What Are Website Heatmaps?
What are Heatmaps?
Heatmaps are a powerful tool for understanding how internet users approach your website pages - what elements they click, how far down they scroll, what they interact with, and what they ignore.
Heatmaps - or heat maps - enable marketers, developers, and UX professionals to see how internet users interact with a website or application. What heatmaps are in essence is a powerful visual story that shows which areas are attracting user attention, which are being ignored, and these insights can be used to guide development.
Heatmaps record user behavior en masse, and this data is then superimposed over the webpage under investigation, in the form of a graphic that uses color intensity to represent the frequency of clicks, scrolls, taps, and mouse movement - some even use AI and eye-tracking sensors!?
Today, they are usually generated with a full rainbow palette since the human eye can perceive more colors than shades of gray. Warm colors represent areas of higher user activity, while cool colors represent lower activity:
What heatmaps are has changed over the years as the technology underpinning them has developed. They’re now highly versatile, and their capacity to supercharge the analysis of huge volumes of information has made them the most popular tool for data visualization and analysis out there today.
The Five Types of Heatmaps
Beyond the separation of desktop and mobile user data, there are five main types of heatmaps that can be used for website optimization. which are generated from different types of website visitor activity.?
These are powered by two types of heatmap software. Data-driven software creates heatmaps based on real user behavior and is the basis of clickmaps, scrollmaps, and mouse tracking maps. By contrast, attention mapping software tracks eye movement and general attention, and uses algorithms and AI to compare actions with broader browsing habits.
The data generated can be viewed in list form, or exported into a spreadsheet for further analysis. However, most people prefer to view the generated heatmaps themselves, with the different types outlined below:?
1. Click/Tap Heatmaps
What it shows: where visitors are clicking or tapping.
Click maps show the page elements that visitors click on the most, and typically use different shades of one color - the hotter the color, the more frequently they click. They are great for understanding how visitors navigate through your website, as well as for identifying which elements attract the most attention and persuade visitors to click through.
When to use click/tap maps:
2. Scroll Heatmaps
What it shows: how far visitors are scrolling.?
Scroll maps show how far website visitors are scrolling down a webpage, and where they drop off - the hotter the color, the more internet users have viewed it. These maps are really useful for understanding and measuring how engaging your pages actually are, and you can use them to identify, remove, or improve issues that damage the user experience.
When to use scroll maps:
3. Mouse Tracking/Hover Heatmaps
What it shows: where visitors are moving/hovering their cursor
Hover maps show where their cursor sits when looking at your webpage - the hotter the color, the longer cursors are there. These maps follow the logic that if people hover their mouse over something, they are paying attention to it, and the information it gleans is useful, even if this logic doesn’t hold all the time.?
The data collected gives you an idea of how visitors navigate around the website or web pages so that you can set things so that it garners the most attention. You can also figure out if non-essential elements are distracting your visitors from the important ones.
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When to use hover maps:
4. Eye-Tracking (Gaze Plot) Heatmaps
What it shows: where visitors are looking, the timeline of their gaze, and how long they look for
Eye-tracking maps overlay information about eye movement onto a webpage. This heatmap type normally requires access to the user’s camera or a special device, making it a less reliable heatmap for large data sets for the moment.
But by examining what visitors are focusing on during their first few seconds on a webpage, you can position the most important elements in their natural eye path, so as to increase conversion rates.
When to use eye-tracking maps:
5. Attention Heatmaps
What it shows: where visitors are drawn to on the page
Attention heatmaps let you see which parts of a webpage get the most attention. They combine website visitor data with AI algorithms, predictive data, and eye tracking to calculate which elements are attracting the most interest, which are being skipped, and display this data with a standard heatmap overlay.
When to use attention maps:
When to Use Heatmaps
You’ll want to use heatmaps when you have a specific website optimization goal in mind. In other words, what heatmaps are best for is finding answers to specific questions that you have about user behavior, and we’ve outlined these in the infographic below:
What Can You Learn From Visitor Analytics Heatmaps?
Our heatmaps are an advanced?website analytics ?feature that helps marketers to improve the performance of their websites. They collect data on clicks and taps, mouse position, and average scroll rate, enabling you to identify the best-performing buttons, links, and hotspots, as well as bugs and broken links.
This provides you with a rich understanding of user behavior across your website - what they interact with, what they ignore, and how they navigate from webpage to webpage. It pulls out broad insights about your audience, which you can then use to carry out data-driven website improvements.
When carried out effectively, the result is an improved user experience and increased conversion rates across your website. This can be achieved by something as simple as moving your priority CTA around the page until it attracts the number of clicks you want, or by changing the layout of the content so that you get more eyes on critical information.
And since heatmap data is categorized by user device, you’ll be able to quickly see whether it’s worth dedicating time to make the website mobile-friendly, or whether it would be better to dedicate resources somewhere else.
You’ll also learn which countries your website visitors live in, and can then focus work on getting the most clicks out of this audience. This would involve things like prioritizing the top languages in these locations when doing?translation work, building publishing timetables around local calendars, meeting cultural expectations, and so forth.
Crucially, your heatmap data can also be viewed in list form. Our heatmaps will automatically create a list of all the web page elements, and the number of clicks and taps on each of them, so you can easily identify the best-performing buttons and hotspots. And, if you want a closer look at the data behind your heatmaps, it can be downloaded and exported to whatever data analysis software you prefer for further analysis!?
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?? Find out more at:?https://www.visitor-analytics.io/en/resources/what-are-heatmaps/ ?? Visitor Analytics
Digital Media Strategist | Work horse | dad-joke connoisseur
1 年Thanks for adding ai heatmaps:) such as www.attentioninsight.com