Conventional data analytics only give you an overall view of your website and its visitors and help you identify the pages that require your attention. You get to know the page from where your visitors abandon your site, but not the exact area on the page that made them do so. They also cannot explain why a particular action occurs and which element should be tested.
This is where heatmaps help. They provide you with analytical data that offers valuable insight into where visitors pay attention to, click, scroll, and hover on. You get a complete view of how your visitors are likely to behave on your website. This helps in optimizing your pages to suit your user preferences and hence increases conversions.
What are heatmaps?
Heatmaps are a visual representation of website analytical data that uses a colour-coding system. These are displayed on your web page itself to show how visitors interact with your website.
The areas to which your visitors pay the most attention are referred to as hot areas and are represented using warm colours (red). The areas to which they pay the least attention are called the cold areas and are shown in cooler colours (blue, purple, or green). The areas to which they pay moderate interest are shown in colours like yellow and orange.
This way, you get to know where your visitors are hovering over, clicking, and scrolling on your web pages. This helps you identify the content, elements, and CTAs and their positioning that attract or repel your visitors. You also discover those areas where they face difficulty in your website.
Ways to increase conversions using a heatmap
1. Find the areas your visitors don’t care about
Heatmaps let you identify those regions and elements of your website that are not getting any attention from your visitors. This helps you in optimizing your website by eliminating those areas that people ignore. For instance, if your site has loads of text and images which you find your visitors least care about or you are offering too many options, visitors may tend to ignore those. So, prune them and keep only those vital elements that fascinate and engage users.
2. Draw attention to the right elements
When you plan to introduce a new element on your website, it is better to determine the right place to do so. Heatmaps can help you identify the best place to place the element on your site. Analyze your site heatmaps to find where most of your visitors are drawn to. Use this to identify the right positioning of your product images, sign-up buttons, Call to Actions (CTAs), advertisements, and more.
3. Identify distracting features
Eye-tracking heat maps help you understand those features on your site that are distracting your visitors. When you find that your visitors are not undertaking the journey that you have designed towards conversions, you need to declutter and revise the design and flow attributes. For instance, if you find that promotional banners, ads, etc. are distracting your visitors, remove those. This will aid visitors to follow the pattern you have designed for their journey.
4. Identify friction points
Heatmaps can reveal whether your visitors can seamlessly navigate your site or not. If they are facing any confusion or issue, you can understand your design flaws. For example, you may find that your users are clicking on an unclickable part of your site, your webpages are placed in the wrong order, your site is non-responsive to certain screen dimensions, or has dead-ends from where your visitors are unable to navigate to other pages. Fix such issues to increase conversions.
5. Understand your visitors’ preferences
By analyzing heatmaps, you can accurately recognize what interests your visitors the most. This can guide you in tweaking your website and including more of those items liked by your visitors. For instance, if you find that product descriptions accompanied by videos entice buyers, you can market your other products too that way. By analyzing click heatmaps you can comprehend the optimal positioning of links.
6. Decreasing cart abandonment
Sometimes e-commerce stores would find that many users have added items to the cart but have abandoned it halfway through. If this is the case with your platform, you can use heatmaps to recognize where your customers are clicking during the checking-out process. Maybe they are hovering the move all over the area as the checkout button is not noticeable.
7. Comprehend how visitors react to content
Not all conversions involve clicking on a CTA. For instance, in some cases, it may be reading a sales copy and then moving on to browse products on the same page; and in some other cases, it may be reading a blog till the end. In such cases, conversions can be evaluated using heatmaps. A mouse movement heatmap can tell you how visitors react to content and thus determine the type of content that interests your visitors the most.
8. Get more out of your visuals
Visuals have the power to entice your visitors and lead them through the conversion funnel. But you need to know what kind of visuals attract them the most. Heatmaps in combination with A/B testing can help you evaluate the effectiveness of different visuals like images, graphics, animations, videos, etc. on your site. You can even test the success rate of two different images or other visuals to know which affects conversions the best.
Final words
Heatmaps can help you boost conversions through your website in many ways. For, you can revise and revamp your site based on solid data rather than assumptions. However, that doesn’t put an end to all your website issues. For, you need to keep testing and retesting even after making changes and improvements. This will help you determine how those modifications enhanced or worsened the user experience.
