What is a heat map and what does it mean?

What is a heat map and what does it mean?

There are many ways to analyze user behavior on the website that are very useful in digital marketing. One such option that can be very useful is Heat Map. Site Heat Map is a graphical representation of data in which values ​​are displayed in different colors. In general, heat mapping is a way to understand how users interact with your website. Heat maps are a powerful way to understand what users do on your website pages. Where they click, how far they scroll, what they look at or what they ignore. In this article we will try to introduce you to the heatmap or site heatmap and its uses. So continue with the text.

What is a heat map?

A heat map is a graphical representation of data that uses a color coding system to display different values. Heat Map is used in a variety of ways for analytics purposes, but is primarily used to display user behavior on websites. A website heat map is a visual representation of how visitors interact with each element of your website. This will show which area receives the most clicks and grabs the attention of your visitors. By testing how certain buttons and elements are placed on your website, heat maps allow you to evaluate the performance of your website and increase user engagement and retention.

History of Heat Map

Is heat map a new topic? The answer to this question is no. The topic of heat maps was discovered by a French researcher in 1879. This researcher studied how people stop on certain words and that they pay more attention to certain parts and simply skip some parts. In 1980, this method was used to test people's attention to advertising. Therefore, the use of this method led newspapers and magazines to change their layout to achieve greater efficiency. After that, the heat map became more and more popular among people and gained many followers.

How to use a heat map to analyze your website?

Site heat maps represent the most popular elements (with warm colors) and the least popular parts (with cool colors) of your website page. Analyzes the content of your site page based on colors on a scale from red to blue.

The question is: who uses the heat map? Heat maps are perfect for marketers, data and digital analysts, UX designers, social media specialists, digital marketing consultants, and anyone who sells something online.

Heat Map provides in-depth insights into the behavior of people on the website. By tracking user behavior in different parts of the website using heat maps, data analysis becomes much easier. Showing how users interact with your website based on which part they click on, which parts they pay more attention to, or which parts they ignore helps in the process of optimizing your website and product page for more engagement and sales.

Using these maps will help you understand why users are not using calls to action, CTAs, contact information, or forms. You can convert users into customers by displaying this map and making small changes to the placement of items.

Heat Map Applications

Now that you are familiar with the concept of a heat map, we would like to introduce you to the heat map applications in this section. Of course, there are many uses for Heat Map, all of which can help you improve your website and generate more sales and clicks. To learn more about these useful applications, continue reading the text.

Understand the users’ purpose

One of the most important uses and benefits of heatmaps is to know the behavior of users on your website. Knowing this information about users will help you to carry out your future activities on your website more efficiently and effectively. From the heatmap, you can see which part of the website attracted users the most or which part of the website was not attractive to users and they ignored it. You can also know which part of the page most users leave.

Find the right website design

If you are a designer, you have probably tested hundreds of designs for your website. The worst part is that you are still not 100% sure that the final design is perfect. Heatmaps easily solve this problem for you. Heatmaps can help you see where visitors click most often and where they do not click at all. With this information, you can modify your website design, identify important elements, and optimize your website design to get the most feedback.

Choose a single goal

Sometimes we place more than one call to action (CTA) on our website and confuse our visitors. For example, you may have added a winter sale along with a product catalog and a free advice ad for visitors on the same page. Using heatmaps, you can see which CTA is getting the most attention and make it your primary audience.

Eliminate distractions

Another important reason to use heatmaps is that heatmaps tell you if your visitors are clicking on non-clickable elements, images, and white space. Are users missing areas to focus on? This information can usually impact the number of user comments on your site. Because it helps you remove unnecessary elements, add links if necessary, rethink white spaces, and direct visitors to the right places.

Helps to optimize the landing page

Important factors for optimizing the landing or login page include the placement of the tags related to the title, optimal use of white space, etc. The most appropriate and common method for landing pages is to use the CTA or call button itself. click-through rates of users and audiences. With heatmaps, you can easily determine whether the placement of the CTA on the page is correct or not. This will help you find the most suitable location for the call button.

Optimizing images on the site.

Another use of heatmap can be mentioned to optimize the images on the pages. The analysis in this section will help you focus more on the important elements.

Improve Internal Linking Strategy

Since the sitemap provides you with the necessary information about where users are clicking, you can determine the best place to place links to increase traffic to the desired pages.

Other Applications of Site Heatmaps

The information and data associated with the site heatmap helps you make better decisions about the layout of the elements on the page. With the help of the heatmap, you can place important elements of your website in the most visited locations to achieve your goal faster. Therefore, using the information from the heatmap will definitely help you improve and optimize your website. You can see where ads, shopping cart and checkout buttons, special offers, etc. can be placed. so that they get the most clicks.

Creating a proper structure to guide the customer, determining the optimal word count, answering questions in Google Analytics, etc. are other good uses of the heatmap. Heatmap is also very important in application design. You can design the best and most optimized application by using the heat map and identifying the key points.

Different Types of Heatmaps

There are different types of heatmaps, each with different uses. Below, we look at the types of heatmaps and their applications.

• Mouse Movement Tracking Heatmap (Hover Maps): One of the most popular heatmaps is mouse movement tracking. As the name suggests, this heatmap shows you information about the user’s mouse movement across the screen. With this information, it is possible to identify the parts that are most interesting to users and place banner ads and important elements in these parts.
• Move Maps Heatmap: The Move Maps heatmap shows you where users most often stopped when moving around the screen. This information shows that users focused more on these parts and found them more engaging.
• Click Maps – This type of heatmap shows you information about the number of clicks made by users. You can identify the sections with the most clicks. You can use this heatmap to see which banner ads, headlines, or other elements are the most popular.
• Scroll tracking heatmap (scroll maps): These types of heatmaps show you how far users have scrolled down the page. A scroll map can be very useful when you want to decide where to place important elements of a website such as links, videos, or CTAs. The longer the page, the less users will see it. Try to place important elements at the top of the page.
• Attention heatmap: The attention heatmap consists of a combination of horizontal and vertical scrolling and the time the user spends in that area. The time criterion is the most important point of this heatmap.

Tools for creating a heatmap

So far in the text, you have become familiar with the concept of a heatmap and its applications, as well as the types of site heatmaps. One of the most common questions these days is what tools you should use to create a heat map. Below, we present 4 tools and websites to create heat maps.

• Hotjar Website: One of the most popular sites for creating heat maps is the Hotjar website. It is free to register and use the analytics tools on this website. To use this website, you can add your website after registering and then click on Add Heat Map on the dashboard. Then, select the desired page and click on the “Create Heat Map” option.
• Crazy Egg Tool – One of the most popular tools for creating heat maps is Crazy Egg. This tool allows you to create heat maps of clicks, scrolls, and movements. Using this tool is not free and you will have to pay between $29 and $99 per month (depending on the type of service provided) to use it.
• Heatmap Tool – One of the simplest tools to create a heatmap is the Heatmap tool. This tool is easy to install and you can use it for free for up to 6 months.
• UserHeat Tool – Another tool to create heatmaps is the UserHeat tool. This tool is also available for WordPress sites by installing this tool plugin for free.

Degree

Heatmaps display comprehensive and quality information about user behavior on the website pages. So you can use this information to optimally and functionally design the layout of page elements, links, advertising banners, etc. With the tools mentioned in this text, you can easily create all kinds of heatmaps and take advantage of their useful information.