Every website owner wants their site to rank the highest on all search engines and be the most appealing option to millions of consumers. An excellent method for the latter is employing the help of website heatmap tools to optimize a web page and increase conversions. Keep reading to know how to make your website rock and sales boom.?
Website heatmap tools have become a popular mainstay in understanding user behavior and helping owners discover where their site fails regarding usability and functionality.
The best heatmap tool even points to the exact areas of the website where users interact the most. Thus, a heatmap becomes an essential technique in every website admin’s analytics toolkit, in addition to Google Analytics.
This article will delve deeper into the 11 benefits of using heatmap tools and explain why their implementation is increasing. By the end of this post, you will understand why startups and corporate businesses should consider heatmap software an integral piece of kit and the best tool for the job.
What Is a Website Heatmap Tool?
Website heatmap tools are methods or specific software clarifying how to improve customer interaction with each web page of your website. These tools present a color-coded graphical report which signifies your landing pages’ hot and cold spots.
Heatmap apps are great at generating a visual report representing website visitors’ activity. For example, you can see where your visitors click and which pages they visit more frequently than others using heatmap software.
You can also use heatmaps to identify the web pages and the elements on those pages that get no clicks. At present, these are the most efficient tools for deriving this data.
Heatmaps also track mouse movements to showcase where visitors often click or have their cursor placed when browsing your website. Finally, consider heatmaps similar to GPS devices that tag all website visitors and monitor and record their movements.
The colors make the reports very easy to read since they visualize the so-called temperature values of each website page. Red and orange mark the areas users frequently interact with, whereas green and blue highlight areas or elements with the least user interaction potential.
How to Do Website Heatmap Tools Work?
The heatmap software analyzes web pages and divides them into interactive elements. Then these are grouped by their tags and larger elements that contain them. Once the mapping is complete, the website heatmap software tracks and records visitors’ activity.
Heatmapping isn’t a new phenomenon by any means. It has been part of website optimization accreditation, CRO courses, and online marketing certification programs for a long time. Heatmap tools are used in data processing and representation and are great at visualizing complex data because they are easy to read and understand, unlike charts and tables.
Some of the best heatmap tools like Plerdy, Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and Lucky Orange are already being used in all leading eCommerce platforms to increase sales turnovers and bring maximum revenue. Map creation is the primary step in building a visual representation of analytic data.
Every activity gets flagged and stored in the database. The heatmap software tracks the movement of unique visitors only, collecting only the most accurate data presented. It records real-time activities and builds reports likewise.
Every report displays the most recent data, making heatmaps a vital tool for tracking website changes and maintenance effectiveness. It can even spot the elements that put your website on the list of bad designs.
A List of 11 Best Website Heatmap Tools
Many top-notch tools will help you build highly-informative heatmaps to track and analyze user interaction. Here is the best software to use.
Plerdy
Plerdy is a powerful digital marketing tool that offers heatmaps, session recording, SEO, funnel, e-commerce tracking, custom events, and more to analyze user behavior and improve website UI&UX. Plerdy’s heatmaps let you analyze website behavior with several different reports. You can see scroll maps, scroll depth, cursor hover, and click sequences appearing on your live website without creating screenshots. From there, you can analyze user clicks and actions based on dynamic elements and segment data from different traffic sources or devices. That way, you can get valuable insights on what is and isn’t working to make effective changes.
Smartlook
Smartlook software combines three tools – click, movement and scroll heatmaps – to record user sessions by default. All data is aggregated in one image, making it convenient to identify weak site areas and eliminate issues. Smartlook customers are Sewio, AstroPay, Vertigo Games and Hookle.
Mouseflow
Mouseflow offers 6 types of heatmaps that record 100% of user traffic by default. A funnel report helps understand the visitors’ drops and improves lead generation. Vodafone, Continent, New Balance, and Philips are the main customers.
Glassbox
The Glassbox AI-driven analytical platform helps get a complete picture of customer engagement. Interactive heatmaps provide all vital metrics in a single image, visualizing the customer journey and explaining how it affects the company’s revenue. Glassbox customers are Purina, Air Canada, Bank Leumi, SoFi, and Marriott.
