Well hello fellow web marketers this is Brian Lewis and I’m here to talk to you today about heat maps. Some of you may have heard of heat maps before and many of you haven’t experienced the power of the information that heat maps can give you. So what is a heat map? Well the heat map is a tool that helps you assess visitor behavior on your site. To get a better understanding of how visitors are interacting under different web pages.
And the reason why they’re important is that in order to provide the best visit experience for your visitors you want to be finding out where are the problematic areas for the visitor experience. Where are they hiccups? Where are they looking like they’re running into some confusion?
3 Types of Website Heat Maps
1. Click Maps
So there’s three different types of heat maps. The first heat map is a click map. So picture a screenshot of your webpage – the clickmap is going to show where people are clicking on your webpage. And so it’s very instructive in giving you a good idea of where are people interacting and especially what’s important is to see are people clicking on things that aren’t clickable. And we see that actually quite frequently in webpages that really aren’t designed quite right. That can be very frustrating for your visitor if they’re clicking on things and expecting something to happen and it’s not happening.
2. Tracking Mouse Movements on a Move Map
Another heat map tool is a move map. A move map tool is going to show you how people are moving their mouse on your web page. Why is that important? Well there’s generally a correlation between how people move their mouse and what they’re reading. So you can get a good sense of how people are engaging with different parts of your page by looking at move map. So if you’ve got some content your page that you think is real important but the heat the move map is showing very little interaction there that’s going to give you a clue that maybe you need to be doing something different there.
3. Scroll Maps
And the final heat map is a scroll map and it’s pretty obvious by its name what it’s going to show you – how far up and down people are scrolling on your web page. And again this is pretty obvious why this is important if you have an important content down lower on your page you’re going to want to be able to see what percentage of people are scrolling down that far. And a lot of times what we see as a problem is that web marketers sometimes leave an important element of a web page like trust and credibility way down at the bottom and we look at a scroll map but only 25% or less are getting that far down. Which means your visitors aren’t necessarily feeling comfortable because we’re not getting that – seeing that trust and credibility. So a scroll map is very important in terms of how maybe you want to might want to move around or maybe create a more enticing visit experience to get people to continue to scroll further down the page.
Additional Heat Map Tools
There’s actually quite a few tools out there that you can use. A lot of them have free trials. The one that we use the most is Hotjar. And another one is Lucky Orange. Definitely are highly recommend that you employ these tools. All it takes a little bit of javascript on your site and you’re ready to go. So hopefully that was helpful on heat maps. If you have any questions about adding heat maps to your website, please feel free to give us a call.
