Have you also spent hundreds of hours gathering and analyzing website data to build experiences that show no change in conversions?

If this is your story, I’ve got two good news for you.

First, you’ve arrived at the right place. And second, you’re not alone!

The case of missing uplift in conversion and revenue

Take the case of an online phone accessories retailer who recently launched a new line of customizable, superior quality phone covers. Despite offering the best products, they were not even close to meeting their conversion goals. 

The team decided to find out what was going wrong by tracking visitor behavior. Heatmaps and session recordings showed how visitors interacted with their new offering. After studying the data, some key findings surfaced:

• Visitors dropped off on the customize phone covers page
• Visitors who dropped off spent the most time on the phone specification & personal details pages
  

Looking at this data, the team narrowed down actionable insights – 

• Reduced the number of steps on the customize phone covers page
• Make phone specifications more visual
• Reduced form fields on personal details pages 

While this worked, it did not get the expected uplift in conversion, and the team struggled to find reasons and fixes.

Does this sound familiar to you?

While chasing data to fix isolated friction points in the funnel streamlines the buying journey, it does not make the journey contextual or relevant to user segments. Visitors expect relevant experiences and want to feel valued at every touchpoint. 

A delightful experience is a mix of experience optimization and engaging with your audience at the right touchpoints. Personalization aids in achieving the latter by helping you release sharp audience-specific contextual and personalized interactions based on user journeys. For instance, rather than simply reducing form fields to reduce drop-offs, the phone accessories retailer can leverage personalization to auto-filter and show customization options relevant to the visitor based on the device they’re using or auto-fill details for repeat customers, and so on.

Similarly, if a visitor on your website is from the US while another is from Germany, the German visitor might expect a local language experience on your website. Or, users who have an affinity for luxury brands are likely to be put off if the most relevant results show discounted brands on the product listing page.

Besides this, visitors also need contextual information relevant to their journey to make a buying decision quickly. Personalization enables this. For example, you can nudge someone visiting a product page forward by showing positive product reviews as a notification triggered at the right time. 

While these are some common examples of how businesses can create personalized experiences, there is no limit to what you can do. Irrespective of what your unique use case is, personalization always starts with your users’ data.

Data in personalization – All you need to know

Websites gather a vast amount of raw visitor data that has the potential to unlock valuable personalization opportunities. But to make the most out of the data you already have, knowing what type of data enables personalization is paramount.

A single view of enriched and intelligent data lets you craft experiences that convert. With digital advancement, surface-level personalization is not enough. The above data empower marketers to create behavioral micro-segments of website visitors, so they get personalized experiences at the right time in their journey. This data is collected from multiple sources and unified at one central customer data hub so that you can visualize and learn from your visitors’ behavior and leverage it in your optimization campaigns.

Let’s look at some ways you can define your audiences using raw customer data:  

1. Pre-defined segments

You can build visitor cohorts using pre-defined behavioral, geographical, demographic, and contextual data in this segmentation method. You can also create micro-segments combining one or more of the above data sources. 

The phone accessories online retailer mentioned earlier can use pre-defined data points (like device and browser used, location, behavior on site, past purchases, etc.) to create user cohorts, plan segment-specific campaigns, and only show them relevant content.

For example, they can segment visitors and deliver personalized content to reduce drop-offs on the customize phone covers page. Or show first purchase offers to new users to motivate them to complete the purchase. A micro-segment of iPhone 13 Pro users visiting the website for the first time and through a Chrome browser can be shown a special discount to nudge them to complete the purchase.

2. Custom attributes-based segments

Segmentation based on custom attributes helps deep-dive into visitor behavior and ascertain how specific segments respond to your experience. Contrary to pre-defined segments that cover generic visitor attributes, custom attributes help build cohorts using non-standard, domain-specific attributes that match your campaign goals. These are extremely flexible and allow you to create hyper-personalized interactions by filling in the gaps between pre-defined segments.

Imagine you are an eCommerce store collating and analyzing conversion rates. You notice that premium members convert at 10%, whereas general buyers convert at 2%. Using this data, you can go very specific, run targeted promotions for the general buyers to nudge them further into the funnel, and increase conversions from this segment.

Similarly, you can create custom segments based on attributes like visitors’ last visit to your website, guest visitors vs. members, monthly spends, buyer personas – discount, impulse or FOMO, frequent flyers, loyalty customers, top 5% ace gamers, and more.

3. Third-party data-based segments

Another data source that comes in handy when segmenting visitors based on external parameters is third-party tools and integrations. 

