Web pages shouldn’t be considered static – meaning, you have to regularly tweak its look or update its content to keep it current.
Heat mapping is one such metric that effectively shows you how visitors interact with your landing page. Heat mapping software programs use computer algorithms to simulate where people look and click on your page.
Using a heatmap can allow you to do several things, including:
- Determine exactly where links and ads should go
- Get more visitors to purchase a product or fill out a form
- Predict how site visitors will interact with your page in the future
- Make Web usability testing easy to implement
Heat mapping shows the density of user clicks using a red to green color-coded system. Red indicates a large number of clicks while green indicate fewer clicks.
Here’s a sample heatmap from a U.S. government website.
Not all heat mapping programs are considered the same and while we may recommend one here, we do not guarantee individual results.
Google Analytics offers a tool that shows general web site usage statistics. However, it does not track click ratios for individual links. For instance, if you have two links on the page that go to the same place, Google’s tool will combine the results.
CrazyEgg is another utility that’s much better than Google since it is a visually-based program that allows you to see your page’s effectiveness at a glance. It gives you an idea of how your site is performing from your audience’s perspective, the only perspective that really matters in the end.
Whatever you do, heat mapping is definitely a great tool for helping you increase conversions.