Heat maps help marketers understand what visitors are doing on their landing pages—how far they scroll on the page, where they click, which page elements they focus on, and which elements they ignore.
Data collected from the maps allow marketers to make optimization decisions that lead to higher landing page conversions.
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Let’s dive in…
What are heat maps?
A heatmap is a visual tool tracking user interactions on a webpage. It employs color gradients to indicate areas of high and low engagement, to help you understand what’s working on the page and what’s not.
You can judge how effective a web page is by analyzing a heat map on the following two things:
How much information visitors engage with: Look at how much of the page visitors read. Based on this information, you can assess which page elements are working well and which are not.
What actions do users take: What are visitors clicking? Do they click the CTA button, type in the form fields, etc.?
Types of heat maps
1) Click heat maps: They record data based on where visitors click on your landing page. The red spots showcase the areas where the visitor clicked the most. The highest number of visitor clicks on a landing page should be on the CTA button.
2) Mouse tracking heat maps/hover maps: Hover maps are heat maps that show the user’s mouse movements on your landing page. The primary problem with hover maps is that you can’t always directly correlate a visitor’s mouse movements to what they’re looking at.
3) Scroll maps: These help you see the exact point where visitors scroll on the page. They are generally used for long-form sales pages.
How can you utilize heat maps for conversion optimization?
Heatmap data helps you answer the following questions about user behavior:
How visitors are using the landing page?
How do they navigate on the landing page?
What catches their attention, and where do they tend to click?
Which page element are they ignoring?
Do they click the call-to-action button?
How engaging is your copy?
Where should you place the page elements you don’t want visitors to miss?
Considerations and best practices
To ensure the heat map data you collect is accurate and, most importantly, generalizable, you must have an ample sample size–so the changes you make on your landing pages based on the data work. Ensure a significant sample size (2,000-3,000 views per device) for accurate insights.
For example, if a heat map shows that many visitors are not filling out the form beyond the first field, this doesn’t necessarily mean that visitors only filled out the first field. This could also mean visitors used their keyboard to tab through fields instead of their mouse.
In this specific case, it would be better to measure the time a user spent within each form field instead of simply looking at click maps.
When you’re creating heat maps, make sure to look at the full picture, so you can benefit from the heat map analysis.
Use heat maps to track behavior, optimize conversion rate (CRO), and make UX decisions.
While analytics metrics tell you the exact traffic numbers on your landing page, and of those visitors how many abandon your page, heat maps explain what happens when a visitor comes on the page – where they click, where they don’t click, what they read, and what they don’t read. Understanding why users behave the way they do helps you create a landing page that users find easy to navigate without any friction.
Conversion rate optimization is the continuous process of ensuring that the marketing funnel works successfully by converting leads into customers with the help of different optimization processes. These processes include A/B testing, improving on-page experiences with heat maps, usability tests, etc.
Don’t A/B test your landing pages randomly. Start with a particular idea in mind – the hypothesis comes from insights collected from heat map analysis.
Another way you can use heat maps is to make User experience (UX) decisions on your landing pages. Instead of making assumptions about how visitors see your landing page, you can collect real-time data on their on-page experience. This data helps you create a page with a great user experience.
Heat maps are indispensable for understanding user interaction, and guiding optimization efforts for higher conversion rates. Understanding why users behave the way they do helps you create a landing page that users find easy to navigate without any friction.
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Jovan Simic, Account Manager
Jovan Simic is an experienced media buyer responsible for over $30M in profitable ad spend. At Inceptly, Jovan has collaborated with prominent brands, including Advanced Bionutritionals, Amplify Solar, Fittrack, John Crestani, and The Social Man, demonstrating his versatility and expertise. His deep understanding of media buying and consistent track record of success make him an invaluable asset to the industry.
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