For example, using Mixpanel, you can create cohorts of inactive users who haven’t used your product or app in the last week, craft re-engagement campaigns, and deliver personalized content to them for higher retention.

Similarly, using Clearbit’s data, like a company’s IP address, you can deliver personalized content on the homepage banner to visitors from a specific company or industry. B2B companies can leverage Demandbase to identify companies that match their defined ICP, create a segment of high intent prospects, and deliver meaningful information that helps convert companies on their very first visit to the website. 

4. Uploaded visitor lists

Uploaded visitor lists consist of external data like stored cookie data, POS data,  URL query parameters, premium user lists, etc., that you can import and use to create deep visitor segments. You can then run hyper-personalized marketing campaigns for these segments. 

Let’s assume that you are an online gaming company. You want to target the top 10% of users of your game for a particular campaign. Working with the engineering team, you can get a list of every user that qualifies with their unique cookie value. You can deliver the desired experience using robust experimentation engines that let you upload this list onto its database.

These data sets create an invaluable collection of insights that can enrich your visitor interactions at every touchpoint. But knowing how and when to use them is critical to ensuring your campaigns’ success. Let’s look into some industry-specific use cases of personalization that help businesses create a differentiator from their competitors.

Personalization is for everyone

Whether you’re an online retailer looking to increase AOV, a SaaS firm striving to reduce churn, or a publishing house looking for more subscriptions, personalization helps businesses across industries gain deeper behavior insights and design delightful experiences that resonate with every visitor. If you are an online business looking to maximize ROI from existing traffic,  build stronger visitor relationships and ultimately drive growth by delivering relevant experiences, read on to know how you can leverage personalization to activate your audience.   

eCommerce

A study by McKinsay suggests that  80% of online shoppers want personalization from retailers. These potential buyers on your website that you want to convert come from varying geographies and demographics looking for various products. The same shopper may like shoes from Retailer A but not their joggers, some visitors may only shop during sales, and so on. And there is a cut-throat competition to acquire these prospective buyers. With personalization, you can dive deep into granular buyer behavior, and design tailored experiences so they choose you over your competitors.

Micro-segmentation for increased revenue

Using data like geo-location, past purchases, product affinity, etc., you can curate personalized offers and category pages, recommend products to cross-sell, upsell, and more. 

For example, you can auto-apply filters on category, listing, and search pages, so visitors only see relevant products. This makes it easier for them to navigate through the products and increases sales.

SaaS

All SaaS companies aim to keep churn at a minimum. Their subscription-based model demands building long-term relationships. Leveraging personalization to design and deliver tailored experiences for visitors rather than a general spray and pray approach shows that the company values them and helps inculcate brand loyalty. 

Personalized pricing and content for increased revenue

The pricing page is one of the most critical elements. You can create segments based on attributes like company size, revenue, etc., and craft experiences that match visitor expectations. For instance, you can personalize the pricing page to hide self-serve pricing and only show the “contact sales” CTA to Enterprise businesses while showing pre-set pricing to SMBs.

Marketers who evaluate a SaaS product conduct thorough research to find social proof. Using data from third-party tools like Clearbit, you can detect the visitors’ company/industry and trigger relevant logos, testimonials, and success stories. You can also track if the visitor has signed up for a free trial and craft the messaging so they only get content that nudges them further into the conversion funnel – from free trial to paid. 

Travel

The travel industry caters to a diverse customer base. The needs and expectations of travelers keep evolving. Hence, it’s crucial to understand each visitor and curate personalized experiences.

Demography & purpose-driven personalization

A majority of people travel for business or leisure. Once visitors enter travel details like date, destination, number of travelers, etc., websites can use the data to show them purpose-specific travel options & information. 

For business users, show easy cancellation policies, boardroom facilities, how to get an invoice, etc. For leisure users, show activities, spa options, pool timings, 24-hour room service, discounts, etc. You can further break down the leisure demographic into more targeted groups.

You can also pair cookie data with previous purchases, pre-select options in the booking flow, or change the ordering of search results to show the most relevant result first.

E-Learning

People respond more positively to personalized content – interacting, watching, reading more, and ultimately converting.

Personalize learning flows

Many e-learning platforms offer a multitude of courses. But, only a few of them manage to retain learners. Personalization enables e-learning platforms to break away from the linear approach where every learner follows a pre-set flow. 

You can personalize learning flows with dynamic feedback and/or contextual pop-ups. For example, you can ask learners to take a quiz at the beginning of the course to assess their abilities and recommend the next steps. This creates a personalized flow for each learner that matches their skills and expectations.