Hotjar
The Hotjar heatmaps efficiently visualize user behavior, informing you what on your site attracts users and what makes them leave. These tools will easily highlight the issues you need to improve. The world’s largest companies use Hotjar heatmaps – Adobe, Columbia, Microsoft, HubSpot and Panasonic.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg represents heatmaps in the form of snapshots. Customer interaction with your pages is showcased via five types of reports – heatmap, scrollmap, confetti, overlay and list reports. The software immediately spots areas where your visitors drop off the site. Intuit, Wall Monkeys, Sendible, RadioFreeEurope, and Miller&Smith use it.
UXcam
UXcam heatmap analytics provides comprehensive UX insights for each page of your website. A 360-degree view of the customer journey will allow you to fix all issues and optimize your resource.
The customer list includes Housing.com, Inspire, Costa Coffee, PlaceMakers and Rappi.
VWO
VWO heatmaps will record all visitors’ moves on your website, allowing brands to spot the most critical website areas based on real-time behavioral analysis. All heatmap reports can be downloaded and shared. Amway, Timberland, Mindshare, Sophos, and Carrier are the main customers.
Attention Insight
Attention maps are powerful tools to help brands justify site optimization solutions. Built-in AI algorithms will scan all pages and define the areas of interest, calculating attention percentage and clarity score. Focus map and design comparison will simplify optimization decisions. The main customers are Ryanair, Omnisend, NOZ Digital, and others.
Fullstory
Fullstory intelligence platform uses heatmap tools to convey customer interaction visually. Deep insight into user behavioral patterns allows brands to find and improve UX bottlenecks. The main customers are HBC, Lowe’s, Wistia, KeyBank and Salesforce.
LogRocket
LogRocket offers Conversion Rate Heatmaps to estimate the efficiency of customer interaction with your website. These tools build live-time metrics that rely on session replays, product analytics and error tracking to identify the most critical page areas. The main customers are Rippling, Pinterest, Brex, SwissLife and WholeFoods.
The Different Types of Heatmaps
There are many types of heatmaps available online. Let’s look at the most popular ones in use today.
1. Scroll Depth Analysis
Most websites struggle with UI fundamentals and ignore this critical element during the website design and development phase. They have pageviews, but the conversions are very few. Some eCommerce websites have misplaced hero images, while others can’t decide whether to go with shorter or longer content.
A scroll heatmap, which works on desktop and mobile devices, is the best utility tool to determine the proportion of scrolls visitors perform before they leave the webpage or website. They can help you select the best hero images, optimum content length, and ideal placeholder for your CTA on the website.
Unscramblex has made the best use of scroll maps. When a site visitor enters the unscrambled letters into their search bar, Unscramblex displays a list of the highest-scoring words. These words have been identified and ranked using the scroll maps. And how does it work? Let’s take a look at it.
Scroll maps are color-coded, and when a customer stops scrolling, a sudden change of coloring indicates that the visitor has come to a logical end. This logical end is a section of the website where the software no longer sees a logical reason to continue scrolling.
After identifying the words where the scrolling stopped, they are labeled as the most sought-after words and displayed at the top.
Use scroll maps to:
- Highlight false floor or false bottoms
- Identify whether or not visitors reach the content below the fold
- Identify where visitors are spending the most time and where they are losing interest
- Calculate the scroll depth and ideal length of a webpage after which visitors don’t scroll down
- Spot the most suitable area for pricing and other key information or elements, like CTAs.
Plerdy heatmap tools also allow you to measure scroll depth parameters. With their help, you can get a detailed report on the scrolling zones. The software collects data and forms a report based on several aspects:
- Scroll depth per device. It will inform how users reach your resource – desktop, smartphone or tablet.
- Scroll depth per page. Heatmaps track and display visitors’ activity on landing pages, long pages and across product categories.
You can make appropriate optimization solutions based on the received data and boost retention.
2. Heatmap Analysis Based on Segmentations
The confetti map report is an advanced version of the common heatmap, generated in high resolution. In addition, this map contains individual clicks of website visitors, shown as colored dots. Plerdy, click maps function in live mode, streaming every single click and providing you with the most up-to-date picture on the hottest page areas, thus, allowing you to make appropriate decisions on the redesign.
You can easily identify non-clickable elements that users still click on. Visitors find these page elements commonly annoying and can leave your website.
