What Are Website Heat Maps?
Website heat maps are the way of visualizing how visitors actually interact with your website. They provide an superimpose of your website or specific pages on your website which is color coded to show how far the visitors scroll down your page, what links they click actually, where they spend time and what they skip over and all manner of other information.
Many website heat map tools would also provide screen recording the facilities too so that you can actually watch back unidentified visitors to your site and watch them scroll and click around your site in the real time.
The three Major Benefits Of Website Heat Map Tools
Hopefully by now you are starting to see potential of the website heat maps to significantly improve your website both for your visitors and your bottom line. But incase you need any more convincing there are three major reasons why any serious website owner should consider investing in a website heat map tool…
Increased Profits
Most of the website owners hope to make at least sufficient profit to cover their costs. Many are profit focused businesses in their own right. But monetizing the websites especially content websites like blogs can be the real challenge. After all, how do you know where you should put your Adsense ads, affiliate links, opt-in forms, social media buttons and so on for maximum results?
Split testing is surely an important element here that would allow you to test out your hypothesis, but website heat map tools give you an “unfair advantage” from the start showing an exactly which parts of your website get the most visibility and highest chance of clicks. In other words, whether you decide to split test or not, a website heat map created particularly for your website immediately gives you the roadmap to improving your website’s profits.
Increased Visitor Satisfaction
Ever visited the website and realized you could not find what you want? You have gone round and round and then finally given up and gone elsewhere? Or how about clicking through to the website then immediately making the judgement call that it is not of interest then going elsewhere?
Increasingly user experience is becoming an essential part of the web design. Heat maps allow you to see which areas of your website get the most attention and which areas are skipped over. They let you see which links to keep on getting clicked, which pages get interacted with, with elements get clicked on even if they are not active links and more.
By including this data set in the web design decisions you will be able to create the more satisfying, user-friendly experience that allows your visitors to quickly find an information that is most important to them.
Of course, this does not just potentially improve your average visitor value (AVV) but also increases the chances of word of mouth marketing as your site is recommended by previous visitors on forums and social media.
Higher Search Engine Rankings
In many ways the 3rd benefit of website heat map tools is an extension of previous point. In essence, we know that Google uses factors such as ‘time on site’ as the ranking factor in their algorithm.
In other words, Google are rewarding the sites with great visitors experience with the higher rankings and increased traffic. Of course, this makes perfect sense Google wants to offer up the very best sites for the specific keyword phrase so the better the website performs the more Google is going to want to send it traffic.
All this means that investing in the simple, low-cost website heat map tool and implementing the changes to your website design, architecture and content in light of your discoveries can have significant effect on the traffic you receive.
In short, whether you want to make more money from your advertising, produce the better user experience, increase your social media followers or sell more products website heat map tools can help.
They show you exactly how your visitors interact with your site, where the “focus” areas are i.e. the best places for your advertising and which areas of your site get skipped over time to rewrite or reformat that specific content for improved readership.
And let us be honest; who does not want website that visitors love and that earns more money than it does right now?