You can also offer dynamic feedback that reinforces good behavior or applauds achievements. For example, once a learner completes 50% of the course at a good pace and shows progress, you can trigger personalized pop-ups encouraging them to complete the course. 

Leveraging contextual data about visitors, e-learning platforms can curate personalized pathways for each learner, thus giving them more control over the course they pursue.

Media

Personalization has already revolutionized content consumption and monetization. It helped Netflix become one of the largest OTT platforms. It has brought huge revenue uplift for social media giants like Instagram and TikTok by pushing content and ads based on what users engage with most on their platforms.

Personalized recommendations for increased subscriptions

When users easily discover content they like, they continue using your platform. And when they find value in your content, subscriptions skyrocket. 

For instance, an online editorial news portal can increase readership and subscription by using behavioral data to show relevant news items first. If a visitor mostly looks for sports news, it can show them sports-related content first. If a visitor often reads political updates, show similar content to get them hooked.

How to personalize with VWO?

At the start of this blog, our phone accessories retailer had actionable data but lacked the means to design and release the right experiences across every touchpoint at scale.  

To bridge this gap and empower businesses to deliver hyper-personalized journeys at a scale that accelerate growth, we recently launched VWO Personalize. With this latest addition to the suite of VWO products, we aim to connect every aspect of personalization so businesses across industries can unlock infinite growth possibilities. You can create multiple tailored experiences and target each of them to a different visitor segment in one single campaign without depending on your development teams. 

VWO Personalize starts with helping you build cohorts using raw visitor data. It then lets you curate and release experiences using the widget library and code editor in our powerful WYSIWYG Visual Editor:

– Create personalized experiences in a couple of clicks using our Widget Library, where you can access a range of pre-designed, ready-to-use widgets. Drag and drop any existing template and design personalized experiences quickly. In the library, you can find widgets for banners, modals, scroll to the top, countdown timer, social share, and more. You can also use dynamic texts in the content to further hyper-personalize the web page catering to individual segments. 

Suppose you want to run a sale campaign on your homepage for a specific visitor segment. In that case, you can go to the Widget Library in the VWO Visual Editor, select the type of banner you want to add to the page, edit its content, and voila!

Similarly, if you are an online retailer looking to increase sales in the US region, you can add a sale countdown to specific product pages and deploy it for visitor segments you want to target. With our Widget Library, you can design as many hyper-personalized experiences for your visitor segments within minutes.  

– When you want to deliver something unique, create custom templates with our Code Editor. Insert custom Javascript codes and variables into your website and build your own unique widget and experience that match your campaign goals.

Let’s say you want to add a hover effect on your product pages. Using our Code Editor, you can simply write a custom CSS or Javascript code and deploy it on the pages you’d like. Take a free trial or request a demo with our product experts to understand how VWO Personalize can help your business achieve unprecedented growth.

Personalization vs. privacy – Striking a balance

Throughout this article, we’ve discussed how visitors leave behind data trails with each online session. Companies capture this data daily to use it to personalize campaigns and interactions. But, the amount of data gathered also calls for concern about misusing visitors’ data without their knowledge. Inevitably, while visitors prefer personalized, contextual experiences, there is an inherent fear that couples it.

The question facing companies is how to use this data for personalization without breaching privacy and security. Many regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have been implemented to address this. 

But companies need to take the onus of responsibility. To win visitors’ trust, they must do more than just fulfill the regulatory requirements.

Companies must ensure that their personalization practice is always compliant by adopting a privacy-first approach that ensures privacy and data safety. They must constantly update security controls with evolving data protection regulations and reforms. 

Maintaining transparency about data collection, storage, usage, and what businesses do to ensure its safety is critical. 

With VWO Personalize, you run data-driven campaigns and release hyper-personalized experiences while ensuring absolute data privacy. It is designed with a privacy-first approach, complies with global data protection norms, and comes with airtight controls that ensure your visitors’ privacy.

What next?

Customized covers of superior quality were the USP of our online phone accessories retailer. The irony was that most visitors were dropping off on the customized page itself. The changes made didn’t help since they were non-targeted blanket changes. Personalization fills this gap. 

With personalization, our retail guy can:

• Implement auto-filtering and show customization options relevant to the visitor based on demographic data like age or gender & contextual data like phone model used
• Trigger location-specific payment options 
• Trigger offers and dynamic content based on the buyer stage a visitor is on

This list is not exhaustive, and the possibilities to personalize are infinite. Visitors expect personalized experiences. If they don’t get it on your website, they will move on to the next available option. So don’t lose out on any more business. Start your personalization journey and unlock unlimited growth opportunities to scale your business now.

