What is a heatmap?
A heat map (or heatmap) is a two-dimensional graphical representation of data where values are represented by colour. The colour variation may be by hue or intensity and provides an immediate visual summary of information to the reader about how your users use your site at a glance. This means you can quickly pinpoint elements of your website layout that perfectly serve their purpose and those that deserve extra attention and care.
What does it Show?
Heat Mapping software collects data from a web page and displays that data over the web page itself. By aggregating user behaviour, heatmaps facilitate data analysis, identify trends, and optimize for further engagement. Heatmaps are most commonly used to show user behaviour on specific web pages, like where users have clicked on a page, how far they have scrolled down a page, and what they look at or ignore. These data can be handy for conversion rate optimization, thereby improving the user experience on their website.
Heatmaps are more visual
Compared to other analytics tools, a Heatmap is easier to understand and analyze, even if you are not that familiar with analytics. Because it provides a visual approach to numeric values. The use of colour-coding is the best part of Heat Mapping tools. For example, a Heatmap usually overlays red and orange colours to the parts of your website that visitors interact with the most. Meanwhile, green and blue are used for elements that do not get the desired attention.
Move heatmaps
Move maps track every user’s cursor movement to give you an idea of how they navigate your interface. Move heatmaps provide you with valuable insight into where users expect to find featuresand which elements they tend to interact with. For mobile applications, heatmaps track long touches that are used to navigate the screen and move things around.
Heatmaps work best as a first step in the analysis process
Heatmaps can help you understand why certain product pages work better than others. To optimize the in-game purchases of this mobile game app developers decided to compare interactions between Free and Premium users.
Heatmap indicated that when faced with a choice between items prices in an in-game currency and real money, Premium users gravitated towards the latter. A resulting decision to update the store to show mostly real-currency prices to Premium users led to an increase in overall sales.
Provides an instant overview of key web performance
There are several types of Heat Maps available. Although each of them serves different purposes, the ultimate result is the overview of web performance. A Click Heatmap reveals the clicking patterns of the users, whereas the Scroll maps provide data about the scrolling patterns. Attention maps show which parts of your website are most engaging to users. Movement track mouse movements. Lastly, Geo Heat Maps reveal territories or countries where conversions are high and where they are not. In short, Heatmaps tell you at a glance what’s working and what needs to be addressed.
Makes it easier to learn from users and create user-friendly web design
Heatmaps help you understand what your audience is doing on your website, where they are clicking the most, which CTA/content is getting the most and least attention, where they spend the majority of the time, what they look at or ignore and more. These data can be used while optimizing or redesigning your website for a more user-friendly design. Combine Heatmaps and A/B testing, and your learning becomes predictive without being intrusive: You test future design choices before deploying them to a wider audience – and don’t risk alienating your users.
Help companies make data-driven choices that improve the bottom line
Heatmaps can help improve your overall bottom line. They can help you make better web designs that drive engagements and conversions. They can also help you reduce your landing page’s bounce rate on Google Analytics. In fact, a combination of a heatmap analysis tool and landing page software can help you increase the conversion rate of your landing pages.