Are heat maps the best way to improve your business website?

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?

How to add PayPal purchase buttons to your Squarespace website

Image of PayPal for business website

To add an e-commerce section to your website, it is difficult to find the right platform for your business.  When we chose Squarespace, we knew we would get Stripe as an e-commerce platform for the website.  We were impressed by the simple to understand sales and revenue reports.  However, choosing the personal plan limited us to only selling one product. 

We needed another option to sell more products on the website.  After looking around we selected PayPal because it is one of the world's widely used e-commerce pay platform.

You can add PayPal buttons on to your Squarespace site without having any coding experience.  The following is simplified steps of how we did.

When creating your Squarespace website

• Enabling a site-wide password allowed us to hide our website from the public
• We created the Page (PayPal buttons only work on a Page) that we wanted to sell the product/service on
• We then added the ‘code injection’ block under the products we wanted to sell

Head to PayPal and sign up for a business account.

• You can add in your bank account details later (ensure you add the details before your website goes live)
• Go to the set up section and select the HTML code section (2)
• Click on the ‘create buttons’ after it opens up the explanation
• Choose the button e.g. ‘Buy Now’ and give it a name
• Select the attributes you want on the button such as quantities, low stock notice, etc
• You can complete the two optional sections for the button
• We recommend you do Step 2 to track sales and revenue which is handy for tax time
• Once you have completed the sections click on the ‘Create’ button
• This takes you to a screen which shows your created HTML code that can be injected to your website
• Copy the HTML code

Go back to your Squarespace website

• Go to your e-commerce page and select edit  
• Go to the ‘Code Injection’ block and paste the PayPal code in to this section and save (the PayPal button should appear)
• Save the Page and click on the button to ensure it takes you to the PayPal site

To edit your button, sign in to PayPal and go to “create buttons’.  Under the button types, click on ‘go to saved buttons’ and select the name of the button that you want to fix.

That is how we were able to add the PayPal buttons to our website.  Adding a PayPal button to your site may sound difficult if you have no coding experience, but this process will make it easier for you to add the buttons to your site.  Have you added PayPal buttons to your Squarespace site?  Did you do it this way or did you find an easier way to create the buttons?