This article aims to educate readers who are not familiar with leveraging heatmaps for their Shopify store’s conversion rate and experience optimization. It will navigate your way through how heatmaps can help you craft experiences that guarantee increased ROI. 

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

With VWO Heatmaps, you can see how visitors browse your website, what catches their attention, and which elements distract them. From dynamic heatmaps, scrollmaps, and element lists, to behavioral segmentation – VWO Heatmaps offer a plethora of features that cater to the requirements of organizations of every size. Take an all-inclusive and guided free trial to test our tool. 

Besides VWO, we’ve also listed other free and premium heatmap tools that can help with your store optimization. Let’s begin!

Shopify heatmap: Move your north star metrics upward and to the right with heatmaps

Launching an eCommerce store using Shopify may be a fairly simple task, as iterated above, but ensuring that the store converts is a different ball game altogether. To drive consistently growing conversions and deliver stellar experiences that boost repeat buyers, understanding your website performance as well as your website visitors is extremely crucial.

There are 2 types of data that eCommerce stores can leverage to understand how their website is performing and strategize on improving it: quantitative data and qualitative data. Quantitative website data comes through analytics platforms and tools like Google Analytics. GA tracks key performance metrics like conversion rate, page traffic, traffic source, bounce rate, cart abandonment rate, and other such quantifiable metrics.

For instance, an online merchandise retailer can integrate their website with GA to track how many visitors are dropping off on their checkout page. And let’s assume that the analyst, after looking at the data, realized that the final number of drop-offs on the checkout page stood at a staggering 80%. The analyst is left with one simple question that GA could not answer – WHY? Why was the checkout page drop-off so high? What was making visitors reach the final stage of the purchase funnel and then leave without finishing the purchase?

This is where qualitative research, particularly using heatmaps, comes into the picture. Heatmaps follow visitors’ journeys end to end and give you a clear picture of why they took the action that they did on your website. Going back to the merchandise retailer example, by looking at the heatmap of the checkout page, the analyst can now identify areas of friction as well as redundant and missing information by taking cues from visitors’ behavior on the checkout page. Visitors are clicking on the payment options drop-down yet not completing a purchase – maybe there aren’t enough payment options; visitors are clicking on the promo code field and dropping off from there – maybe you need to list down available codes in a drop-down; visitors not clicking on the CTA at all – maybe you need to test its copy and placement. 

Heatmaps enable you to step into your visitors’ and users’ shoes and experience first-hand what they experienced on your website. Such a peek into visitor journeys can equip you with so many actionable insights to act on for your optimization needs. 

Because eCommerce is one of the most dynamic and ever-changing industries, it becomes even more important that your Shopify store is in its most optimized form. Let us look at how heatmaps can help in the optimization of Shopify stores and their conversion rate: 

1. Increase conversions:

An eCommerce website is never really a hundred percent ready. Due to the dynamic nature of its target audience, almost every day a new pain point surfaces to which businesses need to react promptly or they will lose to the competition. This warrants launching new products, updating security, shipping, and other policies, and more such changes to your website. All these modifications can introduce bugs or other unplanned issues. Heatmaps can help Shopify stores follow their visitors’ journeys end-to-end and discover all such bugs and friction areas in their conversion funnel. 

An eCommerce website’s analyst can look at the mouse heatmap of their product pages and examine how each element is performing individually as well as in combination with the other elements of the page. For instance, are visitors hovering around the product page looking for any information like the size chart or available colors, or are they clicking on the product image expecting it to expand, or if your “Add to Cart” button is readily discoverable or not, and so on.

All such insights go into crafting a website that does not create friction between the visitors and the interface and that matches visitors’ expectations, which ultimately results in increasing conversions.

2. Combat cart abandonment:

Cart abandonment is the Achilles heel of every eCommerce website. Despite having ticked off every possible box from the products’ perspective, some eCommerce stores still struggle to bring down their cart abandonment rate. There can be many reasons for this: unexpected shipping charges, lack of refund options, long checkout processes, lack of payment options, lack of guest checkout, and so on. Heatmaps enable you to visualize visitors’ on-page behavior and track every click, scroll, pause, and mouse movement they make that can help you understand how they interact with your Shopify store, and reckon which elements and sections of your cart page attracts or distracts them. 