Let’s model such a situation. A visitor to your website for mobile brake repair services is looking for this service in his area for a specific car make. While browsing, he finds the CTA box with his city on your homepage and clicks on it, expecting to be redirected to a page with contact information and pricing, but no link is available.
Using the confetti heatmap report, you can highlight unclickable elements users still click on and add relevant links in the right places. It helps improve your website’s navigation and give the users what they want, reducing bounce rates and boosting conversions.
You can use heatmaps to track clicks on:
How the user interacts with the images
Images can have their clicks tracked, and you can identify which ones visitors are clicking on the most, add relevant links to them, and place them according to your visitors’ expectations.
This simple issue can cause users to feel frustrated, but with the help of click maps, such patterns can be identified, and you can make data-backed changes.
Which links are clicked and which are not clicked by users
You can use click maps to identify where visitors expect certain links and add them in the appropriate areas. Combining this data with link-building tools can help create an effective website link strategy.
For instance, your website has a click map running on it, and you see that visitors mostly click on a section or element which does not have any links to the homepage.
It shows that your page’s structure does not match your visitors’ expectations, and it may be time for an overhaul.
When to change the call to action (CTA)
Click maps can be used to discover whether visitors are clicking on the main CTA or are CTA on the most popular parts of the webpage. For this, our favorite example, Medical Alerts Buyers Guide. But, again, usability is a top priority because most users will be seniors who might not be tech-savvy and have compromised motor skills.
With the help of the heatmap tool, they have placed CTAs in all the right places, removed all gestures requiring more than one finger, and made visual cues easy on the aging eyes. This allows them to compare medical alert systems and equipment easily and purchase the one best matching their needs.
Which menu items are more clickable
You can check website navigability using click maps and improve user experience (UX). For instance, if a visitor clicks on the ‘Continue’ button on the cart page, they may expect to go back to the product listing page they were at before adding a product to the cart, mistaking the ‘Continue’ button for the ‘Continue Shopping’ button.
Usually, the ‘Continue’ buttons take visitors to the next step in the checkout process. This issue is common for Shopify and WooCommerce websites. As a result, the site’s navigation does not match your visitors’ expectations and needs to be modified to match them.
3. Mouse Tracking
A mouse tracking heatmap shows where visitors keep their cursor the most. These mobile apps are Hover Maps, Attention Heatmaps, and Move Maps. Mouse tracking is also a part of the Plerdy heatmap toolkit.
You can use mouse tracking heatmaps to:
- Highlight the sections where visitors hang around the most and place content appropriately. For example, these sections can include primary CTA, necessary advertisements, etc.
- Collect insights on where a visitor is looking when visiting a web page by analyzing where their mouse pauses and where they hover.
But one thing to note is that the rule mentioned above may not apply to technical blogs on WordPress, for instance. It is because of something called ‘parkers,’ which are visitors who place their cursor in one spot regardless of what they are reading or when entering a field on the site.
4. Eye-Tracking
Most people often confuse mouse-tracking heatmaps with eye-tracking heatmaps. This software does not rely on mouse cursors to highlight the website’s usability but on where the eyeballs are looking at any given moment.
This data allows you to identify the most attractive page elements for visitors: “hot” and “cold” spots.
Humans are inherently biased regarding their sight and tend to use it more than any other sense. The same pattern works when browsing through a website.
The eye-tracking heatmaps are particularly handy if you run a website that offers updates on the stock market. For example, using a heatmap tool, you can discover that the users look mainly at the top left corner of the screen to find information about a particular stock and rarely at the bottom right corner.
This fact is something you can capitalize on. A great example is when you showcase high-yield dividend stocks, you can add details investors care about, such as market cap, dividend yield, and annual payouts, to the top left corner.
Utilizing the appropriate platform will improve the user experience and enable them to make more informed investments.
You can use eye-tracking heatmap tools to:
- Highlight where visitors are looking at most on your website pages for information.
- Understand if a visitors’ gaze is being distracted by any element (visual or textual) on the page.
- Figure out the most attention-grabbing sections of the page by tracking visitors’ gaze patterns to place all essential content and images.
Top 11 Benefits of Using Website Heatmap Tools
Now that you know the different website heatmap tools, it is vital to know why they are such a critical t web analytics feature today. This software has many benefits, including the following ones:
1. Detecting and Highlighting Issues in Your Website
Perhaps the most significant advantage of using heatmap tools is highlighting any issues in your website since its construction.
