How to Use Website Heatmaps: The Complete Guide

According to one study, you only have 50 milliseconds to make a good impression on people who visit your website for the first time.

So how do you know if your site is making a good impression? How do you know if people are engaging with it?

That’s where website heatmaps can help you out! But what are they, and how do you use them? Keep reading to find out everything you need to know!

What Are Website Heatmaps?

Heatmaps for a website are a tool that you can use to visualize all the data. It’s similar to a graph or chart, but it’s more interactive. It makes it easier to understand the data you get from how people interact with and view your website. 

A heatmap will record actions that people do while they’re on their site. For example, if you have a list of pages, they’ll tell you which ones people tend to click on. They can also tell you where people’s mouse hovers, how long they scroll for, and what their eyes look at.

A system will put all this data together into an image of your website lit up with rainbow colors. If the color is red, that means it’s a highly trafficked area. Whereas blue or purple are “colder” which means that people rarely use those areas of your website. 

However, there are a few different types of heatmaps that will give you different types of data. 

Different Types of Heatmaps

While you might want to use only one heatmap, there are benefits to all of them.

For the best results for your website, you should consider using all of them together. 

Click Maps

A click map tells you what people are clicking on the most. You should look for them to engage with your website, like going to your contact or products page. 

This will let you know which call-to-actions are more effective and draw more people in. 

They can also tell you if some clicks are giving users an error or a bug so that you can go in and fix it to improve the user’s experience. 

Scroll Maps

A scroll map will tell you how far people decided to scroll down on your page. This is especially useful if you’re generating content for a blog. 

If people stop scrolling halfway through your blog post, they may not find it very entertaining or interesting to read. They may have also had trouble reading it. 

Regardless of what the issue is, if people aren’t scrolling to the bottom of your content to find the call-to-action, you’ll have to change something up. 

Eye-Tracking Heat Maps

This map isn’t as common and will take some more advanced technology and knowledge to use. People will have to come into a lab or wear glasses while looking at your site, and then the data will have to be analyzed from there. 

But this heatmap will track what people’s eyes go to and what they look at on your page. For example, they may look at your catchy logo. Or if something is glaringly wrong on your page, that might be the first thing that grabs their attention. 

You don’t have a lot of time to get their attention, so you can use this data to think about how you might want to redesign your website or redo your content to make it more appealing and catching. 

Using Website Heatmaps

So now that you know about the different types of heatmaps out there, there are a few ways to use them. 

One of the strengths of using heatmaps is that you can improve your traffic and sales if you know how to read these maps correctly. 

Go to Google Analytics

Before you even set up your heatmap, go to Google Analytics. This will give you enough data to figure out how to set up a heatmap that will fit in with the research you’re doing for your customers.

You should find points that you have problems with. You should also identify pages that need some rework.

Ask Questions

Next, you should start asking different questions. Pretend you’re the customer and ask yourself if there is a clear call-to-action button.

Is it easy to see? Are people seeing all the information that they need to? You might want to make a list of questions that will make the heatmap useful to you.

Get Your Heatmap Up

There are a few ways that you can set up a heatmap, but you can easily integrate it into your website. You should focus them on the problem pages that you identified earlier. 

Once you’ve had the heatmap installed for a little while, you can look at the data and analyze it to see what some of the issues are.

Do Outside Research

If you still aren’t getting the answers you need, you may need to do some extra research. Compare the results you got with other statistics that are out there. 

See if it correlates to other bigger issues. You should always look at the data as part of a bigger picture, not just on its own.

Learn More About How to Use Website Heatmaps

These are only a few things to know about how to use website heatmaps, but there are many more tips that you should know.

We know that running a business and generating content for your website can be difficult but we’re here to help you out.

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