What is Heat Mapping – How Heat Mapping Improves User Experience

When running a physical store, you put your best foot forward at every stage. You ensure that the store is clean and colorful, the receptionist is warm to potential customers, the products have been placed strategically, someone can guide potential customers, the checkout process is easy, and the packaging is delightful. It’s easy to tell what works as you can see how everything flows. But can you do this with a website? Why, yes!

Heat mapping is a visual tool that shows you how people interact with your website at each stage. Here is how it works:

Heat mapping has become a crucial tool in website management thanks to this all-rounded approach. Let’s consider why many businesses have been adopting it.

Should You Use Heat Mapping

All businesses come down to customers. If your customers are happy, you can look forward to more conversions and sales that generate consistent revenue. But if they are not, you can as well bid your business goodbye. Heat mapping enables you to take charge of your business by offering you the perks below:

1. It highlights your website’s strengths and weaknesses: Businesses conduct SWOT analyses to help them understand what works for and against them. And with a heat map, you don’t need to guess. Instead, you can look at the visualization representing your best-performing and worst-performing pages. But that’s not all. It also gives you insights into the user behavior on these pages. For example, if people often hover over the testimonials before purchasing your items, you would know that the testimonials have a positive effect. But if they hover over them and click out of the page, you would know they did not have the conversion power you expected. When you know what works and what does not, it’s easy to make changes that give you better returns on your marketing investments.
2. It helps you understand your audience better: When selling anything to anyone, you must understand who they are and what they want. Only then can you create a value proposition that will appeal to them. Moreover, this helps you create marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience. And how better to get these insights than using a heat map? As you follow what your audience spends more time on and what they ignore, you can determine what to include and remove in your future campaigns. For example, if people respond to comical blogs, you would include more of these, increasing traffic and time spent on the site.
3. It helps you tweak your web design: Content is not the only thing that matters in a site. People also care about how well it performs, how fast they can find what they want, and how it looks. For example, if pages often take ten seconds on average to load, people may leave your site after waiting five seconds. In this case, you would optimize the pages to load faster to reduce this churn rate.
4. It helps you make informed decisions: While general market data is often helpful, relying on it can prove impractical for your business as it relates to general audiences. Heat mapping enables you to examine your audience and understand what they want. For example, if the numbers show that people prefer products within the $10 to $30 range, you could focus more on such items instead of spending money on items that do not have much demand.
5. It identifies barriers to conversions and sales: Creating a website and filling it with good content often seems straightforward. But it’s easy to miss out on important aspects. For example, you may find that the checkout form is so long that people often fill it halfway before abandoning their carts. You can use this information to simplify the checkout process and encourage more people to complete their purchases. The data from your heat map also points out areas that can benefit from more engagement, thus allowing you to include more prompts to boost the user experience and get people to the purchasing stage.

The more you know about your audience and how your website performs, the easier it will be to create marketing campaigns that streamline your sales funnel.

Perfecting the Heat Map

Would you like to boost your overall user experience? The key comes down to using a heat map tool by considering the following:

• I. Does it meet your business goals? For example, if your goal is to increase conversions, your tool should have features that visualize this part of the customer decision journey.
• II. Is it easy to use? Do you require training to get the hang of things?
• III. Can it work with your existing analytics tools?
• IV. How accurate is its data? Can you rely on it when making business decisions?
• V. Does it comply with the data regulations in the regions where you operate?

Your choice should be practical, based on your business goals, and sustainable so that you can continuously use the data to make critical decisions that boost your website’s performance.

Conclusion

Heat mapping gives you insights into what people do on your website, which helps you improve the user experience to boost your traffic and engagement. Moreover, you can use these insights to market your products more effectively instead of using guesswork when anticipating your customers’ wants and needs.