How heat map analysis can help you in Marketing?
one of the challenges on Marketing is collecting data and its interpretation. Different methods are available to overcome this challenge and heat maps are one of them. You can find them almost everywhere; From weather and real estate websites, to people like doctors, engineers, and marketers to use for representing complex statistical data and turn them into comprehensible and actionable information.
There is a subtle point here about methods: charts have to be explained, tables should have legends for interpretation, but heat maps are self-explanatory and intuitive.
So, what is heat map and how it works?
A heat map is a data analysis software that uses colors to display user interactions with your website. Different companies provide this tool for marketers, UX designers, and also product managers such as Hotjar, Zoho, and crazyegg. Personally, I use Hotjar in my projects. Since all of them have a free trial, you can compare them to choose the best one based on your needs.
If you want to evaluate a website design’s performance, A/B testing or even its contents, the best way is to use the heat map that visually shows you the popular sections of your website. This method uses a warm-to-cool color spectrum to show your site’s popular sections.
A case study for using heat map analysis:
I analyzed the Xepos website, a company I’ve worked for as a digital marketer and SEO specialist, by heat map and saved the visual reports for website’s performance, both on desktop and mobile versions. Here are the images for both versions:
The first section of the website landing page without heat map:
With Heat Map:
Mobile version:
Why heat Map is important for Marketers?
With these heat maps, I identified the most important sections of the Xepos website both in desktop and mobile versions and how they can be improved.
1- If you are a Digital Marketer, you definitely heard that content is king. But which type of content is king?! Yes, I know there are lots of standards and techniques related to copy-writing like identifying prospects pain points to use them in your content, writing empathy map, using Inbound Marketing in writing your content, and many other methods that are not related to this article; but after all of these implementations, is the written article interesting enough for your site visitors?
With scroll map you can find out up to which paragraph most of your visitors read your content.
I give an example to you, let’s say Eli writes an outstanding in-depth content using skyscraper technique. After publishing, she identifies that just 5% of the visitors scrolled down to the end of the article. So, she wrote almost 6500 words and looks like no one really wants to read that much. But since she is an expert in this field, she checks another report which is google analytics goal tracking or confetti report and almost all of the visitors who read the post entirely, click on the CTA. So she identified that her content is not under-performing to increase website bounce rate. She creates a qualified content that disqualifying unsuitable visitors for the sales department.
2- As a UX designer, you should know how people interact with your website, what sections need improvement and where is the best place for implementing the CTA buttons to drive more conversion. By using the heat map you can track them all. From the Xepos case study, it can be concluded that:
· The navigation menu is the most clickable section of this website while it is designed in the hamburger menu. It can be replaced from a hamburger menu to an interactive menu.
· Retail and hospitality are the most popular industries for the website visitors, a hint that later on, I identified from customers’ feedback form and sales reports. For the Mobile version, the takeaway industry is much more popular, so it should be considered in the design to drive more conversions to the website.
3- As a SEO specialist, you should know what is the best website structure for your project. This is related to business priorities, keyword researching, user journey, and the context of each page. By keyword researching with Ahref, Moz or other software, you just know the volume of monthly searches and the keyword’s difficulty. These searches are not based on your customers' demographics, they are accumulated from all searches. It’s better to design the website’s structure based on your customers’ behavior and interests and it can be obtained by using the heat map and finding which keywords are more popular for them. Also consider how many times they click on a specific keyword on different pages, since we only have a monthly search volume for each keyword in the search console.
There are 5 questions related to the heat map analysis that can be helpful for any marketers:
- Are people seeing important contents?
- Are people clicking on key page elements (links, buttons, and CTAs)?
- Are people confused by non-clickable elements?
- Are people getting distracted?
- Are people experiencing issues across different devices?
A heat map can answer all of these questions so you can improve your website’s performance more efficiently. Let me give an example: based on the mobile version of the Xepos heat map, lots of visitors click on the till system image, so it distracts customers from major elements on the website and based on question number 4, we remove the picture on the mobile version to avoid the distraction.
As you see, identifying users’ behavior by heat map analysis can affect the UX design, copy-writing, and also website structure design for the SEO section.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Resources:
2. https://www.zoho.com/pagesense/alternative-to-hotjar.html
4. https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing
5. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/skyscraper-technique-drive-traffic
6. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032415?hl=en
7. https://www.crazyegg.com/confetti
8. https://blog.templatetoaster.com/types-modern-navigation-menus/
9. https://www.hotjar.com/heatmaps/analysis