It's Getting Hot In Here: Three Ways a Heatmap Can Improve Your Site

When reviewing the success of a site, we can get a lot of information from Google Analytics, but that data can only get us so far. For instance, if you see a page on your site has a high bounce rate you know for sure visitors are leaving that page, but you may not really know the reason why. They probably couldn’t find what they were looking for but what prevented them from finding it? Was it an issue with the navigation, a poorly designed element, or maybe the call-to-action was too far down on the page? Here’s where a heatmap can help you discover and solve user issues.

Find the Page Elements Users Really Want and Make Them More Prominent

Heatmaps can help you discover which elements users are interacting with on your site the most. You can then use this information to redesign your page, making the popular items more prominent and easier to find. 
This is an example of a heatmap Ascedia recently ran for The Osthoff Resort listing page on the Travel Wisconsin website. You can see from the heatmap there are three very distinct hot spots. The majority of visitors coming to the page are clicking on the Osthoff website link, clicking through the images and/or clicking on the Deals link.

Ascedia used these details, pulled from the heatmap, to inform a recent redesign of the listing landing pages on the Travel Wisconsin site. The final redesigned listing page featured a larger, highlighted website link, improvements to the scrolling functionality for images on a mobile device, and the Deals link was moved right above the images to make sure it was easily seen. 

Uncover a Misplaced Call to Action

Scrollmaps can show how deep visitors to your site are scrolling down the page. This can help you decide how and where to place important elements on your web pages. 

Let’s say you have a call to action that’s closer to the bottom of your page. Through Google Tag Manager event tracking, you’re noticing that the CTA button gets very few clicks. Running a scrollmap can show you if people are scrolling deep enough on the page to even see the CTA, using a percentage scale. If you discover that only 20% of people scroll down to the area where your CTA is located on the page, you will want to move it up. A scrollmap also lets you separate the types of visits viewed on the scrollmap by device: how deep a visitor scrolls on a phone might be different than how they use the site on a desktop.

Determine the Best Day of the Week for Interactions

Are you setting up a social media content calendar? You can use the Confetti day of the week tool to visually learn which days of the week people interact with parts of your page the most and use that intel to plan your posts. For the Ascedia site, we see that Tuesday brings the most clicks to our site, with a lot of people clicking on the About Us link in the top nav. We could use this info to do a ‘Meet the Ascedian’ Facebook post on Tuesday, driving traffic to the corresponding article on the site. If you run giveaways or events on your site, this could be great info to use to strategically stop and start pushing event details or giveaways.

Stop making assumptions about how visitors are using your site and use heatmaps to see where people are really looking.