What is a website heatmap and how does it work: Your complete guide for analytics

Large data sets are difficult to deal with. However, thanks to the advancement in technology introduced with a website heatmap. As a digital marketer, heatmaps are now your basic need to monitor your website’s performance. For instance, how many people engaged on your website, visitors’ location, the bounce rate, the number of visitors, and e.t.c. Let’s read further to understand in detail what a website heatmap is and how it works.

What is a website heatmap?

In simple words, website heatmaps are visual representations and the fastest way to track visitors’ activity on your website. They show data in a colored form, making it far easier to understand visitors’ interactions on the website.

How does a heatmap for a website work?

Is it the first time you heard the word “heatmap”? Okay, so let us clarify that you might not be familiar with the term “heatmap”; however, it is not something new. In fact, you have come across heatmaps while watching weather forecasts or while reading about population density. Now, the question is- how does a website heatmap work? Well, it depends on your goals and ideas. However, here are some of the common ways how it works:

- Determining goals
- Using the right heatmap tools
- The setup of a heat map

Determining goals

You always have goals and ideas before website development. Similarly, before setting up a web heat map, you need to determine your goals. A business is nothing without goals; therefore, every heat mapping activity should begin with a goal, and your analysis should follow from those aims.

Using the right heatmap tools

The right heatmap tool means that all your queries are accurately answered. Moreover, due to the expansion of digital business and e-commerce websites, you will find countless heat maps for websites. Therefore, finding the right heatmap tool to find out the number of visitors on your website, bounce rate, conversion rate, and the location of the visitors is challenging. To find the ideal heat map for your website, make sure you can effortlessly personalize your sample traffic through it.

The setup of a heat map

The final step of a website heatmap is setting it up. Finalize the pages that require a heatmap so that the data can commence to be collected. Next, select the heatmap type that can be used for your visitor or consumer behavior research. Once you’ve decided which pages you want insights on, put up heatmaps for them. Every program will require you to install a smart code on the website you wish to examine in order to plot a heatmap on it. This smart code instructs the tool to begin monitoring interactions and motions.

Types of heatmaps

One heatmap is not enough to examine a visitor’s behavior. Therefore, you will need different types of heatmaps for websites to determine a user’s behavior. Some of them are:

Click heatmaps
Scroll heatmap
Eye-tracking heatmap
Attention heatmap
Dead click heatmap

Click heatmaps

Click maps, the commonest type of heat map, give you insight about where visitors or consumers clicked on your webpage(s). They display the data that determines which element receives the most clicks and which element receives the fewest.

Scroll heatmap

Suppose you want to know which website page engages the more customers and which page the less, set up a scroll map. It shows how far visitors scrolled a specific page.

Eye-tracking heatmap

These types of heatmaps use advanced technology sensors to track users’ eye movements to examine the focus of attention. The data you collect from the eye-tracking heatmap gives you an overview regarding how well or captivating your website appears to visitors.

Attention heatmap

You can find out how long a visitor spends on each section of your website on average with an attention map. You’ll learn which sections of your website your users pass over and which ones they spend the most time on.

Dead click heatmap

As a user, you might have clicked or tapped somewhere on the page that is an unclickable element. The dead click heatmap displays the data of those unclickable elements so that you can make the user experience better and prevent inconvenience.

Conclusion

Website heatmaps are a mandatory tool for digital marketers or business owners. Moreover, they are also an essential tool to monitor consumer behavior analytics. It is tremendously important to use the heatmaps correctly, if not used correctly, it will result in wrong data.