But sometimes, we may get involved with metrics that are theoretically valuable, but may not provide us with very good insights, such as click-through rates and site views. For example, if the amount of incoming traffic is very high, it may indicate the quality of your blog headlines, but it cannot necessarily show the overall journey of visitors on your blog or the exact way they interact with your website.
Fortunately, there are data visualization tools that can show you which parts of your content get the most user engagement and which parts don’t. These tools are known as heat maps and they can provide you with data and views that you can use to optimize the user experience on your website versions and the conditions of the conversion rate. Optimize your site.
In the following section, we’re going to review the different types of heatmaps you can use to check the performance of your site’s content and evaluate the insights and information you can get from them.
What is a heat map?
Hitmap is an image of the participation of visitors on a page on your website. These maps use different color spectrums that show which parts of your page performed better in terms of attracting users’ attention. The hot parts attract the most attention to themselves and the cold parts are the parts that attract the least attention to themselves.
Types of heat maps
There are three main types of heat maps: scroll maps, click maps, and hover maps. What information does each of these heat maps provide?
Heat map scroll
This type of heat map shows you what percentage of visitors have scrolled through each part of your website page. The hotter an episode is, the more visitors have checked that episode. This data can help you determine where to place CTAs or important information on your website page. Sudden changes in your scroll map can help you determine which part of your website page is losing the visitor’s attention.
Click heat map
It shows the parts of your page that visitors have clicked on the most. The hotter a part is, the more visitors clicked on it. This data will show you whether it is important for visitors to click on your CTAs or other buttons on the site. Also, these maps can show you if the elements that are not clickable are in such a way as to mislead the visitors.
Floating heatmap
They show you where visitors place their mouse cursor while reading a further page. The hotter a part is, it means that they have looked at that part of your website page. This data can help you determine how visitors actually navigate your site, so you can place important elements where they get the most attention. You can also specify whether the unnecessary elements are in such a way as to mislead the visitors or not.
Which types of content are suitable for heat map analysis?
Analyzing heat maps of every type of page on your website is very useful, but unfortunately, it is not enough. The most effective way to use heatmaps is to analyze the pages that have the most impact on your site’s conversion rate: the homepage, landing pages, and blog posts that have high conversion rates.
Home page heat map
Your home page is actually an introduction to your brand. If you constantly check which parts of the page the visitors are scrolling the most and find out whether they spend more time on keywords and click on CTAs or not. , then you will find out which part of your home page to place the main information and elements of the site so that, in this way, the bounce rate of visitors will decrease and your conversion rate will improve.
Heatmap of landing pages
Your landing pages are the last step in converting visitors into customers. If you can analyze the behavior of your visitors on these pages, you can design optimal landing pages to generate the most amount of converting customers.
Heatmap of high-converting blog posts
The placement of your CTAs in blog posts can greatly affect their conversion rate. For example, at HubSpot, even though the CTAs in our footer banners are engaging, we’ve found that they only generate a small percentage of leads on our blog.
After analyzing our own heatmaps, we found that the CTAs in our anchor texts, which are hyperlinked after the post introduction, actually generate the most leads for our website because most visitors, CTAs are seen at the beginning of the post and not at the end of the post.
Prioritizing the participation of visitors
Whether running A/B tests on website design or looking for the best place to use call-to-action buttons in blog posts, site heatmaps are the best tool to measure. The amount of attention and content design can communicate with your audience and turn them into leads and final customers.
