Heat map analysis: how to visualize your visitors’ behavior

If you want your website to do well online, you need to make sure you get enough visitors to it. It’s very important to provide good quality content and to ensure it’s optimized for search engines. Just having a lot of traffic isn’t enough since the project somehow needs to be financed as well. It doesn’t matter whether you run an online store and sell products or provide information and finance your site through paid advertising: you need your visitors to take action and click on your content. In addition to increasing the number of visitors (known as conversions), you also have to tailor your content so they are more likely to click on it.

The usability of your website has a particularly strong effect on how many conversions your site achieves. The more user-friendly your page, the greater likelihood that your site will be a success. One reason that you’re not getting any conversions could be the simple fact that your call-to-action button is hard to find. An interesting way to analyze the user-friendliness of your own web project is to carry out a heat map analysis.

The heat map analysis is a form of investigation to analyze users and their website behavior. For this purpose, a heat map is created that shows different colors depicting the strengths and weaknesses of how user-friendly each analyzed page is. Just like with a thermal imaging camera, the colors are available for different temperature gradations: the classic heat map consists of the colors red (hot), yellow (warm), and blue (cold). Colors such as orange (medium heat) and green (cool) depict the transitions between the individual heat levels.

Heat maps are by no means an invention of online marketing. As early on as the 19^th century, the Parisian statistician Toussaint Loua published a tabular overview of the different Parisian districts, showing specific characteristics of the population. It was first released in black and white, and later in color. Today, the useful visualizations are not only required in web analysis, but also for presenting weather maps, in energy consultation, or analyzing soccer matches.

Mouse movement tracking

To find out the order in which a visitor scans your website, you can create a mouse movement heat map. This form of visualizing user behavior is not based on eye movements, scrolling behavior, or the number of clicks, but rather on mouse movements. As a rule, this provides a very accurate picture of which areas a user has viewed at a certain point in time. Like eye tracking, this method of analysis needs a recording of the complete user session. You don’t, however, need any special hardware, simply a suitable software solution that enables you to record and analyze movements.

There are several technical possibilities for creating a heat map, which are categorized depending on the intensity and the tracking methods available. This means that tools come in a range of different prices, which is why searching for the right tool in order to analyze user behavior is a question of cost.

• Scripts and plugins: with the help of scripts and extensions for your CMS, which run on your own server, you have full control over the recording of mouse movements and clicks. With the necessary knowledge, you can implement tracking solutions like these. Alternatively, you can use ready-made tools such as hotjar. The JavaScript library provides you with the necessary base, including very detailed documentation so that you can configure mouse tracking for your web project using just a few lines of code. You can then generate a heat map with the recorded data. You can try it for free for 15 days.

• Heat map simulations: if you are rather reluctant to carry out comprehensive analysis because of the costs and time required, you could consider tracking simulation. Different providers offer online services such as EyeQuant or Feng-GUI that simulate the potential behavior of your visitors based on data, algorithms, and experience. To do this, you simply need to upload a screenshot of the page that you want to test, and you’ll receive the corresponding heat map.

• Paid heat map analysis tool: there are also options on the internet in case you need a professional visualization of user behavior that doesn’t require you to have programming skills or expertise. Various paid web services offer their own JavaScript programs for recording and evaluating data. You choose a subscription, insert the corresponding code lines into your web project and define what needs to be tested. Depending on the provider, visualizations of users’ clicks, mouse movements, or scrolling activities are available after tracking has been completed. Some interesting examples of extensive heat map analysis services are Crazy Egg, Clicktale and Mouseflow.

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.