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Focusing on a heatmap for UX designs is an excellent way to enhance conversion rate. It helps analyse the interaction between a webpage and prospective customers. As a marketer or designer, you need to take the guesswork out and use data to make improvements.
In this blog, I will discuss various heatmaps for better UX, tools, and resources that you can try out to improve websites and landing pages. Heatmaps are a great way to increase conversions from your existing traffic and utilise the data to form a better online presence.
What are Heatmaps?
The general definition of heatmaps is:
“A heatmap is a data visualization technique that shows the magnitude of a phenomenon as colour in two dimensions.”
In marketing terms, it is somewhat the same.
“Heatmaps are a visual representation of data that showcases how a visitor interacts with a web page.”
Be it clicks, scroll depth, mouse movements, etc., heatmaps capture everything to analyse the performance of a page.
It uses various colours, such as red, green, blue, etc., to differentiate popular page sections from the least attractive ones. In landing pages, the significance of heatmaps increases as it helps identify elements that look great from a design point of view but might be misleading for the visitors.
For example, sometimes, an unclickable element might be getting unwanted clicks. It might mean that it is positioned incorrectly. By doing A/B testing for landing page elements, it becomes simpler to optimise clicks.
Information on which element got the highest clicks, how many clicks resulted in positive action on the page vs how many got wasted, etc., are answered in detail by heatmaps.
To enhance landing page UX, it is crucial to utilise heatmaps. Marketers are always looking for various tips and frameworks to better their landing pages. But at the end of the day, the best page critiques can only come from the users.
With the help of heatmaps, a brand can easily analyse visitor interactions with a landing page and identify the weak and strong points of the page.
Who Should Use Heatmaps?
In marketing, heatmaps are a useful tool to analyse copy and design of any web page. With a heatmap expert in a marketing team, it becomes easier to reduce the conversion friction of any web page.
Let’s see how heatmaps are utilised by various marketing roles.
- PPC Managers
A click on the PPC ad showcases user interest. For interest to become a conversion, the connected landing page should hold all the right elements at the right places. For a PPC manager, the landing page is a crucial stage. It helps the visitors decide the final decision about the targeted leads. Regular heatmap analysis of a PPC ad landing page helps make it conversion-ready.
- Marketing Professionals
Marketers handle the website, social media, and every platform where their brand is present. Coupling Google Analytics with Heatmaps assists marketing professionals and reduces their guesswork. A heatmap can easily answer such questions by how smoothly the site is working, what is hindering visitors’ experience, and the visibility of the CTAs on every page.
For example, by using Google Analytics, marketers can determine which of their blog posts is performing the best. With the help of heatmaps, marketers can identify the scroll depth of the page and place a CTA where the users usually stop scrolling.
It helps reach out to visitors who scroll to the bottom of a blog post, where a CTA is present. Instead of placing the CTA randomly anywhere in a blog post, it is better to put it where visitors might end their reading session.
- Product Managers
The quality of digital products, especially SaaS, is determined by how well they perform. Many product businesses create big digital libraries with everything the product can be used for. But still, managers can receive queries they might have never thought about.
Through heatmaps, product managers can easily observe prospects’ interactions with the product’s interface and determine common user issues and patterns. By determining such problems, product managers can optimise the product for a better user experience.
- UX/UI Designers
Reading and analysing heatmaps is an active part of a UI/UX designer’s job. The usual metrics, like conversion rate, bounce rate, etc., only signify the page’s performance but do not point out exactly which element is negatively affecting a page. So, a designer must figure out which elements must be optimised.
In this quest, heatmaps are the most powerful tool that UI/UX designers use to enhance the designs according to the users.
Why Use Heatmap For UX
Let me holistically explain how heatmaps help in augmenting better user experience to the web pages.
As a designer or a marketer, you want to identify areas on your website or landing page which are not performing. We need to consider lots of variables, but one of them is user experience.
Bu using a heatmap for UX & analytics tools to track prospect behaviour, you can identify problems stopping your visitors from taking the next step.
Later once we identify problems, we can come up with hypotheses and test them. We will talk more about that in the future in our AB testing for heatmaps. Till then, you can learn about the basics of A/B testing through this blog: Landing Page A/B Testing Framework Beginner’s Guide.
Let’s understand how users behave on your site.
How Heatmap For UX Work
Heatmap designs allow us to identify areas on our site where users spend the most time. You can use tools like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Microsoft clarity and capture heatmaps.
Google Analytics can tell you what’s happening; heatmap designs can show you WHY.
In our agency, we use both HotJar and Crazy Egg.
Let’s take this example from a test that we recently ran for a client.
When looking at both the scroll map and heatmap design, we noticed the CTA button appeared below the fold. The average fold on mobile was about 658px.
A side note on the average fold. The average fold is the average location visible when a user opens the page before they’ve done any scrolling. It is presented as a white line with the label AVERAGE FOLD.
