You are probably working very hard to get good results on your website. You know, you use landing pages, you have a blog, you publish content on a regular basis, you share it on your social networks, etc. But it is not always enough.
The good news is that in the digital world everything is measurable and improvable. Today we want to demonstrate this to you through a brief tour of the definition, characteristics and interpretation of the heatmap.
have you heard of it? Do you know how to use it to improve your website? Join us!
what is a heatmap and how to interpret it?
It is a measurement technique used to obtain a graphical representation of user behaviour within a website. It uses a colour code to reflect the different states of activity:
- Red is the warmest zone and represents the highest values, where there is the most interaction and the user spends the most time.
- Blue is the coolest area and represents the lowest activity.
- The intermediate values are shown with the colours that separate red from blue (orange, yellow and green).
The code snippet is added to the website and is a very powerful analytics tool that differentiates it from other instruments: Google Analytics, for example, gives us very valuable traffic information on a quantitative level, but the heatmap gives us specific and relevant details about what the user is doing when he/she is inside our website.
Because it is such a visual resource, it is used in many disciplines.
3 types of web heatmaps
are you aware of all the information that a heat map can give you? It is a very powerful tool to draw conclusions about the behaviour of users who visit our website and make decisions about it.
Here are the main types of heatmaps you can use on your website:
- Movement maps. They follow the movement of the mouse pointer and establish a match as if the cursor were the gaze, although they do not always coincide. Normally, they match in 88%, so it is a very representative indicator. To obtain this data, a script is installed on the server site where the mouse movement information is stored on each visit.
- Interaction or click maps: These are more reliable because they only start to collect data when the page is interacted with, whether on a button, a filter or a field. In other words, they only show the points on the page where users click. It is very interesting because it can reveal some usability problems. Within this heatmap, there is also the confetti map, which indicates the colours to show other complementary data (operating system, type of browser, etc.).
- Scroll maps: This provides information on the total screen and the areas of the website where the user spends the most time. Are visitors reaching the footer? Do they leave the site immediately after entering? Where do they stop the longest? What kind of information are you offering there?
Knowing what users do when they enter your site, where they look, where they place the cursor, how many times they click on a button, which pages interest them most, which parts attract their attention or how they interact is vital, not only to design personalised strategies, but also to improve the structure of our pages and the user experience when browsing them.
7 advantages of making a heat map of your website
Imagine you have designed your own page with a special offer for a product, for example: "Recover from summer excesses and get fit - see products! You have placed this offer in the middle right hand side of the page because it looks nice.
With the heat map of your website you will be able to:
- Find out if visitors coming to that page are looking more at the top left (shown in red), while your offer has far fewer visitors and is shown in yellow. Or if the opposite is true.
- Make better decisions: Since you already know what your visitors do, you can try to make the ad more eye-catching (type, colour, video, image) or move your offer to the left, in this case to the left because that is where most of the visits are concentrated.
- Know at a glance which are the areas of the website with more visits (strong colours such as red, orange or yellow) and with less visits (soft colours such as green, blue and turquoise). You can also detect if what attracts the visitor's attention is the area or what you have placed in that area.
- Know which elements of the page attract more attention from visitors and obtain relevant information to make the appropriate modifications. This translates into benefits for the user and for the business.
- Detect your own errors in the selection of marketing strategies, programming, etc. Many times, there are errors on product purchase pages that do not allow customers to complete the process.
- Discover new opportunities to start designing strategies from scratch with the knowledge of the errors and the most interesting areas for your visitors.
- Define CTAs more accurately. These elements are focal points, and you have to place the content you want users to access on them. If clicks are not registered, something may not be working properly.
There are many platforms to make a heatmap of your website, such as Nelio A/B Testing, Aurora Heatmap or others. Now that you know how to interpret a web heatmap, it's time to use it to improve your website.
If you have any doubts, give us a call.
