How Hot is Your Marketing Strategy? – A Guide to Heatmap Tools

There are a multitude of tools, both free and paid, that marketers and business owners can utilise to give insight into data trends on their website. However, analysing exactly what your users are doing once they land on your pages can be tricky. You need to know, where your users are getting stuck, where are they clicking, when do they stop scrolling and a whole host of other things, but, all your current tools are providing are numbers and percentages that don’t give you the full picture. Heatmap tools offer all of this data and more in a visual way, meaning the information can easily be understood and actions are taken quickly to keep your conversions rolling in.  

Crazy Egg Heatmapping Tool

One of the heatmap tools we regularly use at SilverDisc is Crazy Egg. This tool gives you a range of ways to view data, giving you a complete understanding of user interaction.

These are main four ways you can view data on Crazy Egg:

• Heat map tool
  • This tool gives you an overview of where users have clicked, so you can identify ‘hot spots’ on your page. This makes it easy to make changes to your site and ensure users click where you want them to and ultimately get in touch or complete a purchase.  
• Scroll map tool
  
  • This tool allows you to see how far users are scrolling down the page. So, we can see if users are looking at the content that you want them to be. If you can see that users typically only scroll to a point which is above your main CTA, we would move the CTA so that it is in a prime position to be viewed by potential customers.
• Overlay report
  
  • This report gives a more structured breakdown of where users are clicking. It provides data on if users are clicking on live links or not. This means you can add in or move links to where users are actually clicking. For example, making the image clickable as well as the text if that’s how users are attempting to access a link.
• Confetti tool
  
  • This is arguably the most useful part of the heatmap tool. It allows you to view the breakdown of clicks based on various metrics. It is a good way to break down your data so you are viewing exactly what is relevant to your business. For example, we could look at new versus returning users to see if there is a difference in behaviour.

These features contribute to creating a complete visual representation of your website's user experience data. This means you can make changes to the usability of your website based on what users actually want from your site rather than how we presume they are using it. It also means that we can make these changes faster and without having to sift through lots of complicated numbers.

Recordings

As well as the static heat maps, Crazy Egg also offers a service called ‘recordings’.  Recordings are video captures of an individual user’s experience on the site. We can watch each user and their progression through the site by looking at where their cursor moves and where they are clicking. This is useful a tool to understand where users are thinking about clicking and not and viewing trends in how users move through a page.  We can also see how pages are rendered on different browsers and devices, this means we can pick up problems with bugs and user experience that might otherwise have been missed. While the heatmaps show how users are clicking, watching a mouse zig-zag across a screen as a user tries to find where they should click is a much clearer way to pick up faults in the page’s design.

You can also filter recordings so you see just the data you need to. This allows you to understand how a specific set of users behave. For example, previous converters might interact differently with the site compared to first-time visitors.

If you need any help with optimising your website’s user experience, or any other marketing please get in touch!