By creating heat maps to analyze users and their website behavior, you can gain valuable insights into how well your website’s layout and design works regarding functionality and usability. However, the web analysis results need to be classified and analyzed correctly. Even though you can get quite a good impression of how often a link was clicked on, a heat map doesn’t reveal whether the user found what they were looking for. You won’t know the reasons why they clicked on your site (because of the positioning of certain elements, by accident, etc.).
For this reason, you should always consider other pieces of data when carrying out a heat map analysis. In particular, the bounce rate or how long the visitor stayed is worth noting. A 100% reliable statement about whether a particular element of your web project achieves the desired level of usability can only be obtained by asking your visitors directly.
Sites with low traffic can often experience problems: the lower the site traffic is, the lower the significance of the heat map analysis and the greater the possibility of misinterpretation – similar to with A/B testing. Since each visitor accesses and uses your website differently, you need to collect data over a long period of time so that clear trends have time to form. Using heat maps on dynamic web projects can be problematic since the content regularly changes. While you can focus on elements that stay fixed in place such as navigation menus, it is hard to measure how much influence certain content has if it constantly changes.