What Is a Website Heat Map?
In digital marketing, a heat map is a visual representation of how users interact with your website. It tracks where attention falls as users scroll down a page: In general, red areas are those that receive a high level of attention, while blue areas are those that rarely or never get attention.
How Does It Work?
Heat maps do not require that the user be hooked up to devices that track their eye movements!
Instead, a heat map usually consists of a combination of some or all of these elements:
- Scroll Maps: These show the percentage of people who scrolled down to any part of a page
- Click Maps: These show you precisely where visitors click their mouse or tap their finger
- Move Maps: These show where the mouse has moved, which correlates to attention
Heat maps can help real businesses optimize their websites in easy and effective ways. For example, a scroll map can tell an employer if candidates are “giving up” before they reach important information on the bottom third of the page. It might then be prudent to reorganize with the key points at the top.
A click map could show you that a video you intended to help optimize conversion on a product landing page rarely gets clicked on. Changing the headers and text around the video might make more people engage with it, although it is almost never wise to set up your videos so that they will play automatically.
The Benefits
The main benefit of a website heat map is that it gives you insight into real customer behavior. This allows you to optimize your website based on live, meaningful feedback that can make your website more productive. This is especially crucial when optimizing landing pages where conversion activities are intended to take place. A heatmap may unlock the potential for incremental improvement that will greatly improve your ROI over time.
Risks of Not Using One
If you are not using tools like website heatmaps to validate your site’s design, you are wasting time in the world of “guess and check” web design. A heatmap contributes more granular insights into how changes impact your page performance. This makes them very helpful for generating action plans based on A/B split testing and other optimization campaigns.
To get the most from B2B Web development including heat maps, contact us.