How Heat Mapping Can Improve Your Analytics

Have you ever wondered what users actually do on your website? Are they clicking on the buttons you want them to click, or having a hard time finding the information they came for and leaving? Oftentimes, we are left having to guess a user’s behavior using metrics that aren’t always a reliable way to get the full picture. 

Lucky for us, these questions can be answered using data generated from marketing Heat Maps. Let’s learn more how we can utilize these tools to show us exactly how users interact with all of the elements on a website and improve their overall experience.

What is a marketing heat map? 

A Heat Map is created by recording all the clicks and mouse movements of your website visitors. Heatmaps use color the way a bar graph uses height and width as a visualization tool.

If you’re looking at a web page and you want to know which areas get the most attention, a heat map shows you in a visual way. Heat Maps allow you to easily see areas you should improve, which sections you should focus on, and how you should edit your pages to get the most conversions.

The data produced by a Heat Map can offer some focused and unique insights you might not have realized through other analytics. Two key insights you can discover once you apply heat mapping to your site are: where your visitors are clicking and what areas of your website they are paying attention to the most. This can help you discover what renovations may need to be made to your website.

Common Marketing Heat Map Reports

There are three types of heat maps that are used most often to record user movements and analyze behavior. These types of heat maps are: 

• Click Maps
• Confetti Maps
• Scroll Maps

What Are You Clicking About?

Click Maps help you visually see which links and buttons are most popular. They can also help you improve usability and identify design flaws.

For example, you might find that people are clicking on something that doesn’t link anywhere, expecting it to take them to a page with more information on that specific product. This opens a new opportunity for you to add a link and direct the user to another page. Remember that you want to design your website with your users in mind, making their experience more enjoyable. 

Click Maps can also be used to understand where people are dropping off on the site or while filling out forms.

For example, if your form has too many questions, people will leave without completing the form. You will be able to visually see what fields people are stopping at, giving you insights as to how to improve your forms. 

Using these user experience findings, you can continue to make improvements that will help with site navigation and form completion rates.

Celebrate with Confetti… Maps

Confetti Maps shows where people click, while also providing valuable insights about how they use your webpage. They show each visitor’s click as a colored dot. The colors stand for the categories you have chosen to sort the clicks by (for example: operating system, browser, etc).  

You can use confetti to see how users from different referrals behave. All visitors click, but the patterns in which they click and what they don’t click on can tell you a lot about how your webpage communicates with these visitors. 

By studying click patterns with the Confetti report, you can see your users’ different behaviors and ultimately measure if they are performing your desired actions. 

You Say Scroll-Map, I Say Content Analysis

The Scroll Map lets you see how far down a page visitors scroll. It gives you an idea about how much of your page is visible to visitors. Each section provides information about visibility and time spent on site. 

A great example of valuable insight from the Scroll Map is when key page content is located in a low-visibility area.

For example, a call to action button is almost always best suited in the top fold of your page. But, not all layouts look this way. How far down visitors are scrolling is a strong measure to get a clear idea regarding the page structure. This can help you decide if you need to move certain elements on the page up higher for users to see faster and optimize the page for conversions.

To find advantages, it is required to know how people are interacting with scrollable web pages. Persuading visitors to scroll below the fold is always a challenge, and the data achieved from heat maps can show how effective your design is at encouraging users to explore your entire page.  

Whether you need to tweak your design to better entice visitors to scroll or move the CTA up-page so it’s more visible, tracking scrolls can show you exactly what your visitors are looking at.

Marketing Heat Map: Lucky Orange 

Lucky Orange is a user-friendly platform that allows businesses to optimize for conversions.  It can create custom heat maps, specific to your own needs. One of the top features available are their dynamic heat maps. This tool creates heat maps that allow you to watch, in real-time, how users interact with all elements of your website, from dropdowns to buttons. 

All visits to your website are tracked and recorded, allowing analysts to have the data they need to make informed decisions, right at their fingertips. 

Some of the statistics that Lucky Orange Can track are: 

• Activity level
• How active the user was during a session
• Number of page views
• Time on site
• Landing page
• Exit page
• Source

These metrics can provide your business with valuable information about your users behavior and insights on what works and what doesn’t. 

Additionally, you will be able to segment traffic into groups such as how they came to your website, or on what devices they are navigating from. 

How To Use Lucky Orange

In order to incorporate this tracking tool on your website, you will need to add a small amount of code to the page that you want to track. This can easily be done using Google Tag Manager. One key concern for most people is the effect of this tool on their website. Luckily, this plug-in won’t affect your site speed or your Search Engine Optimization score. 

The web pages that you choose to track are entirely up to you, but it is recommended to track all of the pages on your website because this way you will understand how your whole site works. By using this tool, you may discover powerful insights about certain pages on your site that you didn’t know before. So, why not use it to its full potential?

Once added, the tool will start tracking your website traffic. Now you can start to use the data that is being gathered about your website to understand not only your users, but if your website is performing at the highest potential. Over time, you will be able to notice patterns in your user’s behavior and fix any UX problems you start to notice on your site, such as an incorrect link or a non-clickable item that users want to click.

Google Analytics

Heat map results are qualitative and once you have analyzed all your findings, be sure to also gather your Google Analytics data as its metrics provide quantitative information. Just like you audit your marketing strategy, you should also audit your website’s performance. By using both Google Analytics and Lucky Orange’s platform’s data, you can get a holistic picture of your user’s experience on your website and provide you with the best ways to optimize your website.Are you interested in incorporating heat map analysis on your website? Schedule a strategy session with one of our digital strategists at Pinckney Marketing to learn more about how to optimize your website through the power of analytics.

This post was originally written on January 24th, 2018 and refreshed on May 20th, 2020.