How to use visitor data to perk up website conversions

Whether you are a brick-and-mortar or click-and-order business, having a good website is an indispensable part of your growth curve.

What makes a good website? Well, that's subjective—a lot of factors contribute to a site's success. However, understanding your visitor's behavior and realigning your website goals to suit their needs solves half the problem.

In this blog, we'll tell you how you can use heatmaps to decipher visitor data and boost your website conversions.

But first, what is a heatmap?

Search Business Analytics defines a heatmap as "a two-dimensional representation of data in which values are represented by colors." A simple example of a heatmap that we've seen all our lives would be a weather forecast report, where green to red colors are used to indicate the severity of rainfall or bad weather.

To put it in website terms, heatmaps are a color-coded (visual) representation of areas of a page that get maximum attention from visitors.

When can you use a heatmap? 

Use a heatmap when you want to identify the deal-breakers (i.e. barriers to conversions) on your website or landing pages.

Let's say you have an eCommerce website, and you want to figure out why visitors don't make it all the way to purchase even after coming to the product page. In this case, you can create a heatmap for the product page and see why people drop off—whether it is a usability issue, bad placements of CTAs, or just poor content that's not enticing enough.

Heatmaps can put things in a new light when you want to...

 1. Redesign an existing website

Creating a new website can give designers and marketers sleepless nights. That's why it's important to get some insights from your old website. Use a heatmap to see what has and hasn't worked with your target audience so you can choose the right colors, layout, words, and design for your new site.

Case Study

If you go to the Zoho PageSense website, you will see a set of products listed on the top banner we use for cross-promotion. When we redesigned our site layout, we used heatmaps to see which other products our visitors were clicking on. This insight was helpful in choosing the right products to display in our new design.

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2. Improve content marketing effort 

How do you know if your content is leading to conversions? Attention and scroll maps to the rescue! See which parts of your content visitors spend more time on, which ones they bounce off from, and how far they scroll to reach your call-to-action (CTA). This data can be helpful in deciding where you want to show your USP and CTA that will feed your funnel.

Case Study

Recently, one of our customers found their blog was getting good traffic but not enough conversions. They configured a scroll map and noticed only 1% of the visitors made it to the CTA. Further, they checked where 25% and 60% of their audience bounced off. To fix this, they placed one more CTA at the top fold and reduced the drop-off rate by 40%. Read the full case study.

3. Create a seamless user experience 

A bad user experience (UX) can cost you a pretty penny. If you want to make more visitors happy, you will have to give them a smooth user experience from start to finish. Heatmaps show you how visitors navigate from one page to another so you can find if there are breaks in the UI and fix them.

4. Identify distracters that kill conversions 

Visitors lose track when you overload your page with images, moving elements, and text. With heatmaps, you can see if your page has elements that distract visitors and then weed those elements out.

Sometimes you might notice that people click on non-clickable elements. This means you have to either make the element clickable or remove what makes it look clickable.

Case Study

When we configured a heatmap for our home page, we noticed a lot of people clicking on the integration icons. That made us realize that visitors wanted to know more about each integration. As a result, we included links to each icon.

Check back soon for part two of this series on using visitor data to increase website conversions.

If you enjoyed this look at heatmaps, you might also like to read these tips:

Tranform a poorly performing page into a conversion specialist using heatmaps