For example, looking at the heatmap of the cart pages, an online clothes retailer can identify that visitors only abandon the cart after they open the tax calculator dropdown. This can indicate that the visitors find the tax amount being charged to be on the higher end. Or, the ‘suggested for you’ section in the cart page is distracting visitors from finishing the purchase and sending them back to the product page. It can be inferred from this that cross-selling on the cart page may not be the best strategy for your store. 

3. Experiment for an optimized experience:

Bad UX can lead to your revenue taking massive hits. The phrase, a stitch in time saves nine, fits perfectly well here, especially when a timely fix can not only save but also make huge sums of Dollars for a Shopify store. The key is understanding the visitors in and out and experimenting with an interface that not only attracts visitors but also nudges them to finish their purchase. Both these can be achieved for your Shopify store with the help of heatmaps. By letting you step into your visitors’ shoes and experience things on your website, heatmaps help you gather on-page behavioral data of site visitors and identify segment-specific pain points. By equipping you with actionable visitor behavior insights, heatmaps help you formulate data-backed hypotheses. When these hypotheses are tested continuously with thorough prioritization, it enables you to fix broken elements, thereby, improving experiences drastically.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

The top 4 Shopify heatmap apps and tools for your store – free and premium

Here’s a list of the top 4 free & premium heatmap tools for your Shopify store that you can take out for a spin before making a huge monetary commitment on any tool: 

1. VWO Insights’ heatmap:

VWO Insights’ heatmap tracks and visualizes visitor journeys on your website. You can choose from its varied offerings like the classic heatmap, scrollmap, clickmap, and more. It also offers a plethora of segmentation options (you can choose from the pre-fixed segments or create your own segments).

VWO’s free AI-powered heatmap generator allows you to predict how visitors interact with your web page. It enables you to gauge bottlenecks based on user experience so that you can take the required optimization measures. 

To enable VWO Insights’ heatmap on your Shopify store, just install the VWO Smart Code to your website, and create a revenue tracking goal and start heatmapping. 

Additionally, VWO’s heatmap tool comes in a suite with other visitor behavior analytics tools like session recording, form analytics, on-page surveys, on-page surveys, funnels, and usability reviews. What’s more, – all these tools can be used through a single app from which point onward you can run as many campaigns as you want using any of these capabilities without any other code required. 

VWO offers a free trial, after which you can choose a plan based on the goals you want to achieve. 

2. Order heat map

Created by SCS Design, Order Heat Map collects customer data from your store and displays it on a Google Maps heatmap. It also allows you to segment the audience by state and city so you can drill down on your heatmap result. Along with creating heatmaps, Order Heat Map allows you to create a targeted mailing list and export it so you can send it to potential customers. 

Order Heat Map offers a 5-day free trial after which it charges $10 a month. 

3. Hitsteps analytics

With a 5-star rating on the Shopify app store, Hitsteps Analytics doesn’t just offer visitor web analytics but also lets you live-chat with your visitors. It helps you identify main selling points by following each visitors’ stream and identify products that are generally brought together, and so on. 

Hitsteps Analytics has many plans to choose from based on your business goals: Free Plan, Starter Plan, Basic Plan, Pro Plan, and Ultimate Plan. 

4. Hindsight

Hindsight by Eastside Co. is an analytics tool offering heat mapping and visitor recording. The Hindsight heatmap enables users to switch between clicks, mouse movement, and scrolls data. It also lets you map the aggregate of all three. Apart from helping you identify where visitors spend maximum time on your website and which elements attract them the most, it lets you check what your visitors saw on your website with visitor recordings. 

However, Hindsight does not offer a free trial or have a free plan. Its basic plan starts from $19 a month and goes to $85 a month with the enterprise plan.

Conclusion

Just building an eCommerce website with the help of Shopify will never be enough. For a business to successfully take off and maintain growth, the same Shopify store has to be iteratively optimized by deciphering visitor needs and expectations. What better way to truly know your visitors than with the help of heatmaps! Now that you know how important optimizing your Shopify store is, choose the right heatmap tool and start making the most of the goldmine of visitor behavior insights you receive.

FAQs on Shopify heatmaps

Together Android and iOS offer close to 6 million mobile applications today. Given the unprecedented speed at which mobile apps are taking over the digital space, it is imperative to understand user behavior in-depth to deliver converting mobile experiences. While taps underline mobile usage, desktop visits are driven by clicks. Consequently, experiences need to differ.

Download Free: Mobile App A/B Testing Guide

For example, one of the derived inferences from the tap versus click difference is the fact that mobile app screens do not have the luxury of combining multiple elements on a single page as their desktop counterparts. The page would be prone to erroneous taps because of a high density of elements resulting in a categorically horrible experience.

