Heat-Mapping: What It Is and How to Do It to Enhance Your Business Website
Specificity is essential in marketing. You must know exactly what your customers and leads want so you can capitalize on their interests for impactful content and campaign creation. While common strategies to identify what makes your website visitors curious involve feedback and surveying, it’s even more effective to track their engagement without asking directly or waiting for answers.
This doesn’t only make your analysis accurate, but it also helps you make adjustments and improvements to your website whenever it’s necessary. To track your customers’ and leads’ engagement on your website without asking questions, do heat mapping. Read on to find out more about what it is and how you can utilize this marketing strategy.
What is Heat-Mapping?
Heat-mapping is a data visualization technique that uses software tools to present the engagement metrics of your website’s visitors. Most of the time, a heat map is presented in colors similar to the output of a thermal imaging camera.
How to do Heat-Mapping to Boost Your Website’s Performance
1. Use heat-mapping software tools or create your own
There are plenty of heat-mapping providers out there you can choose from depending on your needs. Yet, each one of them has a significant advantage over the others. Some have simple configurations that can easily be integrated into your website. Others can analyze more metrics. If you have vast technical knowledge, you can program your own using this guide.
2. Track the engagements you want
There are 5 main types of website heatmaps. You have:
- Standard heat map - This tells you which pages on your site perform well.
- Click maps - This shows which parts of your pages receive more clicks.
- Scroll maps - This shows you which sections of your pages visitors spend the most time in and how far they scroll.
- Mouse tracking heat maps -This shows which points visitors find interesting and engaging.
- Eye-tracking heatmaps - This shows the visitor’s gaze patterns, where they often get distracted, and page sections where they look at to get more information.
3. Analyze hotspots
After you’ve taken the engagement data, analyze the content your visitors find interesting, engaging, boring, distracting, annoying, in disagreement with.
4. Do a case study
Identify the reasons for your website visitors’ behaviors. What caused the hotspots? Is there a specific time, event, or content presentation pattern that influenced hot and cold zones in the heatmap? Which demographics take interest in what topics? These are the questions you need to ask before moving on.
5. Improve your website upon what you’ve learned
After you have done a case study, identify which changes you need to make to boost your website’s attractiveness and engagement. Change the template of your content or use more specific words for your blog titles. Reduce or increase the use of visuals.
Before anything else, make sure to set up your site’s tracking cookies and explain to your visitors that you’d appreciate it if they accept so you can improve their future browsing experience. This will also help you gather engagement data because heatmaps still need to comply with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
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