Heat Maps: What They are and How Businesses Can Benefit From Them

Your website is central to your business's success. It allows prospective customers to learn about your brand, contact your company, make appointments, engage with content, buy things, and more.

The question: Are visitors engaging with your website as you intend?

If you’re not sure how visitors interact with your website, it might be time to add heat maps to your website to find out, such as where they click and how far they scroll down different pages.

This guide explains what you need to know to get started with heat maps so you can use them to optimize your website.

What Is a Heat Map?

A heat map is a data visualization tool that creates pictures of how visitors interact with websites. It measures things like how far users scroll on a web page and where they click. Heat maps provide business owners, marketers, and web developers insight into what aspects of a website perform well and which could be improved.

Instead of using numbers, which can be confusing when it comes to website reporting, heat maps use colors to show data. The colors make heat maps user-friendly and easy to understand because the different tones reflect numerical values. Typically, bright, hot hues indicate high levels of engagement and activity, and cool, dim ones lower levels.

What Value Do Heat Maps Provide?

Website heat maps allow you to clearly track and understand visitor behavior, giving you the information needed to improve the online experience and overall performance of your business website.

Heat maps combine quantitative and qualitative data. They allow you to identify behavior patterns, clicks, and other actions through data presented in a visual format. These visual tools are more valuable than numbers-based website tracking tools like Google Analytics (GA). In most cases, GA can tell you that you have an issue with your website, such as low time on page. Heat maps go beyond that, showing what’s preventing visitors from engaging with the page for longer.

Types of Heat Maps

There are several types of heat maps, including:

Eye-Tracking Heat Maps

Eye-tracking heat maps leverage eye position and movement measurements to see where users look on a webpage. Eye tracking is done with a webcam. It allows you to identify how long visitors spend on web pages, what they look at, and whether they viewed a page element for an inordinately long or short time.

Mouse-Tracking Heat Maps

Mouse tracking heat maps show you where website users hovered their cursor on a laptop (or a finger on a smartphone) the longest. This information can help you identify webpage elements that perform best with visitors because they spend significant time on them.

Be aware that mouse tracking is not always completely reliable. Visitors may not always be looking at the spot where their mouse is when they’re on a page.

Scroll Maps

Scroll maps are visual depictions of website visitor scrolling behavior. They show how far users move down web pages, allowing you to identify barriers to engaging with all the content. A bad scroll rate could also indicate a page is too long.

Click Maps

Click maps can help you identify where your visitors click on web pages — or not. This information can help you optimize your calls to action (CTAs) and CTA buttons so you can generate more leads and business.

How to Install Heat Maps

Adding heat maps to your website is likely easier and more cost-effective than you think. Popular heat mapping software includes Mouseflow, Hotjar, and Looker. Many offer free trials and tiered plans that are effective for most business types. A relatively small investment in heat mapping software will pay off in an improved website visitor experience and digital performance.

Once you start your trial, you will receive instructions on how to install the heat map software. In most cases, it’s as simple as adding a bit of code to your site, and you can immediately start monitoring your heat maps to improve website performance.

Heat Maps: The Final Word

Most businesses that depend on their websites to bring in business can benefit from heat maps. They can help you visualize data to better understand how your website visitors interact with your pages and the elements on them. Heat maps can help you optimize your website to improve visitor engagement and conversion rates.

Now that you understand the value heat maps can deliver, isn’t it time to start researching software providers to identify the best option for your business?

Bonus content: Check out common website errors that could harm your brand.