps?
Heatmapping software can benefit many multiple teams in an organization due to the variety of data that can be gathered and analyzed. Here’s an overview of how the heatmaps tool can benefit various departments:
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For user experience designers
UX designers are frequently in charge of testing their site or app, and the heatmaps tool can supplement their testing methods.
UX designers, for example, can use them for usability testing to determine whether their content motivates users to take action, identify patterns of behavior, and determine whether your CTAs are strategically placed.
Heatmaps can also be used to supplement the findings of A/B tests, which can be applied to both your control and the variable you’re testing. You will understand why your variable does not perform as well as expected. Even “failed” tests can provide valuable learnings if you have one of these tools in your back pocket.
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For Marketers
Any digital marketer understands that competition for customers’ attention is fiercer than ever, and traffic acquisition costs (TAC) are rising. Unsurprisingly, getting the most out of your site traffic is critical.
Marketers can use the heatmaps tool to determine which parts of a page or advertisement people look at and which parts they ignore. This understanding enables you to place the most important element—such as a special offer or a CTA button—on the most visible part of a page.
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For digital strategists
Analysts can provide critical but frequently overlooked data that transforms analysis into actionable insights and business outcomes. Heatmaps tool allows you to combine qualitative and quantitative data in ways that add depth and context to your analyses.
Whereas other methods may only allow you to count the number of times a user clicks a button, heat mapping tools can help you understand what happened before, after, and in between those clicks—critical information for understanding your user’s behavior.
Furthermore, heatmaps are highly visual by nature, allowing digital analysts to quickly see and understand complex data sets before delving deeper.
The Pros and Cons of heatmaps
The use of heatmaps to measure user behavior has advantages and disadvantages, just like any other type of website analytics. Here are a few examples.
Advantages of heatmaps:
- In a highly visual format, you can see and understand large amounts of data at a glance.
- Determine areas where users may be ignoring or overlooking the action you want them to take and put a solution in place.
- Improve your understanding of user behavior over time by identifying useful patterns.
- Learn from your site’s pages to create more effective pages in the future.
- Determine which parts of your website users are naturally drawn to and place your most important content there.
Disadvantages of Heatmaps:
- Heatmap data can become unreliable due to differences in device sizes and browsers.
- A heatmap gif that displays untrustworthy data.
- A heatmap tool that does not take dynamic pages or elements into account.
- Heatmaps frequently do not work well with dynamic applications that change the page, and most websites today are dynamic.
- They can be difficult to convert into actionable business intelligence without corresponding quantitative data.
- Certain heatmaps, such as eye-trackers, can be prohibitively expensive.
- Some heatmaps, such as AI-generated heatmaps, require large amounts of traffic to be analyzed in order to make accurate predictions.
- The final issue with heatmaps is that they should always be paired with other data, as any heatmap will not provide a comprehensive picture of why users behave the way they do.