How a heat map can save your website

May 25, 2010 | Posted by Carolyn Pikoulas
How can you tell whether the content on your website is working? Simple -- look at a heat map! A heat map is a visual representation of how visitors interact with a website. One of the biggest advantages of a heat map is that it gives insight into visitor behavior that you may not be able to glean from Google Analytics data. Here are 4 good reasons why you should examine your own website's heat map:

1. You can understand your visitors' expectations. For instance, if you have an image along with a text link, you may notice that people are expecting to be able to click on the image more than the text (or vice versa). From this, you start to learn what your consumers want from your site, and you can fine tune your site's navigation.
2. You can see what people are NOT clicking on to reveal poorly performing areas of your site. If you're trying to promote an offer and notice that people aren't clicking on it, you can improve the offer, reposition it or change the graphic all together.
3. You can improve your site's layout. People tend to form an ‘F' pattern, when looking at a website. Their eyes naturally move left to right, then down the left side of the page. If you determine that visitors quickly click away from your Home page, it may be because the layout is too confusing or not pleasing to the eye.
4. You can better define your goals. Do you want visitors to click on a promotional offer, sign up for a newsletter, or go straight to your photo gallery? You can start to form more realistic goals by analyzing what appeals most to your visitors and creating more content like that.

There are a number of low-cost, online heat mapping tools that you can use on your website. Interested? We can help!