Heatmap: To Optimize Website Conversion Rate

Consider the situation. You got to a mall and find a very fancy store. You find a lot of customers in the store as well. So, you end up going inside. While checking out the products, you find that they are of high-quality but equally expensive. Since you do not find them worth the money; you leave the store and go to some other one which offers equally excellent products at a lower price range. This same scenario works across all digital platforms and e-commerce stores. With ample marketing strategies and tactics, you can bring in traffic. But the key challenge is to have a good conversion rate.

A good heatmap website conversion means converting the traffic that comes to the site into leads for customer acquisition. High traffic gets recognition for the website, but high conversions generate revenue. And the bottom line for all the marketing strategies and business models across the digital platforms is to generate an appreciable amount of revenue. For marketing and conversion optimization, there is no one size fits all strategy. It varies according to several parameters. Nowadays, along with marketing models, there are several other methods for conversion rate optimization (CRO). One of the most underrated and unheard of methods are the heatmaps.

What are heatmaps?

While studying the financial market, we usually study reports for various regions to find a profit, loss, sales, and other parameters. It gives us a fair idea of the market requirements and the need to improvise the methods. This is exactly what heatmaps do, but for a website. 

The heatmaps are a visual representation in the form of graphs, providing customer interaction and behavior on the site. Believe it or not, when they say, they monitor every activity that you perform on the web; it is completely true. This is exactly how heatmaps work. By tracking the user activity. It helps us understand the pain points for a website. Some reasons which can act as a barrier for the high conversion rate include:

• Cluttered landing page
• Confusing navigation
• Poorly presented content
• Broken call-to-action (CTA)
• Website isn’t compatible with mobile phones
• Overflow of content and information

Benefits and importance of heat mapping

According to the statistics, only 21% of the marketers can successfully implement the content marketing programs and get the expected rate of investment (ROI). This is a very low percentage compared to marketers using the various tactics and strategies. These statistics also make us realize the need for better heatmap website conversion. The heatmaps are one such method to help you increase online conversion. They are not just limited to statistics through big numbers, but more than that they help you visualize the customer interaction with the site. With the color-coding, you can understand the pain-points and strength of the site for conversion optimization. It offers a list of benefits which include:

• Know which elements get the least attention: You need to remove all the clutter from the site for easy navigation. For e.g., there is an image that people overlook most of the time. You can easily remove it, as it grabs no attention.

• They help in improving the navigation: The heatmaps allow you to track user movement, helping you understand where the customer is getting lost. For e.g., a website offers several courses such as ms in data analytics, digital marketing, cloud computing etc. The customers come to the site, like the courses, and want to contact the service providers for the same. But they have to scroll all the way down to find the contact details. You can easily improve the navigation by placing the contact button on the top for easier navigation and access. This further increases the leads and conversion rate.

• A budget-friendly method: Unlike a few years ago, when you had to spend an appreciable amount to carry out surveys to understand the user-behavior, nowadays, you can easily do it through the web. In fact, it is one of the easiest methods for data analysis. People tend to change their behavior and choices when under observation. But this is not the case with heatmaps.

Enhance and optimize the most viewed section:

You do not want to present a poor show. Suppose that the call-to-action part gets a lot of views. However, the customer gets distracted because of the advertisement placed just next to it and clicks on the advertisement instead of completing the purchase. This is one of the most observed things in e-commerce conversion optimization. You can then remove or change the place of advertisement, or any sort of distractions for the user. Also, you can understand which section is getting the highest views and clicks. You can further enhance the content and web design for conversion optimization.

All these details seem like minor ones, but they can affect heatmap website conversion in several ways. Many times, people make a good website and do not perform any research or analyze the website for months together. This leads to a decline in conversion rates. 

Types of heatmaps

The heatmap is not just for the overall interaction of the customers with the site. It is about tracking every activity of the users. And to do so, there are mainly three types of heatmaps, which include:

• Hover heatmaps: These heatmaps track how the user moves over the site, and where it pauses while navigating through the page. It also allows you to understand the correlation between where the customer is looking and the cursor placement. 

• Click heatmaps: These heatmaps vary according to the number of clicks. These are color-coded according to the range of clicks on a specific location at the site. It helps in understanding the density of viewers in every region across the site.

• Scroll heatmaps: It provides the number of people who have scrolled to a specific point on the site. It further helps in the website’s optimization by shifting the regions for easier navigation. 

Once you gather all the statistics through the heatmaps, it provides a clear picture of conversion optimization. Several platforms offer heatmap facilities along with the integration of A/B testing for better data provisions. 

Ways to increase website conversions with heatmaps

After having all the data, you need to study and understand it well. You can easily increase website conversions with heatmaps through the following methods:

• Reduction in cart abandonment: Many times, people add the product to the cart and abandon it. It is not just because they lose interest. It can also be because of the complicated page structure. Make it easy for the customers. Also, do not place any promotional banners or content above the checkout button. This leads to the distraction of customers from the primary purpose.

• Optimization of CTA: The call-to-action buttons can help you grab the attention of the customers. Track the eye movement of the customers using the heatmaps and place the CTA at those points to gravitate attention.

There are several other methods, like real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring for heatmap website conversion, to help you generate leads and increase conversion rates. The heatmaps work at the backend for implementing the marketing strategies. In fact, most users do not know about the presence of heatmaps, which is a plus point for the marketers as it provides organic data. 

Conclusion

In brief, it is no tough nut to have a website. But, the optimization and having a good conversion on the website requires a lot of drill and effort. The growing technology has put all the digital platforms on the same pedestal. You need to constantly and improvise the strategies and plans for a good e-commerce conversion rate or for other sites as well. Customers are the lifeline of any business. So, while implementing the strategies, it is important to understand their behavior and interaction patterns to obtain effective results. Various tools are available for the integration and optimization of the website according to the customer’s expectations. So, why not convert all the traffic into customers with all these tactics?