What Exactly Is Website Heatmap?

Do you have a website for your business or a personal blog that’s monetized? Do you know exactly how your customers or potential leads interact with your website? Do you know which links they click on the most and where they stop scrolling?

Most business owners don’t know the answers to the questions above, which is where a website heatmap comes in handy. 

Everyone knows the importance of good content or an attractive layout. In fact, 38% of people will stop engaging with your website if they find either of the above lacking in any respect. 

It isn’t helpful if you know that people don’t stay on your website unless you know why they don’t stay for long, or what caused them to stop engaging with your website. The details matter and that’s why a website heatmap is necessary.

What if you knew exactly where your customers stopped interacting with your website, so you knew exactly which aspects to change, rather than overhauling the whole thing for a huge avoidable price tag?

Let’s read on to see how website heatmapping can transform your relationship with your website visitors in a big way. 

What Is a Website Heatmap and How Can It Help You

At its core, a website heatmap gathers information about how your website visitors interact with your website, how they behave on your website, and thus, helps you make informed optimization decisions for your website. 

A website heatmap is a graphical representation or a diagram that shows you easily and at a glance how your website visitors behave on your website. 

It’s called a website ‘heatmap’ because it uses colors, warm to cold, to state the level of engagement of the website visitors with each aspect and page of your website. 

You can gauge many different things from a website heatmap. Some of which are: 

• If your visitors are clicking on the call-to-action (CTA) or not
• If they are scrolling below the fold or stopping at a certain section
• Which page of your website and which section of each webpage has the highest visitor engagement

These are beneficial parameters to have in your back pocket as a business owner, so you can precisely improve your website based on your website visitor’s unintentional feedback.

No more fiddling around with guesstimates, and bungling about with shoddy theories. 

Five Different Types of Website Heatmap Tools

There are many different aspects to your website, which need to be assessed to see exactly how your visitors like to engage with, or not, with your website. A website heatmap is only one of the tools you can use.

Let’s look at all five of them in detail.

Heatmap

As iterated earlier, a heatmap will give you a graphic or visual representation in the form of a color scheme of warm-to-cold to see how your website visitors are engaging with the various aspects of your website. 

Clickmap

This is where things get juicy. A clickmap will tell you which parts of your websites are being clicked on and which aren’t. This is about visitor engagement. 

A clickmap will look at four different clickable aspects of your website – the images, the links, the CTA, and the navigation. 

Scrollmap

Nowadays, with infinitely scrolling websites, a website owner would definitely like to know if a visitor on their website scrolls down past the fold, or even further.

Are your website visitors scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the page or do they drop off somewhere midway? Or worse do they not go past the fold at all? This will give you an idea of where your website visitors lose interest and bounce off. 

Mouse Tracking Heatmap

This will show you where your visitors hover their cursor the most. Most people will tend to hover over content that either they find engaging or that they find confusing. 

A caveat to this would be the ‘Parkers’. These are people who park their cursor in a spot for a while, without moving it about.

This would skew your stat as you might believe that a particular section of your website is engaging when it’s actually a parker messing with your data. 

Eye Tracking Heatmap

These heatmaps actually track the eyeballs of the visitors, which requires more sophisticated equipment. But this will tell you where your visitors are looking at most for information, or whether their gaze is being distracted by something on the page.

If you know that there is a section that your website visitors’ eyes focus on, you can try to place more important information in that section, or ramp it up somehow.

Why You Should Use Website Heatmapping

It’s impossible to read your website visitors’ minds in most cases. You have no idea what they are thinking about your website content or the layout.

But with this option of website heatmapping, you will definitely have a better grasp on what your website visitors think about your website’s layout, structure, and content.

You can also optimize your website’s conversation rate, and measure your website’s performance using website heatmaps. 

With website heatmap tools, you can quickly and easily highlight all the problem areas on your website, so you can fix them, and improve the UI (user experience) with your website. 

Due to the color schemed map, it’s easy to tell, at a glance, which parts of your website are doing well, and which aren’t. 

Website Heatmaps Are the Tool for the 21st Century Website Owner

With website heatmaps, you can move into the 21st century with your website optimization. No need to guess at what visitors are doing on your website anymore.

You will know exactly what they are up to and how long they are on each section of your webpage. 

If you are confused about how to optimize your website, then website heatmap tools are for you. 

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