What is a heat map?
Heat maps provide a visual way to monitor visitor engagement with your website pages. The heat maps are basically colour-coded images that reflect the most and least, engaging sections of your website. There are different ways to generate heat maps two of which involve tracking how peoples' eyes move across your website or by mouse-tracking analysis.
Mouse-tracking makes it easy to see exactly what visitors are looking at and focusing on when they come to your website. By having visibility of what thousands of visitors do when they get to your website and how they engage with it provides you with really useful insight as to what areas of your site work best, and also spot areas for improvement and guide your website design decisions.
Being aware of how users interact with your site makes it easier for you to determine where you can improve on different elements such as making your calls to action more prominent, making sure your key content is located on the sections of your website that people gravitate towards the most and so on. 69% of people spend their time looking at the left hand side of website pages. So be sure to capitalise on this and place your key sales copy and messaging on the left hand side of your website wherever possible.
You should also think about the colours that you use on your website. What you should be aiming for with colour is to have web page areas that stand out from your background colour as these tend to garnish higher engagement levels and catch peoples eye. Think about your calls to action too to make sure that they are featured in eye catching colours to help them stand out.
How do I get a heat map analysis?
There are lots of companies who provide this service (usually for a small fee) online. The cream of the crop are below:
Click Tale
Their analysis includes real-time visitor recordings, mouse movement heat maps, conversion funnel analysis and more. Click Tale are market-leaders in heat map software. As well as offering an affordable and comprehensive paid service, they also offer a free plan too.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg offers some of the most in-depth heat mapping software available, coupled with a suite of powerful analytic tools. Best of all, prices are affordable and start from just $9 a month.
SessionCam
If you have a WordPress website, SessionCam offers a free and comprehensive analysis of customer interaction with your website. Visitor web sessions are recorded in real time and heat maps can be generated based on mouse movement, clicks, web page scrolling and browser interaction.