In the last couple of years, website heatmaps took control of the whole internet.
Numerous sites can provide you with a great heatmap analysis service, and qualitative data analytics. It is fair to say that with the help of heatmaps, you can read out much crucial information about your potential buyer’s behavior, which no other tools can handle.
Heatmaps are great because you can find out how your visitors browse your site. If there is a single step where you lose conversions, with a heatmap analysis there is a big chance that you find that out.
Minor issues, like a non-functioning CTA button, or a poorly maintained landing page can generate lower conversion rates and revenue. However, it is really hard to notice these mistakes. Without heatmap analysis, you can only determine that something is wrong, but you have no clue about the exact issue.
In this article, I will try to introduce all the variables that can decide the launch time of a website heatmap analytics and all the factors that contribute to a faster introduction.
Table of Contents
Factors that can decide the time of the implementation
Let’s see some factors that can help you in the decision when the right time arises for the introduction of a heatmap tool!
The stage of your traffic
You can pay millions of Euros to create an analysis of the given data if there is no traffic yet it won’t work. Heatmaps only work well if your site is full of potential buyers, who engage in interactions (clicks, scrolls, etc.) with your site.
Be sure that you have enough traffic to properly analyze the data. An 80-element pattern is not enough to draw meaningful conclusions about the given data.
The development of your site
Creating a sufficient place for a heatmap not only depends on the amount of traffic you have but the stage of your site as well.
If you want to change a major part of your site, you better wait for the implementation of heatmaps.
The problem with this is the following: at the start of your data tracking period, your heatmap shows you patterns where the user spends more time, or where they are stuck at. But, if you rearrange something crucial, your whole qualitative data will be meaningless.
For example, your heatmap will show you red circles, but you can’t decide that they belong to the new updates, or that there was something bad there with your previous version.
The complexity of your site
Every complex website requires a heatmap. And there is no such complex website where it’s impossible to introduce this analysis.
But the more complicated your site, the more time it gets to optimize it.
You have to define what you want to measure on every single subpage, you need to define the paths and interactive elements. So be aware to leave time for it, and don’t want to save the whole planet at the last minute.
The budget
Yes, implementing an effective heatmap service is not always free. Most of the time, it is quite expensive. So you have to take into consideration how much you want to spend on this data analyzer tool. There are other measurement tools such as a session replay or an analytics platform which also cost money. You have to decide what you really need.
Luckily, on Capturly, heatmaps are part of the free package. Moreover, they give you unlimited heatmaps for free, and it includes automatic data capture. Many competitors in this market don’t give you these extras on the free package.
User Feedback
Implementing a heatmap can also create a worrying mood for your customers from data theft, or sensitive data.
Whether your heatmap is secure or not, if your customers are afraid of the possible negative outcomes, you have to wait a little till they realize its safety. There are a bunch of ways how you can prove that:
- With Statistical data – convince your customers with real-time data, that a heatmap tool can’t damage their privacy.
- Introducing the positive effects – convince them that the advantages that come with heatmaps are more significant than the opposite.
- Creating a transparent site – if your site contains all the information about the current regulations, and how you store their data, they will be more likely to trust you.
What are the experts’ opinions about the right time of implementing a heatmap?
Most of the experts say that the factors that I mentioned earlier can influence the decision about implementing a heatmap. However, they don’t believe that it is always important to consider these variables every time.
For example, implementing a heatmap service even before your site generates traffic, is not a big issue at all, according to them.
Moreover, there are some benefits of doing that: let’s imagine that you create a huge online advertising campaign to introduce your site to your customers. You spend an enormous amount of money, so you are sure that more than 10,000 targeted users will visit your site.
If you implement the heatmap after the start of the campaign, you won’t get a crystal clear overall picture of their behavioral patterns. What if they didn’t understand something the first time, but then they started to figure it out?
In this case, there is a chance that you only track the data right after their first try, and you lost a lot of potential buyers without you realizing it.
The general rule for analytics is the sooner the better.
Factors when a heatmap is crucial
However, in case of getting into a negative effect of some of your key figures implementing a heatmap is essential. In this section, I share most of these situations.
