Are heat maps the best way to improve your business website?
Christopher Seeto
Image of Heatmap website
When you begin a startup business you are always in testing and building phase. It is especially important when you have an ecommerce site as you constantly want to improve it. The hardest part about this is getting feedback from customers or website visitors. So how do you overcome this problem and what tool or tools can you use?
During the course of setting up our website we came across the term ‘heat maps’. Heat maps to us are a way of analysing visitor behaviour so that you can find ways to increase conversion and improve the website. Many people think that you need coding skills to set it up but you don’t.
There are two interesting free heat maps that we are using. They are Heatmap and Hotjar. Heatmap is mostly a click based heat map, while Hotjar works by tracking people’s eyes when they see your page and clicks. So what is the difference?
The clicks are visitor actions completed on your page like clicking on images, buy button or social media icons. While eye tracking is exactly that, tracking the eyes of website visitors as they look at information or images on the page. The more traffic your site has, the better you are able to understand what visitors are looking for. It also lets you analyse what is working on your site and why people click to buy certain items.
To install heat maps on your site, all you need to do is sign up and then get the HTML or Java script code. Once you have obtained the code, you need to inject them in to the ‘head’ section of the website page that you want to track.
For people who are using Squarespace, all you need to do is to sign in to your account and go to ‘settings’ and then click on ‘Inject code’ and then paste the code in to the ‘head’ section.
As to the question if heat maps are the best way to improve your website, the answer is yes. Although we have not been using it long, we can see its value. Facebook is one of the many tech companies who use heat maps. So when you think about it, if they are using it then there must be some value in it. Do you believe heat maps improve websites? What heat map apps do you use or recommend? Or are they a waste of time?