Ever used a heatmap?

Last time we talked about the importance of good data. One way to gather data is by having a heatmap on your site. In short, a heatmap tracks how people interact with your site. You can see where people click, how far they scroll, impressions on what is most used on your site, or least used.

One of the first questions I ask someone when learning about their goals is, “Do you have a heatmap installed on your site?” I generally will get these two responses: “What‘s a heatmap?” Or “I do, but I don‘t really know how to use it.”

I would say a heatmap is probably one of the most useful and under utilized tools available. There are several heatmaps on the market, some are free and some are paid. There are several that are within a reasonable budget, and if you‘re spending any money to drive traffic to your website, you should be equally as focused on tracking the data from your heatmap.

Let’s say you are driving traffic to your product detail pages and aren’t getting the ROAS (return on ad spend) you expected. If you check your heatmap you may see that the “Add to Cart” CTA is below the fold and very few people are scrolling down far enough to see the CTA. Once you notice this, you move the placement of the CTA above the fold, and start to get more sales just by the change of placement.

Your heatmap should be placed on all pages of your website, and on any ads you are running. Each page can give valuable insight on how your sales funnel is performing. Be careful not to make too many changes at once. You will want to make one change at a time to ensure that you are able to determine if the change made a positive or negative impact.

You can also use your heatmap to help determine the engagement of new features, lead captures, search bars, menus, and more. Let’s say that you recently changed your menu to include “Featured Products,” but aren’t certain if it is actually being utilized. You may notice after a week or two, that it isn’t getting clicked. You might change the placement of the tab, or change the color of the font to drive more attention to it. You may also, make changes and see no difference, and determine to change the language from “Featured Products” to “Most Popular.” After the change, you review the data and notice that the verbiage was the factor that increased the engagement to generate the result you were hoping for.

A couple of companies that I would recommend are Crazyegg, https://www.crazyegg.com/ and HotJar, https://www.hotjar.com/ . I personally like HotJar better than Crazyegg, because they update their software regularly, and performs better for mobile devices. Both tools are great, and have pros and cons of each.

One final note, be certain that you are strategically making changes to your website. It’s imperative that you answer the question “why?” You should never make changes without understanding your strategy for change. Each change should be well thought out and planned.

Thanks for checking in on the blog, stay tuned for the next article!

Thanks, Elizabeth