Which are the best heatmaps for Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Heatmaps give you amazing insight into the way users behave on your website, from the amount of time they spend on certain page elements to the distance they scroll down your landing page or checkout. With so many different heatmaps available – from scrollmaps and confetti maps to mouse movement maps – knowing which are the best heatmaps for conversion rate optimisation can be difficult.

In this post, we’ll explain the differences between four different heatmaps and let you know which ones you should be paying the closest attention to in order to increase your conversion rate and improve your marketing return on investment.

Short landing page? Pay close attention to your clickmaps

The most well-known type of heatmap is the clickmap: a visual representation of where visitors click on your landing page. Clickmaps show clicks on your landing page using a simple system – the more clicked an area is, the warmer it is.

Clickmaps are ideal for learning more about the way users behave on your website’s homepage, as well as on short-form landing pages. Since they plot clicks – instead of time spent on site – they’re most valuable on pages with lots of clickable elements.

The busier your website is, the more you’ll learn from a clickmap. By analysing what your users are clicking on and what they’re ignoring, you’ll be able to diagnose why a homepage, category page or landing page isn’t performing as you expected it to.

Use clickmaps to:

• Analyse user behaviour on homepages, category pages and product pages
• Discover which page elements are attracting the most attention from users, and which aren’t so popular
• Diagnose conversion problems on short-form landing pages and checkouts, and learn what changes you could make to fix these problems

Long landing page? Use scrollmaps to learn how far people scroll

Scrollmaps are a little different from clickmaps. Instead of showing you where users are clicking, they show you how far down your website users are scrolling and how much attention they’re paying to certain parts of your page.

The warmer a certain part of your page, the more often it’s read. Scrollmaps usually start out extremely warm, since almost every visitor will view the top section of your page, and become lighter as users scroll below the fold.

Scrollmaps are ideal for long landing pages, since they let you detect exactly where users are ending their interaction with your page. Use scrollmaps to diagnose issues with your copy or page design that are causing potential customers to lose interest.

Use scrollmaps to:

• Analyse user behaviour on long-form landing pages, product pages, articles and other pages with lots of content below the fold
• Learn more about whether users are truly engaging with your content or just briefly visiting your website before leaving
• Diagnose page elements that are preventing users from reading further, such as buttons or ‘wall of text’ copy that users don’t want to read 

Web form? Use mouse movement maps to track user behaviour.

Mouse movement maps track not just where users click on your website, but where they hover their cursors before clicking. Since there’s an 86% correlation between mouse movement and eye movement, they’re a great indicator of where your users are looking.

Just like clickmaps, mouse movement maps are most effective on busy pages with a large number of clickable elements where clicking is essential to make progress, such as signup forms and checkouts. This is because mouse movement maps let you know exactly where users drop out of your conversion funnel. From bad buttons to overly complicated web forms, you can often discover hidden conversion killers with just one mouse movement map.

Use mouse movement maps to:

• Diagnose problems with signup forms, checkouts and other pages in which users are required to enter personal information
• Discover where users are looking on your page, since mouse movement and eye movement are closely correlated
• Learn which page elements are attracting the most attention from users and which ones are failing to stand out 

Need more user insight? Use confetti maps to discover your audience

Clickmaps might tell you where users are clicking on your website, but they don’t tell you very much about the users. Confetti maps are visual representations of the places users click on your website with additional information about each user. Using confetti maps, you can track variables such as referrer (the URL from which the user reached your website), browser type, search keyword and whether users are visiting your page for the first time or returning to your website.

You might discover that users arriving on your website from search click different page elements than users arriving from social networks. You might find a massive difference in click habits between mobile, tablet and desktop users. You might also discover a significant difference in the browsing habits of new users and returning users.

Links to pages like ‘delivery information’ are often hotspots for people new to your website, but are less clicked on by return visitors.

In addition to variables such as referrer and browser type, confetti maps allow you to learn how long users are spending on your website before clicking. This can help you diagnose issues with content engagement that cause users to click too quickly.

Use confetti maps to:

• Gain additional insight into the way users behave on your website based on their referrer, browser or device type and other variables
• Learn how long users spend on your website before clicking on navigational menus, buttons and other on-site elements
• Compare different traffic sources to see how users behave on your website based on where they arrived from.

Learn more about the best heatmaps for Conversion Rate Optimisation

{{cta(‘b0e270c0-3de5-4cab-b60a-237ddf2d93f9′,’justifyleft’)}} Is your landing page not performing up to expectations? Are users bouncing from your website for an indeterminate reason? Heatmaps can give you new insight into the way your users behave – insight that other Conversion Rate Optimisation tools alone often don’t provide.

If you’d like to learn more about heatmaps, download our free white paper: How To Use Heatmaps To Increase Your Conversion Rate. Inside, you’ll find detailed advice on how you can use heatmaps for CRO, including:

• Four other heatmaps used by Conversion Rate Optimisation experts
• Why mouse movement maps shouldn’t be analysed in isolation
• How you can use heatmaps to learn more during a split test
• How heatmaps can be used to validate new page designs