How to Improve Digital Marketing Through Heatmap
Every website owner would like to know how users interact with his website.
This will help him identify ways to enhance the user experience. A heatmap is a data visualization tool that helps you in this regard. It reveals a lot of useful info — like what kind of images do your customers like, which areas of your site they find difficulty navigating, and more.
So what exactly are heatmaps?
Heatmaps are data visualization tools that represent the different levels of attention that your visitors pay to various areas on your website using a color scheme. They present the regions that gain the most attention in red, the least attention in blue, and moderate attention in colors like light orange and yellow.
These relate to where your visitors are spending more time, hovering their mouse, scrolling over, or clicking through. Some advanced heat mapping tools even provide you with visitor session recordings just like a movie clip. Website owners can use this info to make more informed decisions about their digital marketing strategy.
6 ways to improve your digital marketing through heatmap
There are several ways to work on and improve your digital marketing through heatmaps. We’ve listed six of those for website owners to benefit from.
- Learn your users’ intent
Look at your website’s heatmaps to understand how visitors are navigating your site, which areas gain their attention the most, which content do they read the most, which areas they simply scroll over without a pause, which areas they are dropping off, which filters and menu options they use the most, and more.
You can leverage this information to create your future landing pages, blog posts, and PPC campaigns. For instance, if you find that some of your blog posts are read by most of your users, post more related blog posts to cater to their needs.
- Identify distracting elements
The ultimate aim of having a website is to increase conversion rates. However, your users may simply scroll over your important messages without paying attention. In such cases, there would be some distracting elements around or your message isn’t prominent enough. Your heatmaps could help uncover such information.
You may find that some CTAs aren’t impressive enough- maybe they should have a different color or wording. Some messages may be bypassed. Changing the font size or style, including images, etc. may help fix it. Or there may be some ads or images that are distracting your users from the main message- a phenomenon referred to as website blindness. With this info at hand, you can fix those.
- Identify friction causing elements
With heatmaps, you also get to point out those elements that confuse users. For instance, your click maps may uncover some clickable items that users are trying to click through. In this case, you may incorporate a link there to useful and interesting content to meet your users’ expectations.
Your hover heatmaps can reveal weak spots too. For instance, you may find that many users are spending a long time in unusual locations or dropping off at a specific page or position on a webpage. Identify why they are causing trouble, and find out ways to rectify those. For instance, it may be a confusing copy, lengthy content, images that appear like buttons, etc. Fixing these will reduce bounce rates and increase conversions.
- Structure your site for the buyer
Your website with all its elements should be structured keeping in mind the journey you want your buyers to take. That is, your content, CTAs, links, images, etc. should offer visitors the info they look for and need at each phase of their journey. Your heatmaps can help you in this regard.
Just have a look at your click maps to know whether visitors are taking the journey you intend for them. If you find that they are clicking links that take them outside the sales funnel, you should consider removing or adjusting those as per the journey planned. This will help increase conversions.
- Optimize images to be catchy enough
Heatmaps can also tell you the best placement of your images. This you can do by combining heatmaps with A/B testing. You may present two pleasing variations of the image positions and determine the position that best appeals to your visitors. Instead of positioning, you may even test two entirely different images or different sizes of the same image.
Yet another way in which you can optimize your site’s images is by discovering whether people are trying to click on your site’s unlinked images and then fixing it.
- Achieve the right mix of elements
Sometimes when you look at your heatmaps, you may find that certain things work for your brand while certain things do not. For instance, your visitors may find some color schemes attractive. But the pages with such color schemes may have CTA buttons that your visitors are indifferent to.
When you get such valuable information, you can put together those elements that visitors find appealing. Thus, using heatmaps can help you get the right mix of elements including content, headlines, CTAs, color schemes, font sizes, font styles, images, white spaces, etc. This can in turn increase your engagement rates and conversions.
Wrapping up
Using heatmaps can help improve your digital marketing by enhancing your site’s customer experience. By looking at your heatmaps, you can gain valuable insights into what works for your brand. You can leverage this info to increase engagement and conversions and get ahead of the competition. So, if you haven’t started with heat mapping yet, it’s time you do it.
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**About the Author: Shivani Goyal is a content curator at NotifyVisitors, a platform that helps businesses understand their customer behavior on their website by employing heatmaps that show different values, where users have clicked on a page, how far they have scrolled down a page, etc.
