The Future of Heat Mapping

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Heatmaps in detail, where is it going?

In the last decade, web analytics became an important toolset in every online business. If you had to make a list of not online companies, you wouldn’t need much paper for it. It is simply not worth it not to use that opportunity. Customer demand is higher than ever, and the competition is constantly growing in every sector. Nowadays, the products themselves won’t be enough to get you to the top. You need to give additional value to your customers. 

If you have a website of any sort, you must care about its visitors. You need to gather efficient information about their behavior and needs when they browse your pages. Optimizing your website based on your visitors’ needs and preferences is vital for boosting your conversion rates. Most web analytics tools will result in a large pile of numbers, charts, and statistics. In terms of accessibility and transparency, website heatmaps deliver.

Utilizing this data, you can increase signups and conversion on a large scale. In a recent study, heatmaps proved to be extremely useful. Employing the knowledge gathered from the analysis, a slight change can increase conversion by 34%. Additional to the heatmaps, with single changes, major gains can be achieved.

What are heatmaps

Using colors scaling from blue to red, heatmaps give you an aggravated view of user activity on your website. The most active elements are red, the least ones are blue (options regarding the coloring can vary, though). This way, you can gain a thorough insight into what your visitors look, click, scroll, swipe, and what they ignore completely. This information is much easier to understand and analyze. Other analytics tools might return more statistics and numbers, but comprehending it takes a lot of time.

Why is it worth it to use heatmaps

When you don’t use heatmaps (or any web analytics tools), your business is more prone to injury. Changing and redesigning websites can do a lot of damage. It results in loss of conversion rates, revenue decrease, and all the time and resources you wasted to update your website.

People can get frustrated when they don’t find something they are looking for. The same thing happens on websites. When your visitors struggle to find your links, CTA-s, or registration forms, they become dissatisfied and leave your page hoping for a better alternative. Heatmaps help you determine what your visitors miss, what they look for, and what attracts them the most. Utilizing this data, you can improve your website and boost your conversion rates.

How do they work

The technology behind heat mapping is quite complex. In short, without detailing any algorithms, heatmaps work as follows: after setting up the heatmap software or addon, you can choose which website to track, what kind of heatmap to use, and what subsites to be included. The data is displayed on the web page itself. Once you turn on the service, it starts collecting data immediately, and you can start analyzing reports and heatmaps as you like.

Heatmap types

Heat Mapping is a collective term that covers several types of heatmaps. They all proved to be useful in different aspects.

Click heatmap

Every click made by a visitor indicates a choice. With the help of click heatmaps, you can collect and analyze these choices to get a general understanding of your visitors’ behavior. Click heatmaps are very useful for measuring the effect of your CTA-s. If you don’t have enough new registrations, click heatmaps may reveal that visitors don’t even click on the link for some reason.

Move heatmap

Tracking your cursor movement, move heatmaps are a great tool for capturing user behavior. Of course, it does not explain why a visitor stopped or moved the cursor, but it is a great base for making assumptions.

Scroll heatmaps

Scroll heatmaps can help you determine where you lose most of your visitors. This type of heatmaps shows how far people scroll on your website. You can find out if important information is missed or ignored. Analyzing the results can help to find a better place for CTA-s.

Segment heatmaps

Using segment heatmaps, you can analyze the traffic sources where your visitors come from. Segmenting your customers based on this data can be very useful, especially before redesigning your website or launching a new campaign.

Trends in heat mapping technology

Over the years, technology allowed web analytics to evolve into a robust part of e-commerce. With the increase of online businesses and medium, analytical solutions show significant growth in marketing efforts. Heatmaps have already revolutionized the methods of how we comprehend our online customer experience. We don’t need complicated charts and statistics to understand user behavior. More and more companies deploy heatmap technology to improve quality and get on top of the competition. As the demand increases, so does the supply. Today a large number of businesses offer advanced heat mapping technology. In the last few years, the types of heatmaps are more segmented than before. You can use touch heatmaps exclusively for smart devices, swipe heatmaps, confetti reports, overlay reports. E-commerce companies require the most detailed tools for revealing every glitch, error, and misplaced advertisement on their websites.

 The growing market adapts to demand, and so does technology. About fifteen years ago, website analysis did not have a major role in e-business. Today, heatmaps play a major role in online marketing. However, the effectiveness of these tools determines the volume of growth. It is important to mention that effectiveness is mostly realized by comprehending the data and improving accordingly.

The current marketing trends and customer approach indicate that the unique user will become more important in the future. Now, the majority of web analytics tools focus on quantitative data. It is needless to say that this information is a must. However, companies need to target individuals to stay competitive. Heatmaps are, in fact, a transition between quantitative and qualitative data measuring. Meanwhile, these solutions gather information about every user visiting the site; they provide unique information visually. The current direction of this technology is pointing towards a unique user experience. To maximize this experience and thus optimize our conversion rate, we must approach data analytics and measuring the same way. 

Session replay

A great tool for measuring user behavior is session replay. It, just like heatmaps, gives you a hand to understand what’s happening on your website. Session replay provides a video reproduction of all user activity on your website. This way, you can track and analyze user behavior individually. The insight you gain allows you to see your potential fields of improvement through the customers’ eyes.

Conclusion

Heat mapping technology is an option to use not exclusively for projects but all the time. This type of analysis is a major advantage of online marketing. Even if you currently don’t have any ideas or development plans for your companies, heatmaps can always provide new customer behavior patterns.

This solution advances business, be it car rental, photo agency, a webshop, or any other sort.

Heatmaps become more popular every day among companies as they realize how important user experience is. Technology is always being improved towards market trends, and it is not different with heat mapping technology. It focuses more and more on a unique customer approach, as this seems to be the game-changer among web analytics tools.

The Future of Heat Mapping

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