Well hello fellow web marketers this is Brian Lewis back at you again to talk a little bit more about web marketing and specifically web usability. One of the tools that we talked about in a previous session was heat maps, click maps, and move maps and scroll maps. And what we’re going to talk about in this session is another tool that’s usually bundled in with your heat maps called visit recordings.
So get this, imagine being able to spy on your web visitors as they’re interacting with your page. Imagine being able to see them as they’re moving, as they’re scrolling up and down moving through the page clicking, navigating to other pages well. You can do that with visit recordings that as I said are bundled in the heat map tools. And the great thing about the the visit recordings is that it’s really going to uncover some of those problematic areas. It’s going to give you really deep insights into what might not be going so well with your web pages.
You know sometimes when web marketers are putting their pages together they get a sense that “oh my visitors are going to be able to figure this out” and they’re going to be able to figure this out. Well with the visual recordings you’re gonna be able to exactly see what they’re not figuring out. And what we like to do when we look at visit recordings which is actually just a recording – there’s no audio, it’s just a recording of people interacting. It is individual people interacting on your site. We like to look at visit failures instead of visits successes because the visit failures are going to tell us where the problems are. And we grouped those failures into three categories.
The first category we call chaotic clicking. So as we’re looking at a visitor recording, are we seeing somebody just clicking all over the place? This means almost without any reason, just madly clicking. That probably means that there’s some kind of issue with your page in terms of your messaging or in terms of things that look like they should be clickable or not. Or things that aren’t clickable – should be.
Another visit recording or visit behavior failure that way we look for is pandemonium behavior. Pandemonium behavior is someone who’s just scrolling up and down on the page moving all over the place. They they scroll down, they go back up, they scroll down like over here again – that’s what you’re probably creating a very confusing visit experience. Hopefully you can narrow it down to a very specific area where that and ammonium behaviors is being exhibited. Then you can work on fixing that area.
And then the last visit failure that we look for is called excessive dwelling. So that’s when somebody scrolls to a certain part of the page and they just stop. Now that could mean that maybe they had to take a phone call or answer an email but a lot of times what it means is there’s like that deer-in-the-headlights look. They’re just frozen where they’re at and this usually means that they’re confused. So that is another area that you want to focus some attention on – what do I have on that part of the page maybe that’s making people just scroll to that place and just stopping.
So those are the three main things to look for when you’re using a visit recording tool. Again they are bundled in with most heat mapping tools. The previous session we talked about to sample heat mapping tools Hot Jar and Lucky Orange are both very very good tools that have all the heat maps and all the visit recordings that are strongly recommended to implement on your site. All it takes is a little bit of JavaScript after you sign up for the account on your pages and you’ll be getting some really really good useful information to improve that visit experience. And get people through your site and helping them achieve their goals which helps you achieve your business goals.
Thanks so much for watching, this is Brian Lewis. I’ll talk to you next time. Please contact us at Tiny Frog is you have any questions about using visitor recording tools.
