Heatmaps are a big part of digital marketing, since they show how users will interact with sites. You can use them to capture the audience’s attention or if they’re having trouble with navigating your website, and you can use this to improve your strategy too if you’re worried about it.
Heatmaps are visualizations that show how well a site is performing. They make it easy to look at complex data sets by representing color and values. You can do this from a scale of red to blue, with the warmest color being the highest engagement level, and the coolest being the lowest. There are different types too. There are scroll maps, which track how readers make it down before dropping off. The redder it is, the more others will read it.
There are also click maps, which show how many places where the clicks happen. These can be internal links within the piece your navigational bar, the logos, the call to action buttons, or anything which is clickable. Finally, there is the hover maps, which track where the users move the curser around. Hot maps are shown by where the users stop to read it more often.
So how can you use these? Well, there are a few ways for you to use these kinds of maps, and we’ll go over a few of them here.
First, you can learn about user intent. This shows not only target behavior, but it gives someone a chance to learn about the behavior of audiences. Another thing is to figure out the parts of the page that get the most play. You have to look at the content people care the most about, and what seconds they scroll over without stopping, and where they drop off. You might wat to look at the menu options and the filters which get the most interaction, which talk about what your audience cares about the most. These also tell you about PPC campaigns along with landing pages and blog posts too.
These can show the keyword opportunities too in order to inform others of the content strategy, social posts, ad copy, and whatnot. You may want to look for the bounce rates and the dwell times too. Here, you should figure out how many visit the page, and then leave because they can’t find what they want or what is relevant.
Next, you can optimize the page layout with this too. This is really done with your best judgement of course.
While the headers are important, you want to look at the interacting elements, the buttons, and how they move. You’ll realize that some people may look at other parts of the site than possibly different locations. You can change the layout to make it so that users go towards the action you want.
They can even be used for metrics too, and offer you a lot of quantitative data.
At the end of the day, heatmaps help you see how your site is performing, and also some of the different features that are good, and not-so-good about your site too.
