5 Ways Web Heatmaps Help Drive Conversions

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A company's website is pretty much tantamount to being a storefront these days, especially when it comes to e-commerce. When people are visiting your website, ideally you'd like them to not only positively interact with the site but actually complete the desired action. These desired outcomes, known as conversions, are one of the key drivers of e-commerce success. So how do you get users to find their way to that conversion stage? By understanding them better! Using website heatmap tools, you can see how users are interacting with your website, gain important insights about performance, generate leads, and hopefully lead them to conversion by making necessary changes to accomplish that goal. Here are five ways heatmaps can help drive conversions without affecting the end-user experience.

Mouse Tracking

Have you ever looked at your website and wondered where exactly users are clicking when they visit? Mouse tracking can tell you. As part of the heatmap tools, mouse tracking is integral to gaining unique insight from your page visits. This software tracks where a mouse or cursor clicks on a given page. This includes links, hovering over a link, right-clicking into a different page to open a new tab, and more. It's deceptively simple but incredibly useful for the insights it brings.

Scrollmaps

When users are browsing your site, scrollmaps can come in handy. Scrollmaps are a variety of heatmap that tells you where and how far a user scrolls on a page, where they tend to avoid, and how long they stay in an area. Hot spots on the map indicate popular areas of the website while cold spots indicate the opposite. Knowing the hot spots is great because you can use those opportunities to add a CTA or a possible conversion point to the parts of your site attracting the most views. It works with mobile versions of websites, too. Scrollmaps work best by collecting short-term data (two or three business cycles) that you can then analyze with your older data to determine fresh optimization strategies.

Session Recording

A powerful tool, session recording is part of what makes heatmaps work so well. A session, in this case, is the duration of a user's visit to your website including their activities while there. With a session recording tool turned on, you can start recording a session once a visitor hits your landing page or the product page. Then you can easily track their activities as they move along. This can also incorporate mouse clicking and scroll mapping. When the user is on the site it can also give you insights into their location without violating their privacy or being non-compliant. This is very important because you want your customers to trust you and not be tracked in a malicious way like some other websites have a tendency to do. Moreover, you can get an idea of which parts of your conversion funnel are actually creating those conversions and get insight into where customers might be abandoning your page. With these insights and this data, you can optimize your conversion opportunities and eventually find Total success. It's all a matter of paying attention to what's happening during a session recording. Session recordings can add even more value if you have more data, so using this tool as often as possible is conducive to any optimization strategy.

Form Analytics And Understanding User Feedback

When customers are exploring your website, obtaining feedback is crucial to making the experience better and optimizing all possible conversion opportunities. Surveys and forms, while a user is engaged with your site, are excellent opportunities for collecting useful data. Optimizing forms so they aren't long-winded, complicated, redundant, or boring will facilitate more user responses. A user feedback tool is ideal for finding out what users want. Give them a low-effort survey or questionnaire using multiple choice or open text responses. If you want to know why they didn't make a purchase or left a particular page, all you need to do is ask them! That way you can use the information to build a better site and avoid the surprise of finding negative feedback in a review somewhere on the internet. These tools give you a way to indirectly interact with your customers and learn what features they want, fix navigation issues, identify opportunities to add content that helps create conversions, and so much more.

A/B Testing

In the world of research and analytics, A/B Testing (split testing) is pretty important. As a user experience research metric, it's a way to test two unique versions of a website, email, page, post, etc. for the purpose of measuring which version performs better. One group of users can provide feedback on version A while another group gets version B. Color schemes, font selection, font size, image placement, and even link locations can differ between the two copies. You can measure which version leads to the most conversions and optimize the final version of the site based on your recordings and observations. A/B testing can be very useful and get pretty complicated, so using analytics software to help can definitely smooth the process for everyone while supplying access to data you can use.

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