Heat Mapping and Conversions: How You Can Improve Your Conversions With Heat Mapping

by Toby Oddy

Is there something you can do to make your website drive more revenue? Maybe you need a full-on website redesign. Or maybe you just need to tweak a few elements.

The trick is, how do you figure this out?

​Every marketer would love the opportunity to get inside of their audience members’ heads. Unfortunately, it’s just not possible to do that.

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How You Can Improve Your Conversions With Heat Mapping

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​With tools like heat mapping, though, you can get eerily close. The most popular heat mapping tests include click maps, eye-tracking/hover maps, and scroll-tracking maps. While each of these maps are equally valuable, they tell you different things about how your website is driving conversions.

You can increase conversions on your site with the following heat mapping strategies:

• Focus on your CTAs and CTA buttons

CTAs and CTA buttons are the main method for websites to drive conversions. As such, they should be the focal point of any page and, accordingly, of any strategy to drive conversions.

The best way to test how your CTAs are performing is with a hover map. If you're tracking your CTA links (as you should be) it's relatively simple to see how many visitors are clicking your CTAs. What's more valuable to know from a heat map, though, is who isn't clicking and, more importantly, why they're not clicking. A hover map can provide this insight.

Hover maps were designed as an alternative to the more high-maintenance eye tracking tests. While the results don't correlate exactly--there's no way to prove that a person hovers their mouse over the same spot on a site that they hover their eyes over--it is considered a solid test of audience attention.

How to understand and act on CTA data from hover tests:

What you'll want to pay close attention to is how many people hover over your CTA buttons compared to how many people click on them. This will give you a good read on how convincing your calls to action really are.

If lots of people hover, but don't click, you know you're grabbing attention--but not driving action. If that's the case, you likely need to change your CTA messaging. If people aren't hovering and therefore not even paying attention to your CTAs, though, you need to shake up the design of your buttons or of your page as a whole.

• Think about what elements you can get rid of in your design, and what you should emphasize

Good design can make for a wonderful user experience. In turn, this can make for a happy audience and increased conversions. Bad design, though, can distract or even frustrate. The end result? Users leaving your site early, leading to decreased conversions.

Heat mapping does a great job of showing you what may be doing more harm than good. There is no bad time to pay attention to this, but if you’re planning a site redesign make sure to pay special attention to what works and what doesn’t.

When it comes to understanding what you should emphasize or eliminate on your site, all three of the heat maps can play an important role.

The things you should use each map to understand include:

Use the scroll map to see what is bringing people down your page. Often times, people trickle off a page as it moves down. What you want to keep an eye out for, though, is people dropping off the page early or, hopefully, staying on the page much longer than normal for your site. Oftentimes, images play a specific role in lulling people off the page or keeping them engaged, so you’ll want to pay special attention to any images that jump out near these trends.

A hover map will show you navigation options that are being ignored, which will tell you, you should either streamline and get rid of the option or call more attention to it. Finally, a click map will show you where you’re missing opportunities in the form of images or text that people are clicking on that don’t have links.

Conclusion - Put Your Heat Mapping Results to Work

Remember that to get any actionable conclusions from heat mapping, you must treat it like a scientific experiment and powerful digital fuel that will propel your marketing efforts forward. Form hypotheses, run several tests that last several days and include a reasonable amount of participants. After this, analyze the results, document them, and make sure to implement your findings.

Still--the work isn’t done yet! Continue to run your heap maps, and continue to tweak as your optimizations result in new findings.
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About the author:

Toby Oddy
Toby is a professional digital marketing expert and the godfather of digital marketing for gambling. The CEO and Founder of Digital Fuel Marketing, he strives to help his clients succeed. He used to work for coral, Ladbrokes & Mansion.