If you are wondering “what is a heatmap?”, you no longer have to. You’re in the right place, at the right time.
In essence, a heatmap is a visual representation of a collection of data patterns. It is used in a variety of settings, but heatmaps for e-commerce websites are most common nowadays.
In this article, we will cover everything you need to know about heatmaps so that you can determine if you would like to use them for your business.
Whenever you’re ready to develop your business even further with the help of modern technology, keep reading.
What Is A Heatmap?
A heatmap is a visual representation of data values depicted with color. Heatmaps make it very easy to understand complex data at a glance.
What we call now heatmaps started to come to fruition in the 19th century when it was used in a grayscale format to depict data patterns in tables and matrices.
The term was trademarked when Cormac Kinney developed a visual-representation tool for real-time financial market data. Today, heatmaps can be done by hand, with Excel or specialized software.
Online businesses make use of website heatmaps that visualize the most popular and unpopular elements of the page using a color scale. Usually ranging from red to blue.
Through behavior aggregation, heatmaps assist data analysis and provide a quick understanding of how customers interact with each page. One can learn what people click on, what people ignore, what they scroll through, and much more.
Heatmaps also have an average fold, which is the part of a page that customers see on their device without scrolling.
Why Use Heatmaps?
Heatmaps will allow you to understand how customers interact with your website pages. Thus, allowing you to find a precise answer to your critical business questions, such as “how can I get more visitors?” or “why is nobody converting?”.
Heatmaps will also allow you to determine if visitors are:
- Finding and using page links, opt-ins, buttons
- Getting distracted by other elements
- Experiencing issues on devices
- Reaching content or failing to find it
As a visual program, heatmaps help you in making data-based informed decisions for updating, A/B testing, and redeveloping your website. Not to mention, they are more useful on a broader scale.
Heatmaps show your stakeholders and company members what is happening and have them make decisions quickly when changes are required. Heatmaps are hard to argue with.
Webpage Optimization
By understanding where customers click and spend their time, you can make important decisions, such as where you should have your most valuable content.
Quite commonly, visitors will consistently look at the top left corner, then the right, then down to the page. It’s pretty much what we do when we read books.
Armed with such knowledge, you would be able to place important announcements on the top left corner where it is going to get the most traction.
A heatmap is great for website redevelopment. With a heatmap, one can identify the areas of the site that receive engagement, and the page can be adjusted to improve these interactions.
Conversion Increase
Any time that you want to improve how your business converts, you will use a heatmap. If you want to improve sales or encourage customers to provide their email for a marketing campaign, a heatmap will help you do this.
Heatmap data shows if visitors even get to see the forms you have or if they find the buy button to click. This will give you great insight into how to arrange your website to improve the possibility of these actions.
Testing Efficiency
As part of website optimization, you will want to perform regular testing. You won’t know if the changes you make will harm or help your business. A heatmap can help you make the tests.
The most common method is with A/B testing. You will make separate versions of the same page with the second being different from the first. After enough visitors see both pages, you can compare the heatmap to see if the page led to better results.
If the change results in a decrease in output, heatmaps will present you with information on where to redirect the attention. This will help you evolve your testing continually.
Communication Enhancement
Heatmaps also help you communicate what is going on on the website to managers, colleagues, and stakeholders. Showing heatmaps will present the receiver with the key points of your business supported by visuals.
It can also help you get more buy-in from involved individuals. It’s quite hard for people to argue with facts when they are presented with a heat chart.
A software like decibel.com will be able to provide you with the necessary tools to improve communication with team embers, and much more.
Issue Flagging
Heatmaps help to identify customer challenges. If visitors are not converting the way you want them to, the cause behind this might be technical.
Most businesses focus their attention on the desktop versions of their site, they completely ignore mobile devices. However, many consumers use mobile devices exclusively.
This can be avoided by using a heatmap on all device visits. You will certainly find differences in the behavior of both device types.
Mobile visitors might not be using your checkout option because of how the website looks on mobile devices. Heatmaps will reveal if users are seeing it and if they are or are not clicking.
Technology Revolt
Now that you have discovered what is a heatmap, you are that much closer to actually making use of one. Heatmaps are quite affordable nowadays, so why don’t you just try them out and see if you like them?
There’s no reason not to try something that can exponentially improve the quality of your business output. If you’re interested in similar content, check out some of our other technological articles on the sidebar.