This is just one of the many examples of how user experience designers might want to factor in innate differences between devices and incorporate these in the prototyping stage. One of the most powerful mechanisms to identify if your mobile experiences are optimized for delight (and hence conversions!) is to study mobile heatmaps.

What is a mobile heatmap?

Mobile app heatmaps capture users’ in-app interaction and engagement and visually present the data using an overlay of colors. Red (warm) areas indicate high user engagement, whereas blue (cool) areas indicate low engagement.

This color-based projection of interaction and engagement data onto the mobile screens allows you to comprehend exactly where your app users are focusing simply by looking at the overlaid aggregated usage data. This aggregation helps businesses in two ways:

1. Abstract a large amount of engagement data and concentrate them in hot vs. cold zones for quick interpretations.
2. Identify UX improvement opportunities by identifying areas of traction (or lack of.)

How does a mobile app heatmap work & how is it different from a browser heatmap?

Unlike website or browser heatmaps that gather data based on mouse interaction like clicks and scrolls, mobile heat map app collects users’ touch data. It makes mobile app heatmaps much more complex than website heatmaps as the captured data is gesture-based—the SDK of the heatmap tool you select captures every micro-interaction on the app, with all gestures saved on respective screens, which gets aggregated to generate mobile app heatmaps.

Even though both the heatmap types serve the same purpose, i.e., increasing conversions, the way these heatmaps function and the nature of the collected data are highly contrasting.

Another significant difference between the two is that while for website heatmaps, a website’s HTML code serves as the base and websites appear the same across all operating systems (like Android, and iOS). But that’s not how mobile app heatmaps work; it is much more complex. Mobile app heatmap tools have to consider their respective development platforms (like IONIC, Native, etc).

The complexity magnifies because the same app could be different for different operating systems. In simpler terms, the number of variables impacting mobile app render is multifold compared to desktop renderings, making them prone to UI/UX inconsistencies.

Download Free: Mobile App A/B Testing Guide

What are the benefits of using a mobile app heatmap?

The benefits that app owners can reap from using mobile app heatmaps are endless. Every industry can have its own unique set of use cases and pain points they solve using heatmaps. 

Let’s look at some reasons that make a heatmap app a necessity, not a luxury, in a business’s toolkit.

Improve user engagement

Don’t wait until issues arise to leverage heatmap mobile analytics. Regularly monitoring how users interact with the UI elements through mobile heatmaps is crucial to keep up with their changing behavior in your app. 

Are users engaging less with the main CTA button? Or perhaps they are scrolling less toward the screen’s bottom?

Sometimes, the UI may seem a bit messy, leading users to make unintended clicks or taps. If you suspect such issues, run a hygiene check and tidy things up to ensure a friendly user experience. 

Formulate data-backed hypothesis

User engagement with UI elements has a significant impact on your business growth. More engagement with the right elements (conversion points) indicates users are progressing through the conversion funnel, while less engagement suggests the opposite. 

For example, if users aren’t interacting with the add-to-cart button, it means they’re not moving to the next step for some friction they’re encountering. 

You can formulate and test hypotheses to see if making certain changes improves user interaction with the button. 

This is consistent across your app. You can formulate and run tests based on heatmap data to improve user engagement and increase conversions.

Grow conversions and sales

The stronger your hypotheses rely on user behavioral data, the higher the chances of test success. 

So, if you hypothesized that making the add to cart button sticky will capture user attention, backed by behavior research using heatmap data, your test is likely to succeed. 

This, in turn, improves your metrics, conversions, and sales. Even if the test doesn’t yield the desired results, don’t give up. Run an iterative test and see how it goes. Overall, the more you align your mobile experience with users’ expectations, the more encouraged they will be to engage with your app, pushing your sales upward. 

How are UI and UX related?

UI and UX are very closely knit—the UI of an app is optimized to improve its UX.

Everything that an app user sees on their screen comprises the app’s user interface, i.e., UI or mobile app interface. It can be broadly divided into content, images, layout, color schema, CTA buttons, and navigation. Mobile app heatmap’s gesture tracking captures each tap, swipe, and zoom on every single page of the app, thereby providing user behavior insights to optimize each element of the mobile app interface.

For instance, an eCommerce app’s analyst or interface designer can identify distractions and confusing content or discover broken links that keep preventing visitors from signing up and becoming loyal users, simply by looking at the touch heatmap of the app’s login page.

Or, the marketing teams of a travel app can apprehend if the icon they added to take users directly to the app’s home screen from anywhere on the app is discoverable enough or not. If users keep tapping on other elements and areas on the screen before finding the right button, it can indicate a navigational flaw in the app that needs optimization.

