There are two types of research methods when we speak about research: Qualitative and Quantitative. For example, Google Analytics (GA) is a quantitative research tool. It generates quantitative data that shows you how many people visited your website, how long they spent there, what percentage of them converted to sales, and so forth. Quantitative data is a great way to get concrete numbers about the performance of your website.
What happens when you dig deeper than the numbers? How can you find out why your visitors spend so much time on your site? Why did some convert while others didn’t? Quantitative data only answers the “whats”, but not the “whys”. Only qualitative data will help you understand why your website performs the way it does.
All industries have one goal: to understand visitors and modify their websites accordingly. And that is where heatmaps truly shine. Heatmaps can help you understand why visitors behave the way they do. If you want to optimize your business, heatmaps should be used almost every day.
Wether you want to track visitors’ interactions with your webpage, or look at the performance of your website from various angles: heatmaps can be used for any analysis; regardless of how large or complex your website is. Let’s take a look at some examples of heatmaps that you can use to help you understand when heatmaps are useful.
- Designing for a more intuitive user interface: Redesigning user interfaces can range from minor tweaks to complete design overhaul. You want the latest version to be better than the previous one when you redesign it. Redesigning a website can be time-consuming and costly. Before you go live with a new site, make sure to validate all of your user research hypotheses. Heatmaps can help you make sure that your website redesign is on the right track.
Heatmaps can also help you determine how various elements of your page impact visitor behavior. This includes color choice, content placement, CTA text and so on. These insights can be used to redesign your website in a more intuitive and intelligent way that will increase visitor engagement and increase conversions. - How to reduce bounce rate: While your website might be getting a lot of visitors, is it also getting a high bounce rate? Do you struggle to find out why visitors leave your website? Heatmaps can help you find distractions, optimize your website’s content placement and layout, fix navigational gaps and provide the right content to increase visitor engagement, thereby decreasing bounce rate and increasing conversions.
- Correcting navigational gaps: Sometimes your website’s navigation is not what visitors expect. This happens because the structure of your website was made without understanding how users want it to look. This creates friction and a poor user experience. Heatmaps can be used to determine what your visitors want from your website’s navigation. Then structure it according to their expectations to increase conversions.
- Increasing signups: Sign-ups are the most important source of leads for any B2B Saas company. Let’s say your main source of leads is your free trial request. The free trial request form is be placed at the bottom on your homepage. Your GA data shows that your website’s conversion rates are low even though you have a lot of traffic. You decide to create a scrollmap of the page. Now you can look at the scrollmap generated and it tells you than half your visitors did not find the trial request form. They simply didn’t scroll down to the bottom. With this kind of insight you can place the demo request forms in the most visited sections of your page.
- A/B testing: When you plan to run A/B test, heatmaps are a must. A/B testing is a great way to increase conversion rates . This is true only if A/B testing has been data-backed. All A/B Testing campaigns should include a qualitative analysis on the behavior of visitors to your website. You know that your current design is not converting visitors so you need to make some changes. How do you determine if your current design needs some tweaking or complete transformation? Heatmaps are a great tool. Heatmaps can help you pinpoint the reasons why your current design is not converting as well. It is possible to identify high and low attention areas and create variations based on them for your A/B testing.
Website heatmaps can be used for different purposes depending on the pages and elements of a website. These pages can be crucial to your business and drive conversions. Let’s take a look at how a website heatmap can improve your conversions driving web page elements and pages.
- Home Page: Your homepage is the glue that holds your website together. Each webpage on your website is a branch of it. Your homepage also influences how visitors see your brand. Your homepage is the first impression you give to your brand. Your visitors will be less likely to convert if your homepage is poorly designed and fails to provide a great user experience. Clickmaps can be used to determine where your visitors click most often on your homepage. Scrollmaps can be used to determine if your homepage’s length is optimal. You can identify the most visited sections of your homepage by using heatmaps and then place key content or CTA there.
- The product page: Visitors can add items to their shopping carts from your product page. Visitors will leave your website if your product page lacks information, poor quality images or the size guide is difficult to find. Website heatmaps can be used to monitor how visitors navigate to your product pages. This will allow you to determine if they have for instance difficulty finding the size guide, if they are searching for offers, and many other things. If the heatmap shows that many users clicked on the product images, this means that they want to see details. However, the existing design does not allow the product image to expand. In this case, the heatmap was able to tell you what your users expected from your product pages and give you concrete insight into how you can improve your site’s UX.
- Checkout Page:Checkout is the final page of your conversion funnel. It is therefore crucial that your visitors can find all information on this page. Visitors might leave your website searching for missing information, and then they may never return. Website heatmap is a way to identify missing information. It tracks user behavior on the checkout page. For example, you analyze the data and notice that many visitors clicked on the “Apply Coupon” field. They then left your website, never to return. This insight allows you to hypothesize that a dropdown of all relevant coupon codes, or auto-filling each customer’s eligibility field will reduce cart abandonment and increase purchase.
- Blogs, other resource pages and articles: Heatmaps are a great way to determine the optimal length of your blogs, case studies and other content pieces. Scrollmaps can show you how far visitors scroll down a page and the percentage of people who scrolled through half of it but not all of it. Scrollmaps allow you to optimize your content and plan its length according the scroll patterns of your users and visitors.
- Call to Action (CTA). The real action happens on your web page’s “Call to Action” or CTA. Your website conversion rates will be severely affected if you use the wrong color, text, or place it in an inappropriate area. A website heatmap is used to determine the most visited sections on your website so that your CTA can go there. It also helps you track how many people scroll down to the bottom of the page to see your CTA.
Get in touch with us and learn how to create your heatmap for your website.
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What is a heatmap?
Why use website heatmap?
Source: VWO
