6 Questions That Heatmap Analytics Can Answer About Your Website
In the world of UX, the importance of web analytics grows every day. If you are still not using heatmaps for your website, then you should. Click heatmaps, scroll heatmaps, and segment heatmaps are essential tools for understanding your website and your customers better.
Click heatmaps are geared towards recognizing your website’s weak and strong spots and can help you eradicate the possible rage clicks. Scroll heatmaps tell us how far down the site your customers scroll on specific pages, while segment heatmaps check the traffic source in maximum detail.
Sure, you can achieve even better results if you use different heatmaps together and in combination with other web analytics tools. But there is no doubt that heatmaps should be the staple of any UX designer’s work. Here, we will talk about what questions heatmaps can answer your website and how they can benefit us.
The Benefits of Using Heatmaps
The main role of these tools is the recognition of problems on your site and the improvement of user experience. Click heatmaps reveal and give us more precision when it comes to predicting user behavior. But we should utilize scroll and segment heatmaps, as well.
Where heatmaps can help is with developing the user experience on your site. Some of the most important benefits of heatmaps include:
- bug recognition and eradication of bugs,
- spotting the potential dead or broken links on your site,
- click heatmaps tell where users click the most, thereby what content is more important,
- help recognize the potential rage clicks on our site,
- let us know whether our buttons and content elements are working properly,
- recognizing untapped potential on our website.
What question can heatmaps answer about our site?
Is my Site’s Navigation System Effective?
One of the most important parts of building your website is giving your users a satisfying user interface with an intuitive navigation system. This includes various menus, whether it be drop-down menus or regular menus on the side.
For example, click heatmaps show us where the users click most often, and if they tend to click on our menus often, it is an indicator that the site’s structure is well developed. However, they also let us know which parts of the website or which menus are not used, leading to unnecessary content and ineffective internal links to the other pages on your site.
A good navigation system leads to a much more satisfying experience on your site. Heatmaps let us quickly and easily recognize the weak and strong spots of your website’s navigation, including menus and other parts of your website that guide the users towards the conversion funnel or towards the content you want to show to them.
Are my Buttons Working as They Should?
When we talk about buttons on your website, we must turn our attention towards call-to-action (CTA) buttons on your site. Click heatmaps can be very effective at recognizing which buttons are getting enough love from users and which ones should be improved.
For example, if you have a button that leads to an important part of your website, such as the conversion funnel that can improve conversion rates, it should work properly. An attractive button that will stand out will most often lead to many clicks, but it can hinder your website massively if it is designed poorly.
If one of your buttons is not getting clicked enough, but it should, then it is time to take action. You can easily spot this with click heatmaps. Maybe the design is not as appealing as it should be, or perhaps it is not in the correct position.
On the other hand, click maps are also very effective at recognizing rage clicks and clicks on buttons that don’t lead anywhere. Perhaps one of your buttons has a broken link, so it causes a lot of anger and may lead to rage clicks. Or perhaps the button is not leading to any particular website, as the link within the button is broken.
Am I Using the Full Potential of my Website?
Heatmaps will tell you which parts of your website are “hot” and which are not. Any part of the website that is popular will be marked with segments and click heatmaps. Scroll maps can also be effective for this, although they are not as precise as click maps.
Perhaps you are not taking advantage of the space on your website. Maybe some parts are not as popular as others, and here is the opportunity for improvement. In this case, you need to make this part more appealing so that more users will flock here.
Another way you can make use of the potential of your site is by placing the important content on those parts of the website that seem to be more popular. That is true for CTA buttons; if they are on your site’s wrong spots, you need to consider their position within the site and move them to a spot that more visitors see.
How Far Down my Website do Users Scroll?
This is the main role of scroll heatmaps. They help recognize which parts of the website are more popular by telling us how far down the site users scroll. It presents another way of how you can make the placement of your content and CTAs more relevant. If your important content is where your visitors can not see it, you need to change the structure of your website.
Perhaps the pages are too long, or their content is not as engaging as that on the top. It signals the need to either shorten the page or make the content more interesting for the users. There is space for improvement and optimization of the website, and you can increase how far down the site users scroll.
Is my Mobile Site Working Properly?
One of the important properties of these various heatmap providers is that they will offer you the chance for analytics on various devices, including mobile devices. We know that today, you can’t get away with a poor mobile design.
Click heatmaps also work for mobile devices, and they help you recognize where your site needs improvement. Are they doing the same clicks as they are on your main site? Is there any content more relevant than on your main site? You might need to reconsider your mobile page layout; for that, you can get answers with heatmaps.
Scroll maps can also be very effective here. They help us recognize how far users scroll. You can improve the layout of your mobile page very easily with these analytics by making some subtle tweaks to your mobile site based on your analytics.
Are all the links on my Site Working?
Broken links can be a real bummer. Not only do they ruin the user experience, but perhaps even more importantly, they rob you of the potential sales and conversion that you could be making if these links were working.
Click heatmaps can be very effective at revealing the broken links. Rage clicks can show that and clicks in the content where there isn’t any link. Perhaps the users think that a part of your content features a link to another site, but it turns out that it is not the case. So, you might also be seeing plenty of clicks there.
Heatmaps can help you identify broken links, and the sooner you can find them, the better it will be for your business. Luckily, you can easily fix these links; it is the identification that is crucial here.
Conclusion
Heatmaps are very important for improving the user experience on your site and maximizing the potential of your content. Click heatmaps can show you where the users make the most clicks, and if they are not in the right places, you might not be using the full potential of your website. Hopefully, you will use heatmaps to answer all of the above questions for your site.
Author Bio
Evelin Rácz is the Content Marketing Manager of Capturly, a full-scale online analytics tool that can provide online businesses with first-hand feedback and real business insights simply and intelligibly. Connect with Evelin on Twitter and LinkedIn.
