Heatmaps take large amounts of visitor data and turn it into easily understandable visual snapshots of your website. These snapshots show you the website content with which visitors interact. This includes content which remains unseen because visitors do not scroll far enough, as well as unused elements which can be removed or replaced.
What can you identify with a heatmap?
- Elements that are not clicked
- Elements that should not be clicked
- How visitors use navigation
- Where on the layout the most profitable products or calls to action should be placed
- How visitors interact with dynamic content
- Behaviour changes in A/B tests
Average fold height - How images affect behaviour
- How banner sliders/carousels work
- And lots more!
Why heatmaps?
Heatmaps allows you to quickly, in an easy to understand way see how your users behave on your site. Are you noticing for e.g. that you’re not leading a lot of traffic into your startpage campaigns? Or perhaps that users are not interacting with key CTA’s? Heatmaps gives you a quick overview of what the users are seeing and what they are interacting with.
- See with which content visitors interact
- Get a visual representation of click, touch and scroll interaction
- Easy to use and understand
- A great way to show data to clients and other stakeholders
- Speed up user testing
- Increase conversion and engagement
- More cost effective than eye tracking
Strategies & tactics
Content placement
It’s not uncommon that homepages for e.g. are filled with a lot of content containing different campaigns trying to engage the user. Seeing as creating content is a time consuming task, it’s ever so important to make sure that the users are actually seeing it.
By using heatmaps you can easily see how far the users scrolls and what content engages the users the most. It might be that content further down on the page is what your users engage the most with. This makes it easier to know where to place content and also what type of content to create in the future.
CTA placement
Just like with content placement, where you place your call-to-actions is critical. Is your site focused on bringing in leads, but you’re noticing that not many users are reaching your leads forms? It might be that your users are not seeing the CTA that leads to your form for reasons like it being placed too far down on the page or that there is content around it that engages the users more. Heatmaps will in a quick manner assist you in finding areas for improvement.
Dead clicks
You might notice when analyzing at your heatmaps that users are interacting a lot with areas that are not clickable (dead clicks). It might be that the user thinks it’s click-able elements by the way they are presented. For e.g. on product listing pages, users today are used to being able to click on the actual product to come to the product.
Combine with A/B tests
When running A/B tests it’s common to set your goals (KPIs) and use them to determine the outcome of the test. However by combining your A/B tests with heatmaps, you can get additional information about how the changes in your variant are affecting your users. It might be that your users are seeing more/less in the variant or that they are now interacting with elements differently. For e.g. if you’ve made the search bar more prominent.
Read how to create a heatmap here!