The usage of Heatmaps started as early as the 19th century for statistical analysis, and soon it went on to become a valuable tool for almost every business and industry, including engineering, medicine, marketing, and research.
The practical usage of Heatmaps saw its growth during the declining period in the year 2008. Most people started using it to quickly perceive the foreclosure valuation in several states and evaluate their rates to heatmaps from previous months to observe if the foreclosures were increasing, declining, or staying at the same level.
Heatmaps are useful as they can offer a resourceful and inclusive outline of a topic in a flash. To understand charts or tables, we have to go through and study them thoroughly, whereas Heatmaps, on the other hand, are the shortest data visualization tools that are more accurate and easy to read.
Heatmaps are well friendly to the consumers. To be precise, Heatmaps promote those consumers who are not habituated to evaluating huge amounts of data as they are more visually accessible than the customary data formats.
In this article, we have presented brief enlightenment on Heatmaps.
What is a Heatmap?
A heatmap is a 2-D visual illustration of data using different colors, where each color represents different values. This method of graphical representation makes it simple to visualize composite data and comprehend it quickly. A heatmap is useful to represent various kinds of data, starting from the real estate property demonstrating the number of foreclosures to the spreadsheets of credit default swaps (CDS) to web page analysis demonstrating the total number of beats a website obtains.
Previously, Heatmaps were created manually by hand, but now modern Heatmaps are generally formed using dedicated heat mapping software.
With the help of a heatmap, you can have a visual idea of how users interact with your website and how they don’t interact. In statistics, other software or services, including Google Analytics, displays several static data like session length, whereas Heatmaps provides astonishing details and information about what exactly a user does with your website. This means you can generate accurate elements of your website design that require extra attention and care.
How does a Heatmap work?
The working principle of a Heatmap depends on its type. There are multiple types of Heatmaps, but they can be broadly classified into two categories: Interaction Heatmaps and Attention Heatmaps.
Interaction Heatmaps: It assesses different types of activities and employs tracking codes to keep a record of the interactions between a user and a website, such as clicks, scrolls, mouse movements, and more.
Attention Heatmaps: They are a bit more complex than interaction Heatmaps, and it supervises how a user interacts with your website content by observing or guessing their eye movements.
Why should we use Heatmaps?
The requirement of every website is the same; all they want is to keep their users happy. A happy and pleased user will purchase more products, like more, subscribe more, or consume more content. It is used to find out what makes them happy.
In most cases, the developers like a Digital Analyst, a Product Owners, a Marketer, or UX designers hardly get the opportunity to meet their consumers. Even if you get an opportunity, the visitors might not discern what exactly they want from your website or might not know how to articulate it.
Yet, it is your duty to recognize and comprehend the journey of your customer as if you were seated right next to them when they were browsing your website.
And a Heatmap will help you to do that exact thing. Heatmaps will assess the user interactions and transform them into perceptions. They enable you to go through all the data and information and will also guide you to simply understand the ongoing trends without having to chomp numbers or compare multiple metrics.
This will eventually help you to reclaim the countless working hours and aggravation. Heatmaps will present consistent perceptions of how to enhance the performance of your website and also how to improve the conversion rates. Getting to know exactly how the visitors interact and use your website makes your task much easier.
What are the different types of Heatmaps?
There are numerous types of Heatmaps, but essentially four of them are widely used. They are:
- Click Tracking Heatmaps
- Scroll Maps
- Mouse Tracking Heatmaps
- Eye Tracking Heatmaps
Click-Tracking Heatmaps
Click-Tracking Heatmaps are arguably the most popular type of Heatmaps that explain to you exactly where visitors have clicked on your website. It then provides information into how visitors interact on your website or page. With the help of click-tracking maps, you can obtain which are the elements (or contents) on your website that are getting the most or least clicks. It can therefore point out the navigational errors. Click maps also help to enhance the ROI of your website by inserting and monitoring effective CTA buttons.
Scroll Maps
Scroll maps are visual illustrations that provide the scrolling behavior of a visitor to your website. A scroll map informs you of the following things:
- The total number of visitors scrolled from top to the bottom of a web page
- The total number of visitors scrolled from the beginning of a page but stopped before reaching the bottom of the page
- The total number of visitors who have completely abandoned your page
Mouse-Tracking Heatmaps
Mouse-tracking Heatmaps follow and record the general movement of the mouse. They help you to identify general mouse movement.
Mouse-tracking Heatmaps help spot aggravated and upset users by screening where people are floating, hesitant, or simply thrashing their cursor on your web page. They also help you to spot the hovering pattern of the user.
Eye-Tracking Heatmaps
Eye-Tracking Heatmaps makes use of sensor technology to track the activities of the users’ point-of-view when they are visiting your web page.
This technology helps you to observe eye movement, blinking, and pupil dilation to evaluate where exactly on a page a user was highly attentive. They typically present exceptionally accurate results by presenting, what the user was looking at on your page.
What are the benefits of using Heatmaps?
Like any other website analytics, Heatmaps also has its benefits. Here are they:
- Notice and comprehend large amounts of data quickly in a vastly visual layout
- Easy interpretation and rich insights
- Provides a detailed outline of the web performance
- Offers visual trails to understand the numeric values
- Receives feedback from the user, and that helps to make a more user-friendly web design
- Heatmaps notice the engagement of the visitors and thus provide them with a better overall experience
- Identifies the areas where your website is going down and requires the most attention
- Spots the areas that the users should ignore or neglect
What are the drawbacks of using Heatmaps?
Heatmaps also have quite a few drawbacks. Here are they:
- Heatmaps might produce unreliable outcomes if you often change the device sizes and browsers
- They don’t work well with dynamic applications
- It is difficult to transform a Heatmap into actionable business aptitude without having equivalent quantitative data
- Heatmaps, like eye trackers, that can be costly
- While there are some Heatmaps, such as AI-generated Heatmaps, which require
- adequate number of traffic to examine in order to generate accurate calculations
- Heatmaps are always required to be paired with some other data as Heatmaps can’t provide a complete view of the user engagement on their own.
Final Thoughts
Heatmaps might now give you the accurate answer to all of your queries regarding the engagement of users with your website, but they will surely provide an insight that is not easily available on other analytics tools. Heatmaps can be a very effective tool for web analysts as long as they use them in the right way and don’t depict any conclusion from minute data.
If you use Heat Maps at some stage in the discovery phase of the Conversion Rate Optimization marketing, then it will assist in spotting additional areas for testing. Heatmaps can be incorporated with A/B tests. It means that you will be able to obtain a clear image of the user engagement along with your test variants in contrast with the original.
In short, Heatmaps should be used since they are very insightful. A good Heatmap breaks the block of data and the forest of data and highlights the errors, and draws actionable insights that will help you you’re your business resolutions better. A Heatmap tool presents a simple way to appreciate the visitors of your website, considering their on-page behavior.
My name is Vijay Singh Khatri, and I enjoy meeting new people and finding ways to help them have an uplifting experience. I have had a variety of customer service opportunities, through which I was able to have fewer returned products and increased repeat customers when compared with co-workers.