So to make the form visible, we moved the CTA above the fold and pushed the benefits below the form section.
Voila, we measured a huge spike. The result was a 20% increase in conversions.
Depending on your findings from a heatmap design, I recommend documenting them in a Google sheet. It will help you pick one item at a time as an A/B test candidate.
Types of Heatmaps
A heatmap for UX design can be of many types. Let’s discuss the prominent ones.
1. Movement Maps
The first one is the movement map. Using a ‘move map’ in Hotjar, you can identify hotspots that draw user attention. By employing this knowledge, you can understand which areas get looked at the most and some blind spots which are going unnoticeable.
2. Click Maps
A click map is a heatmap design that will show you which areas on your page are being clicked and how many times they get clicked. It could indicate an issue with your CTA or any other link, but it also shows places where people might be interested in more information, such as FAQs.
Crazy Egg has robust click map data that you can filter by many options. However, annoyingly you can select one filter at a time. Why not allow multiple filters if the data is already there? Hotjar, are you listening?
3. Scroll Maps
Scroll Maps are similar to heatmaps, but instead of showing us where users spend the most time, scroll maps show us where users move around within a web page.
So if you have essential information on your page and visitors are dropping off before they scroll to check it out, a good idea would be to push the information up, so it’s easily visible. Scroll maps will help you position various sections depending on visitors interact with the page.
Here is a pro tip! If you notice not many people are scrolling past 25% page of your page, consider a split test where you test out a shorter version of your page.
4. User Recordings
You can watch entries sessions of users interacting with your website or landing page. Most heatmaps for UX designs offer this feature. Such methods might be time-consuming but are great for finding some hidden UX gems.
Hence my recommendation would be
- Watching people convert: Includes both main goals, such as filling out a form and micro-conversions, such as playing a video.
- For further investigation, put together a list of issues you want to investigate, and then watch recordings of those and gain more insights.
- Correlate recordings to other data points such as rage clicks. This way, you will get more insights into what led to the pain that made users click maniacally.
5. Surveys
Although analysing a heatmap for UX with tools like Hotjar or CrazEgg, or MS Clarity offer data points, they are still based on inferences you derive from them. It is where Hotjar shines out.
Hotjar has a compelling feature: on-page surveys.
On-Page Surveys help in AB Testing because they give us insight into what visitors think about our content.
You can set up surveys and ask questions like “Did you find what you were looking for?”, “Are you satisfied with the experience?”, ”Would you recommend us to a friend?”, “How would you describe us to a friend?”.
On-Page Surveys are great tools to gather customer feedback and ask them what kind of content they liked and didn’t like.
This feature is only available in Hotjar and has become very powerful over the years. You can also get notified via email or slack every time a visitor fills out your survey. Pretty amazing.
We in fact, used the survey as a lead generation tool for one of our clients and have collected over 354 leads.
6. Rage Clicks
Crazy Egg has a handy feature where you can check out ‘rage clicks’. These are areas in which visitors are clicking expecting to do something.
For example, instead of clicking the button on Bequest, we noticed that visitors were clicking a graphic that had no action.
Installing Heatmap Tools: Hotjar or Crazegg, or MS Clarity
Most heatmap tools have a script block that you can easily install on your website or landing page.
If you are running a WordPress website, I would recommend setting up google tag manager first.
If you don’t know what google tag manager is. I would recommend watching a few videos.
Using GTM set up a new tag, choose the trigger to run on all pages, and publish it.
If you are using a landing page builder tool, you can easily add the script via the scripts section. In Unbounce, you can find it under the scripts tab. In swipe pages, you can add the scripts via the dashboard. Make sure to save and publish your page to activate the script on your page.
Please leave a comment and tell me which of these tools you want to try or have already checked out.
Start Capturing Heatmap Data For Improving UX
Once you have installed your script, head over to Hotjar.
You can follow the same steps for Crazy Egg or MS Clarity.
Find your account and click the new heatmap.
Make sure you enter the correct domain URL, including wildcards. In our case, we want to track a landing page for a Google PPC campaign. Since the final URL might include UTM parameters and GCLID, the URL could be different every time; hence we want to capture the URL including any URL parameters.
Conclusion
A heatmap for UX clarifies what your visitors want and point out the specific areas where a webpage is lagging behind. By analysing the conversion behaviour of prospects, you can create websites and landing pages with better designs and copies.
As marketers, we primarily depend on page views, CTR, and other metrics to determine what the leads want. By examining a heatmap for UX, it becomes easier to understand the shortcomings of a webpage as you get to follow the prospect’s conversion journey in real-time. It gives a lot of insights about consumer mindset and how you can leverage it to increase your sales.
I hope this blog was helpful.
Also Check:
B2B Website Metrics to Track for Higher Conversions
B2B Conversion Rate Optimization: Strategic Success Tactics
