(Newswire.net — January 18, 2022) —
Heatmaps are a useful tool for observing what users do on your website, for example, how far they scroll, where they click, scrolling, and what they look at or ignore. This guide will give you an overview of different types of heatmaps as well as how to create and analyze them.
History of heatmap
The first record of heatmaps originates from Toussaint Loua in the late 1800s. Toussaint Loua utilized a shading map to show socioeconomic demographic changes around Paris.
However, the term heatmap was first trademarked by Cormac Kinney. In the early 1990s, he developed a technology for graphically displaying real-time financial market data.
What is a heatmap?
Heatmaps are a type of graphical data display in which colors represent values. It simplifies the visualization and comprehension of complex data at a glance. Heatmaps can be found in a variety of analytics tools, although they’re most typically used to show user behavior on web pages or webpage layouts. Heatmaps can show the results of eye-tracking experiments, as well as where visitors clicked on a website and how far they scrolled down it.
Heatmaps use different colors to show which parts of a website get the most or least attention from users. Warmer colors (red and orange) represent “more visited” sections of your map. Whereas cooler colors (blue and purple) represent “less-visited” sections.
The advantages of using heatmaps
Heatmaps allow you to monitor how visitors interact with your site and answer business-critical issues such as:
- Why are my users leaving my website?
- How do I get more buyers?
- How can I achieve the desired action from visitors?
Heatmaps can also assist you in determining whether or not people are:
- Reaching critical information or failing to notice it.
- able to find and use the main links, buttons, opt-ins, and CTAs on a page.
- Distracted by non-clickable elements.
- Having problems with multiple devices.
As a visual tool, heatmaps may help you make data-driven decisions about A/B testing, upgrading, or (re)designing your website.
Types of heatmap
Based on the type of interaction, different types of heatmaps exist. In this section, you can find various usage of heatmaps.
Scrollmap
A scrollmap is a type of heatmap that shows users’ scrolling behavior on your website in a visual representation. You can use scroll heatmaps to see how far your visitors scroll down the page and what percentage of them leave without taking the desired action.
Scrollmaps can tell you:
- The total number of visitors that scrolled to the bottom of a page.
- The number of people that scrolled down a page but didn’t go all the way to the bottom.
- The number of people who have left your page.
You can use scrollmaps to figure out how long a webpage should be before visitors stop scrolling. Determine whether visitors will reach material below the fold, and identify false floor or false bottom.
Similar to the click heatmap feature, the warmer the color, the more people looked at it when it came to scroll heatmaps. As a result, the data indicates where a call to action (CTA) or other critical information should be placed. The change in hue indicates where the visitor’s interest has decreased.
Clickmap
A clickmap illustrates how visitors interact with a website or a specific landing page. It shows which elements are the most clicked and how many times they have been clicked. You can see what motivates your visitors with clickmaps. You can find out which parts of your website are the most popular, and what should and shouldn’t be clickable.
They also show if there are any non-clickable elements on the website that divert the visitor’s attention. Or there are any parts of the website where visitors expect a clickable element but don’t have one. This will assist you in determining what needs to be changed on that specific page. As a result, catching design flaws like this early on is extremely valuable.
Eye-tracking heatmaps
When people are using a web page, an eye-tracking heatmap uses sensor technologies to track their movements. This technology can track eye movement, blinking, and pupil dilation to determine where a user’s attention is focused on a website. This type of information can help you figure out how well a web page’s design is working so you can make it more user-friendly. Eye-tracking heat maps can provide information about a visitor’s gaze pattern. This allows you to place the most relevant content on a web page in the most-looked-at areas.
By displaying what users are looking at on your site, eye-tracking maps usually provide incredibly accurate data. Comparisons to mouse-tracking data can be used to verify them.
Unfortunately, eye-tracking software is expensive, and data is usually based on a tiny sample of users. Some users are aware of eye-tracking and are afraid of it, therefore they utilize camera coverings to avoid being surveyed.
Mouse-tracking heatmaps
Computer users’ mouse movements are tracked by move maps as they navigate the page. On a moving map, the hot regions indicate where users have moved their cursor on a website. There is a correlation between where people gaze and where their mouse is, according to research. As a result, heatmaps movemap can help you predict where people will look as they navigate your page. They can help identify frustrated visitors by displaying areas on a web page where individuals are hovering, hesitating, or thrashing their mouse.