Analysts, interface designers, and marketers across industries can use mobile app heatmaps to iteratively optimize all the elements comprising an app’s UI, thereby improving its UX. 

User Experience is what the app users experience on your app—the better the experience, the higher the engagement. The more intuitive and optimized the elements of the app interface, the better the experience, hence, the higher the engagement.

There is an 88% chance for online consumers to be less likely to return to a site after a bad experience. If 88% of the opportunities are lost, your app’s core conversion metrics will take a sizable hit.

Top KPIs that can be improved with heatmap apps

Mobile heatmaps shed powerful insights on improving engagement KPIs. In fact, by complementing your testing efforts, they also help boost your revenue metrics. Here are some KPIs you should keep an eye on to get an authentic view of your app performance. 

Time on-page

Time on Screen(ToS) is based on sessions and starts when a user opens the app and ends when they exit. This metric measures the duration for which the user is actively interacting with the app. 

Let’s say you have a mobile app for a weather service, which displays current weather conditions, as well as a 7-day forecast. By examining the mobile app heatmaps, you notice that users tend to spend the most time on the current weather conditions. 

With this information, you might consider enhancing the display of current weather details, making it more interactive or personalized to keep users engaged longer. This will have a direct positive impact on ToS. 

The number of interaction events

Most mobile heatmaps will point you towards areas that drive taps but are not supposed to. These areas can be anything—text elements that are high on emotion (“Latest and greatest handset!”), visual elements that are meant to serve as cues but do not, a down arrow that does not do anything, etc. 

Through mobile app heatmaps, you can make a note of these and trigger an action corresponding to these events. For example, if users frequently tap on a down arrow that doesn’t have a function, you could make it perform a specific action, like jumping down the page, to align the app’s functionality with user expectations.

Stickiness ratio

The stickiness ratio measures how often users engage with your app. You calculate it by dividing daily active users by monthly active users. To improve this ratio, you can use heatmaps to understand user behavior and explore optimization opportunities.

For instance, you own a new publishing app. You find that users are often tapping on the news headline, but there’s no clear way to navigate back to the main menu and explore other articles. 

With heatmap data, you can redesign the user interface to make it easier for users to explore the app further, thereby improving the stickiness ratio.

Retention

The retention rate is a crucial metric that indicates whether your app offers real value to users. It quantifies how many users return to your app after their initial use. This is a strong indicator of user satisfaction and the app’s overall performance. To calculate the retention rate, divide the number of monthly active users by the number of app installations. 

Want to know how different mobile apps can improve retention by using heatmaps? Read this blog and understand the role played by user experience analytics in-app user retention.

Purchases

Heatmaps can be a game-changer for increasing purchases by mobile app users, no matter which industry your app belongs to. 

Imagine you own an eCommerce app, and your goal is to boost in-app purchases. Mobile heatmaps tell you where users are looking, what they’re clicking on the most, and which parts of the screen they’re totally ignoring. 

Now, let’s say you notice that users almost never click the checkout button because it’s kind of hidden by the more prominent ‘continue shopping’ button. 

So what can you do? You can run an experiment tweaking things like button placement, color, and size to make the checkout button more eye-catching. That way, more visitors will be nudged to complete their orders and make more purchases. 

Customer lifetime value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total revenue a business can earn from a customer during their relationship with the app. A high CLV means your app boasts loyal, higher-spending users. 

Imagine you have a mobile gaming app, and your goal is to increase CLV by keeping users engaged and encouraging in-app purchases. 

By examining heatmap data, you observe that some players tap on specific virtual elements but don’t complete the purchase. This could indicate hesitation or confusion among the players. 

Based on these insights, you optimize the in-app purchase experience. You improve the layout, add more payment options, and provide clearer instructions for completing purchases. 

Due to these heatmap-informed optimizations, you see an increase in in-app purchases, longer player retention, and therefore higher CLV. 

Mobile heatmaps shed powerful insights on improving engagement KPIs. Two ways in which you can use heatmaps are to improve:

Time on-page

A mobile heatmap can throw light on the most significant elements getting traction so that you can rearrange content order, directly increasing your time-on-page.

The number of interaction events

Most mobile heatmaps will point you towards areas that drive taps but are not supposed to. These areas can be anything—text elements that are high on emotion (“Latest and greatest handset!”), visual elements that are meant to serve as cues but do not, a down arrow that does not do anything, etc. 

