You’ve done it – you’ve launched your small business website. You’ve deployed your advertising army and are ready to sit back and watch visitors come pouring in. You eagerly await that first person to sign up online, or that first person to pick up the phone and dial your toll free number. But wait, there’s something wrong… nothing’s happening! Your analytics package tells you people are coming to your website, they’re just not doing what you want them to do. Is your call to action not clear enough? Do they not see your toll free number? What are you missing?
It’s time to stop guessing and know exactly how your visitors see and use your website. It’s time for heatmaps.
What Are Heatmaps?
Heatmaps are a tool to help you visualize which elements on your website are more demanding of a visitor’s attention. This can help you identify potential flaws in design, such as images that distract visitors from taking your desired action. There are three primary types of heatmaps: image file, click-tracking, and eye-tracking. Eye-tracking heatmaps involve using live testers and sophisticated headset equipment to gather data, and are generally cost-prohibitive for small business use. For this reason, I’ll focus on the first two instead.
Image File Heatmaps
An image file heatmap, like the one generated above by Feng-GUI, analyzes an image and shows you what parts should theoretically stand out to visitors. When looking at these heatmaps, you’re mainly trying to figure out if there’s anything that distracts visitors from the main purpose of your website. If the focus of your website is to get subscriptions, for example, a large image or advertisement below the subscribe link may cause visitors to look past the action you want them to take and let their focus wander elsewhere. Scrutinize any attention-hogging elements like oversized pictures, 3rd-party advertisements, or excessively large font and adjust your design so that your images complement rather than block your goals.
In practice, I’ve found image file heatmaps best serve to point out any glaring potential distractions before a website launches. Using them to diagnose problems with an existing website can be a bit risky, since they rely solely on visuals and don’t speak to the visitor’s actual intent in the context of your website.
Feng-GUI has both a free-to-use version found here that lets you upload image files (.png or .jpg under 1MB in size) and receive an instant heatmap. They also offer paid services that give you more control and better maps.
Click-Tracking Heatmaps
Click-tracking heatmaps, like the one above from Crazy Egg, use click-tracking over time to show you the hotspots of where your visitors are actually clicking on your pages. When looking at these heatmaps, you’re looking less for major visual distractions, and more for contextual attention derailers. It’s not so much what your visitors are looking at, but what they’re finding that causes them to click. Is there a link to another page that gets your visitors off the correct path? Is there a search bar that’s drawing people in before they even see what’s on this page? Is there an important link that’s not getting any attention at all?
Crazy Egg is, well, crazy good in that it goes way beyond simple heatmaps. As you get more comfortable using heatmaps to analyze your webpages, Crazy Egg offers a strong array of additional reports, including a click map overlay and their amazing Confetti map. Confetti not only tells you where visitors are clicking, but also where the visitors that made those clicks came from, including what search engine terms they used or what referring sites sent them your way. You can get all this from just $9 / month. Considering how much it can do to help you get more out of your online business, this small investment can have immediate and dramatic ROI.
Starting Slowly, Work with a Designer
It’s easy with heatmaps to jump to conclusions and start pointing fingers at what’s not working and why when it comes to your website. My greatest advice when it comes to heatmaps is to get started slowly with small changes and, if you’re not a designer yourself, enlist someone who has a keen eye for such things before making any broad or sweeping changes to your website. Heatmaps are a tool, and without proper expertise, you can easily do more harm than good.
Have you used heatmaps before? Share your results!
These are great tools, i personally use clicktale which has the best of the bunch in my opinion. Its heatmaps are second to none.
Hey Sam,
I agree, ClickTale is an amazing tool. I’ve used it with websites in the past primarily for their visitor recording – that feature goes WAY beyond heatmaps into the realm of live user testing. For any significant usage, the cost is a bit heavier than the free / low cost tools in the post — but it can definitely be a worthwhile investment.