Mouse-tracking also recognizes hover patterns that reveal regions of visitor friction. Though there is a link between where users look and where their cursor is, the two are not similar, which might lead to erroneous conclusions.
Dead click heatmaps
Unclickable elements on a website or app are sometimes mistaken for buttons, and users tap them expecting something to happen, resulting in a dead click. Dead clicks reveal which non-functioning elements on your site or app are being mistaken for buttons. This allows you to figure out how to reduce user frustration and confusion. With heat signatures and advanced analytics, dead click heatmaps can find any non-functioning element.
AI-generated heatmaps
AI is used to create visual representations of user attention data generated by software algorithms. AI-generated heatmaps show what users are likely to pay attention to rather than what they are paying attention to.
Heatmaps generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are used to predict future user behavior by simulating the first three to five seconds of a user’s attention on a website to see which elements are looked at the most and least. AI-generated heatmaps can assist you in determining where critical elements should be placed on future pages and sites. They also have a higher accuracy rate of up to 95% and are less expensive than eye-tracking technology. However AI-generated maps aren’t as effective if there is low traffic or engagement on the website.
Rage quit heatmaps
Rage clicks are used to detect points of friction on your site by displaying regions where visitors click an element rapidly. Rage clicks can happen when people mistake a static element for a button and expect something to happen, or when a button isn’t working properly and causes an error.
Users’ rage click maps display all of the spots where they have clicked in frustration. With Rage Click maps, you can reproduce and fix unexpected errors. It also assists you in identifying and correcting CTA ambiguity in order to improve conversions and ROI by removing product friction. Keep an eye out for false positives in your Rage Click analysis, which can occur when a user clicks quickly across multiple pages of an app. It’s best to combine your rage click analysis with session replays whenever possible.
Error click heatmaps
When a user clicks on something that causes a client-side JavaScript error or a website error, this is known as an error click. The user may or may not notice that something is wrong as a result of error clicks. Even if the user isn’t aware that they’ve triggered an error, you can use error clicks to investigate console errors or uncaught exceptions.
This heatmap can be used to look into console errors or uncaught exceptions in particular. Errors or site glitches can annoy your users greatly. Error-click maps allow you to quickly identify and fix bugs, greatly improving the user experience.
Who can benefit from heatmaps?
Because of the variety of data that can be gathered and analyzed, heatmapping software can benefit many different teams within an organization. Here’s an overview of how heatmaps can benefit various departments:
For UX designers
Heatmaps can support the testing methods used by user experience (UX) designers when it comes to their site or app. UX designers can use them for
- usability testing to see if their content encourages users to act,
- recognize patterns of behavior,
- Check to see if your CTAs are placed strategically..
Heatmaps can also be used to bolster the findings of A/B tests, and they can be applied to both the control and the variable being tested. You’ll know why your variable isn’t performing as well as you expected. Even “failed” tests can provide valuable learnings if you have one of these tools in your back pocket.
For digital analysts
They can provide critical but often-missed data to analysts, allowing them to turn analysis into actionable insights and business outcomes. Heatmaps enable you to combine qualitative and quantitative data in ways that add depth and context to your analyses.
Whereas other methods may only allow you to count button clicks, heatmapping tools allow you to see what happened before, after, and in between those clicks. Furthermore, heatmaps are highly visual by nature, allowing digital analysts to quickly see and comprehend complex data sets before delving deeper.
For marketers
Any digital marketer understands that the competition for customers’ attention is fiercer than ever and that the cost of traffic acquisition is rising. Unsurprisingly, getting the most value out of your website traffic is critical.
Marketers can use heatmaps to figure out which parts of a page or advertisement people pay attention to and which parts they ignore. This knowledge enables you to place the most important element on the most visible part of a page, such as a special offer or a CTA button.
Final thoughts
Any CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategy relies on heatmaps Heatmaps show you exactly what your visitors are doing on your site. You can quickly and easily determine whether or not your copy is being read and whether or not people are clicking on your CTA rather than images and words.
You can also track the origins of your visitors, monitor your pageview-to-click conversion rates, and much more. Instead of trying to figure out what’s going on based on numbers like bounce rate and time spent on the page, or tracking goal conversions in Google Analytics, heat maps allow you to see which elements are being clicked and which are being ignored.