Depending on the specific heatmap tools you have at your disposal, you can detect weak areas directly or through derivation. Data segmentation can help analyze repetitive clicks or similar irregularities to find problems.
2. Instant Actionable Reports
Not only do heatmaps provide accurate results, but they also give them in real time. The user activity is recorded instantly and given to the reviewer without delay.
With instant heatmap reports, website owners can highlight necessary data immediately and conduct A/B testing to help select the best versions of their website.
3. Pinpoint Results
Heatmaps break down every aspect of the user’s activity into categories. It can help check the number of clicks, the visibility of the website, and the overall time the users spend on each part of the website.
A website heatmap tool, similar to how a good team chat software can help simplify a company’s communication process, can help streamline the online resources available on the website.
4. Clear Visual Representation
Heatmaps tools are incredibly convenient for most people as they do not show data in a complex and confusing numerical manner. Instead, they offer you the analysis in color-coded visual representation. As a result, data visualization becomes very easy to understand for everyone involved.
5. User Activity Is Easy to Understand
Heatmaps simplify the otherwise complicated dynamics of your site, using simple visual representations and instant updates. You can learn how users navigate your site and make changes accordingly.
6. Integration with Add-Ons and Tools
Online tools usually have the same issue facing them. These tools are intrusive or exclusive to particular operating systems or browsers and cannot be used in other mediums. It is not the case for website heatmap tools, which are compatible with any browser or operating system.
Website owners can then focus on improving their website rather than tinker with the exact specifications of the software to get it to work.
7. Heatmaps Guide to Improve Your Site
Heatmap data is the most user-friendly tool a website owner can use for funnel analysis and improving their website. The software functions as an intelligent pattern, and instead of outsourcing assistance, you can learn from heatmaps and make immediate changes.
After analyzing the information a heatmap tool provides, you can use it as input data and add it to image recognition software, which can then identify areas of your website requiring maintenance or overhaul.
8. Categorization for Better Understanding
Website heatmaps are categorized based on their actions to assess user activity. These tools include click heatmaps, scroll heatmaps, and many others. Each can specifically help with conversion rate optimization and present session recordings and replays to form better conversion funnels.
These specific heatmaps collect data on different aspects of a website. Click heatmaps and scroll heatmaps, in particular, have vastly different data sets, but both benefit a better understanding of a website’s analytics.
9. Heatmaps Highlight the Appealing Parts of Your Site
You may think some part of your site is appealing, but users don’t specifically like it. But, on the other hand, they may appreciate something you haven’t even given attention to. Heatmaps can point out those potential areas via form analytics and enable you to improve them…
The less appealing parts of a website are typically the ones visitors interact with the least. These can be images, texts, or entire pages of a website that visitors do not engage with, which can increase website turnover and bounce rates. Heatmap tools are essential to keep these numbers minimum and promote better website marketability.
10. Heatmaps Make the Visitor’s Experience Better
The crux of this whole matter of using heatmaps is to improve the user’s experience. Heatmaps guide you to enhance specific areas and tone down others so visitors can have a comfortable navigation experience.
Heatmaps can help redirect the focus of a website owner to the visitors and ensure the best optimization strategies to promote an optimistic outlook for the website. By creating more engaging content and placing elements that visitors appreciate, the overall visitor experience improves.
11. Heatmaps Help Increase the Value of Your Business
In a world where business exits have become a norm, heatmap software is one of the essential tools that can help increase the value of an online business. These tools let you improve the website’s overall user experience and provide recommendations on key aspects of the website.
With easy navigation, better CTA, and reduced friction at the checkout process, heatmap tools skyrocket the conversion rate, resulting in increased profits and, thus, improved business valuation.
Conclusion
So there you have it.
The utility of website heatmap tools is undeniable, and they form significant parts of most website optimization strategies. If you’ve never used software of this sort, it is the right time to give it a test run. And with continued use, website heatmap tools will become a major asset to your business.
We hope you learned a lot about the best heatmap software today. Using appropriate website heatmap tools like Plerdy is the key to alleviating your business and minimizing website UI/UX errors.
Plerdy provides a heatmap tool and many other CRO tools that help you change your website for a higher conversion rate by gathering data about the website and its users.
Visit our website to learn how we can help you convert your visitors into loyal customers.
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