Use a Heat Map to Better Understand Your Web Conversion

Tony Fazzini - August 31, 2012

A lot of businesses are using analytics to test new ideas and evolve to better landing pages. A baseline question is why does a page lose searchers? Is there poor content that is not engaging? The true answer can be any combination of a number of variables that all would potentially need to be tested. Where can you begin? Heat maps!
Heat maps are a way to understand where website viewers are “looking” on your webpage by showing you the “hotspots” that viewers navigate toward. This allows a business to see what their visitors see first and rearrange a page so that the most important content is in the right place.

With this data, a web developer would be able to modify the position of where the checkout button is located, or directions to the business location, etc. There are many companies that offer this software, some are free (www.labsmedia.com) and others require subscriptions (www.crazyegg.com).

Once you have subscribed to a service, they will ask you some questions about your site and see how many pages you would like to track in order to get the process started. Once this data has been entered, they will give you some code to be inserted into the page so that users experience data can be harvested by the website and viewed through the tools. Make sure when using a tool that you give it ample time to collect good data! It is unwise to continually change a page with small sets of data to back it up. This will typically lead to very small tweaks to a site done very often. This will never allow you and your website to get ahead in the process. I would recommend at least 3 months of data before changing a page to make sure you have an accurate idea of what you are viewing.

After you have decided the changes you would like to make, do not delete the old page! It is better to test the new format based on the heat map against the current page first to make sure that these changes will in fact have a positive result.