You may have desired, at one time or another, that you could know which portions of your website users frequently frequented – perhaps through a crystal ball that depicts unseen things. Because no matter what you do, you end up tossing darts in the dark because your work may be based on assumptions, the desire to attain such knowledge is virtually always persistent.
For example, on the left side of your brand’s webpage, you can consider placing a bright red call-to-action (CTA). In this situation, your goals are crystal clear: conversion. You hope the colour red draws the reader’s attention and prompts them to click on it. What happens after that? Because it is unknown whether the CTA drew the site visitor’s attention, he may or may not click it.
So, how can you acquire reports straight from a crystal ball that reveal user behaviour instead of operating on assumptions? You make use of heatmaps. These are visualisation tools that display user activity in the form of colours, similar to how bar charts display their findings using height and width. Let’s start at the beginning:
What Are HeatMaps and How Do They Work?
A heatmap is a graphic representation of the parts of your website that receive the most interest from visitors. Heatmaps are a graphical depiction of data that uses a color-coding method to indicate distinct values, according to Optimizely. Heatmaps are utilised in a variety of analytics applications, but they’re most typically employed to display user behaviour and clicks on specific web pages or web page layouts.
Visual maps of this type can also be used to learn which parts of a website users have visited. Furthermore, these indicate how far down a page a user has scrolled. Site Catalyst and Google Analytics are two analytics solutions that help provide metrics that reveal which pages users visit. These, on the other hand, are lacking in specifics. Heatmaps, on the other hand, show you where your visitor has lingered, clicked, and more on a page. As a result, heatmaps provide a detailed picture of user activity and conversions on a website.
What Are the Benefits of Using HeatMaps?
Simply said, heatmaps aid in the comprehension of site visitor behaviour. These provide information about how customers engage with the website. The results can then be analysed and used to improve a web page’s layout, for example. As a result, you’ll be able to create a website design that guides users to the conversions you want.
Heatmaps are simple to comprehend and apply for improving web pages since they use colour to express aggregate data. Eye-tracking heatmaps and mouse-tracking heatmaps are the two primary types of heatmaps.
Each of these heatmaps has a self-explanatory name. Users’ eye movements are analysed using eye-tracking heatmaps to determine which portions of the site they have visited. It concludes the conclusions using data from a sample group of people, resulting in nearly 100 percent accurate outcomes.
Mouse-tracking heatmaps, on the other hand, track the user’s mouse movement to learn about his activity on the website. These heatmaps are based on actual visitors and are accurate to within 85-90 percent.
Mouse-tracking heatmaps score more points than eye-tracking heatmaps because they collect data from real people. Furthermore, the former is more cost-effective than the latter, resulting in improved user preference.
Crazy Egg, FullStory, Hotjar, and Tableau are just a few of the popular heatmap software tools available. To figure out which solution is best for your business analytics needs, compare their prices and features.
What Are the Benefits of Using HeatMaps on Your Website?
As previously stated, developing a website without understanding a user’s perspective is similar to playing in the dark. However, user research can help. It improves your website design efforts by assisting you in understanding generalised user behaviour.
As a result, user research-based web design is like working in a semi-dark playground. The use of heatmaps, on the other hand, is the next stage. This provides a near-perfect picture of what users do on a website.
As a result, you wind up developing a website in a bright field where you have a thorough idea of where the user clicks and what portions of the page he views. It’s worth noting that heatmaps necessitate a big amount of data before they can be correctly evaluated.
This is why they’re useful when’redesigning’ a company’s website. By the time you’re ready to revamp a company’s website, you’ve gathered enough information to conduct a thorough analysis. As a result, you’ll have a better understanding of your consumers’ behaviour, which means you’ll be able to boost your web design ROI.
Studies on the HeatMap
Heatmaps have been proven to be effective in research. According to a study conducted by the Neilson Norman Group, the time spent on a page by a site user reduces as he moves below the fold.
Visitors spend 80% of their time looking at stuff above the fold, according to the research. As a result, the closer your content is to the header, the more attention it will receive from visitors.
The takeaway from this research is straightforward. The most crucial information about a company should be at the top of the page. This research also provides us another lesson. According to the research, when a user gets closer to the bottom of a webpage, his viewing duration increases dramatically. As a result, adding a CTA at that point will increase conversion rates.
Similarly, there is growing evidence that the left part of a webpage receives significant user experience. Custom web design company can employ heatmaps to figure out which parts of a webpage’s left side get the most user attention.
As a result, as a designer, you can place the value proposition on the webpage’s left side. The same may be seen in the following study, which shows that the left side of the screen received 59 percent of the viewing time. This is about twice as much as the attention paid to the left side of a webpage compared to the right side.
Heatmaps are becoming increasingly popular.
To summarise, heatmaps are useful web analytics tools that can help you improve your website’s design. These provide information on customer encounters. As a result, you can improve customer engagement by redesigning brand websites in an optimised manner.
You may also use heatmaps to see if visitors can readily find search choices, if the navigation bar is working, if visitors are reading the content, and how much of it they are reading, among other things. Heatmaps give your website the analytical edge it need.
Ankit Arya is a digital marketing and web design blogger that enjoys learning about new things and exploring the world. He covers a wide range of topics, including marketing, technology, science, coding, and brain health. She enjoys sharing her discoveries and experiences with readers, and she believes that her blogs can help to improve the world.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post on all you need to know about HeatMaps for web design and analytics for your organisation.