When the conversion rate is lower than your projected numbers
Your goals in connection with your site can be called conversions. A well-suited conversion can show you how well your business is going from time to time.
In contrast, a conversion rate can show you a percentage ratio, where your number of conversions is divided by the total visitors and then multiplied by 100.
The average percentage of the conversion rate is between 2% to 5%, but it always depends on what field you are working in.
So after you define your conversions you have to set a projected conversion rate and take care to stay over it. If you can’t do that for a constant period, there is an issue. However, solving it is not an easy process. Without a data analytics tool, you can only guess what the users don’t understand exactly.
A data analytics tool can help you resolve these situations. Of all of the possible options, the heatmap is the most obvious choice. Everybody understands its method quickly, and you don’t require a sense of math to understand the correlations.
When you want to improve the User Experience
User experience overall all the factors that can cause positive and negative feelings in your users about your website in this case. There are seven different aspects, which are all equally important to consider when you create a site.
These are:
- valuable
- accessible
- desirable
- credible
- findable
- usable
- useful
Of course, a possible implementation of a heatmap service can’t help you to improve all. In fact, just on their own, it can’t handle any of your issues.
However, it can scout your weak points.
When you are not sure that your site is optimized for other devices
I think it’s a great plan to give access to your site from all the following devices:
- Personal Computer
- Mobile phone
- Tablet
- Television
- Smart Home device (not always possible, not always worth maintaining it)
But these arrangements are not always as simple as it seems externally.
For example in the case of a smartphone, you have to maintain a responsive layout to your site (including pictures, viewports, fluid layout), avoid or rearrange the pop-up ads, and improve the loaded times.
As you can see, there are so many aspects here. To shape these subtasks perfectly you need to supervise your accomplishments.
For tasks about supervising, one of the best tools that you can use is a heatmap.
A/B testing
There is a very common thing you need to do when you try to improve your site to increase user experience or your conversion rate. It is called testing!
It means that you compare ideas (connected to your site) and decide which one is better with the help of a predefined method. You can do this analysis with hypothesis testing, a confidence interval, or you may define a p-value.
But please add two things here:
- You need high traffic for both of your sites. For example, if you want to define it with a confidence interval, It depends on the confidence level you want to get, (most probably 0,8 or 0,95) and the statistical power you need (1-100, it’s the chance of having a significant result). The more probable you want to get, the more data you need.
- You also require a data visualization tool, as it takes so much time to understand your raw data. Here, heatmaps can definitely help you. This tool can reveal whether the “A” or the “B” site engages more people in different places, so it is easy to create conclusions about which one works better at different sections.
When you want to define each referrers path
I think you have already heard of scroll heatmaps and click heatmaps, but there is a third way. It is called segment heatmap which opens up many new opportunities.
Just think about when you advertise for two different segments on two different platforms. Let’s say on Youtube, and TikTok. You want to lead them both to your website and encourage them to buy something.
You analyze their route through a scrolling heatmap, and you realize that many of them went down to the bottom of your site, but not everybody. With the standard heatmaps, you can’t split these users, so you can’t find the relations between the referrer’s site and the path of the users of each platform.
Of course, a segment heatmap can be used for splitting other attributes, just like:
- Operating system
- Device
- Browsers
So if you have a perception that you can categorize your clicks, or scrolls into attributes, use this function on Capturly!
Conclusion
Although there are some factors that can decide whether you need to implement a heatmap tool or not, many successful marketers advise starting to use it as soon as possible. You can win more with the positives than you would lose with the negative scenarios.
You may ask what can be a negative effect! For example, a poor user experience, decreased conversion rate, or conversion funnel friction. All of these examples can tear down your success.
Also, there are some crucial situations when implementing a heatmap is urgent. Notice those moments, and make changes as long as it’s not too late.
These situations can be a bad user experience, a decreased conversion rate, or conversion funnel friction.
Recognizing these negative impacts are also hard, so I advise you to use an analytics platform that will help you track your data month by month.
You can also try this analytics tool by claiming the free plan from Capturly Analytics.