Heat Maps – A Versatile Marketing Tool
Is your website receiving visitors but not having conversions? Do you want to collect feedback from your visitors without pestering them? Then, you need to get your hands on website heat maps to market your business efficiently.
So, what are Website Heat maps?
Website Heat maps are a visual marketing strategy tool for businesses to understand how users interact with their website pages – what are the elements they focus on and ignore, where they click on a particular page, and how far on a page they scroll.
How are these Heat maps represented?
The data for your website user’s interaction is represented by colours where warm colours suggest more interactions and cool colours suggest fewer interactions. Colour schemes used in heat maps can vary from grayscale to rainbow schemes. Often, the rainbow-coloured scheme is preferred as they allow one to understand the various data points easily.
Heat maps have two important categories
- Attention heat maps: They are quite sophisticated and use eye-tracking technology to follow the visitors’ eyes when they examine your website page.
- Interaction heat maps: These help in identifying the interaction your users have with your website pages. This is done by tracking mouse movements, the clicks, and the scrolling nature.
Types of Website Heat maps
There are four different types of website heat maps which are, Scroll heat maps, Click heat maps, Eye-tracking heat maps, and Mouse tracking or Hover heat maps.
1. Scroll heat maps
Scroll maps show the business the percentage of visitors each section of a page is receiving. The marketing team can use this data to analyse the reasons behind users being attracted or disinterested in certain parts of the page. This analysis will help put forth an effective call to action
2. Click heat maps
Click maps record data to determine where on a website page are users clicking on. The warmer the colour, the more interaction a user has had with that particular area of the page. It shows if visitors wish to click on the call-to-action button or are distracted by other elements on the page.
3. Eye-tracking heat maps
Eye-tracking heat maps measure the eye movement of a person when they scan the website page. It helps to determine the frequency of a person’s gaze on an area of a page and where is the gaze being directed and fixed.
By understanding the users’ focus, a business can put across principal elements in the user’s gaze to increase the chances of visitors converting to customers.
The eye-tracking heat maps help in gaining more insights as compared to click and mouse tracking heatmaps. The flip side of using this type is, it is time-consuming and expensive.
4. Mouse tracking or Hover heat maps
Hover heat maps tells the marketing team which part of a page is the visitor’s mouse hovering over. The hotter or warmer the colour tone, the longer the user hovers over that page.
The problem with hover heat maps is that one cannot correlate a user’s mouse movements to what they are taking a look at on a page. For example, if a user’s mouse was hovering over a particular headline, it shouldn’t give the idea that the visitor was reading the headline for 5 minutes.
How to use Heat maps
Analysing the heat map for every page isn’t going to prove effective in increasing the conversion rate. An efficient way of converting visitors to customers is by analysing the heat maps of important pages such as the landing pages, the home page, the blog pages and the product pages.
Home page
Your home page conveys your brand personality to visitors. A home page that is unique in design and distinctly delivers your brand’s character will make users become your customers. Examining the home page’s heat map will give an insight into what visitors are interested in. In this way, you can understand where to place certain important elements and increase the conversion rate.
Landing pages
Landing pages are specifically made for a marketing campaign. So, by analysing the heat map of a landing page you can apply an appropriate design for your landing page which will help convert users to customers.
Blog pages
A recent study stated that businesses with a blog page had 55% more visitors than companies without blog posts. So, when you analyse the heat maps of blog posts, you get an idea of where to place your call-to-action banners.
Product pages
Examining the heat maps of product pages will yield information on what products grab the attention of a potential customer and what doesn’t. You can use this information to work and improve upon those products that do not receive many visitors.
Benefits of Heat maps
The following are some of the main benefits for marketers using heat maps:
- Heat maps help in monitoring a visitor’s behaviour on your website.
- The UX decisions on landing pages can be made with the help of heat maps.
- A/B tests can be run with the help of the data collected from heat maps to increase the conversion rate by optimizing the page.
The people who gain from using heat maps are:
- UX analysts
- Marketers
- UX designers
Limitation of Heat maps
Although heat maps are a great tool to analyse complex data, they come with a limitation. The primary limitation of a heat map is, the data collected isn’t real-time. The data doesn’t show the sudden changes in the audience behaviour as quickly as other analytic tools do.
They work really well when coupled with analytic tools such as Google Analytics. Doing this will provide additional insights into your data collected from heat maps.
Let us wrap it up!
Heat maps, being a great data analytics tool must be taken advantage of to efficiently build brand strategy. Utilising this tool will go a long way in marketing your brand to the targeted audience by optimising the necessary pages. So, go ahead and use heat maps and make your brand reach greater heights.
Are you looking for a reliable agency that will help you convert leads to sales? Then The Bumblebee Branding Company, a branding and digital marketing company in Chennai, can help you! Get in touch at ahead@thebumblebee.in.