Through heatmaps, you can make a note of these and trigger an action corresponding to these events. For example, clicking on your down arrow can make the user jump down the page.

What are the best mobile app heatmap tools?

VWO Insights – Mobile App

VWO Mobile Insights offers real-time visibility into user actions, enabling you to pinpoint friction points and user behavior trends across multiple sessions through a comprehensive timeline view. 

Using its color-overlay heatmaps, you can visualize click patterns and engagement hotspots in your app. Further, you can implement your findings with session recordings. Additionally, you can collaborate with your team and share valuable discoveries within or outside your VWO account. 

VWO’s lightweight Android and iOS SDK ensure smooth app performance while maintaining privacy throughout. 

But there is more to it. Why should VWO be your preferred heatmap tool? VWO’s platform seamlessly integrates insights and testing, simplifying the process of using heatmap observations to test hypotheses on a single platform. 

VWO’s mobile app testing features are advanced and outshine many competitors. This will help scale your optimization program, baking data-backed experimentation into your organizational culture. 

UXCam

UXCam provides heatmaps that show how users navigate, where they tap, and what elements they interact with in your app. This tool moves beyond basic metrics and shows you advanced metrics like custom events, crashes, UI freezes, screens, and sessions in the dashboard against which you can assess the interaction of your users. 

This mobile heatmap app also comes with funnel analytics to help you understand where and why users drop off from your app. You can also play session replays that give you a full picture of user behavior and watch them in action in your app. The best part is this tool supports heatmaps for Android mobile apps, iOS apps, and hybrid apps. 

Smartlook

Smartlook is an innovative mobile heat map app that simplifies data visualization by presenting key user behaviors in a single image. You can effortlessly track user scrolling, button clicks, and page navigation, gaining insights into what engages your audience without the hassle of data sampling.

Smartlook offers different heatmap types, such as click, movement, and scroll. Plus, you can segment data by data and complement your research with further insights through session recordings. The organized galleries in the tool make it convenient for you to access all your heatmap insights in one place. 

FullStory

With this heatmap app, you can assess user behavior on your app, helping you validate your design and messaging in your app. You can prioritize hypothesis testing by studying scrolls and clicks, and pinpointing opportunities for optimization. 

When running mobile heatmaps, you have the flexibility to choose between the Android or iOS page and select page properties, device type, time range, and segment to filter your heatmap outcomes based on your requirements. 

ContentSquare

Contentsquare’s heatmaps offer a comprehensive view of in-page and on-screen actions, including clicks, taps, hesitations, scrolls, and swipes. You can perform a side-by-side analysis on the platform or on-site using the live zoning extension. 

 You can conveniently export and share heatmap data with digital teams and stakeholders using this tool. Plus, you can explore deeper insights effortlessly through shortcuts session replay and customer journey analysis. This analytics tool is compatible with Native iOS, Android, Flutter, and React Native. 

Mobile app heatmaps help to improve user experience

If there is one certainty in the dynamic landscape of devices, it is that smartphone penetration is only going to increase. 

So, if you’re looking to make your app a powerhouse of engagement and conversions, mobile heatmap analytics are your golden ticket to watch the stories behind every user interaction in your app. Just weave mobile heatmaps into your workflow, and you’ll be surprised to see how it takes your optimization to a new height. 

And if you’re wondering where to start, look no further than VWO Mobile Insights – it’s your go-to tool for supercharging your entire optimizing journey. Give it a try, and explore its superb features, and we’re confident it will become an essential tool on your user behavior discovery journey. 

FAQs on mobile app heatmap

In addition to offering mouse movement heatmaps, website heatmaps offer scrollmap to gauge content engagement, clickmap to track and analyze click data, classic heatmap for overall page performance, and eye tracking heatmaps to capture gaze frequency and fixation length – eye-tracking heatmaps are often confused with mouse heatmaps though. Their use cases are widely different, and this blog attempts to educate readers around the nature of these differences.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

This blog also aims to navigate your way through what mouse heatmaps are, why they are important, and how it’s insights differ from the straightforward scroll and click insights that other heatmap types offer. We’ll also leave you with a list of the most popular and robust mouse heatmap tools to choose from for your mouse heatmap exercise

What is mouse heatmap and why is it important?

Mouse heatmap visually represents visitors’ mouse movement data using thermal imaging – it records where visitors are hovering, clicking, scrolling, and pausing through your web pages. It is often also referred to as mouse tracking heatmap, mouse movement heatmap, hover map, attention map, attention heatmaps, or move maps.

By leveraging mouse heatmaps, one can identify hover patterns that can help discover areas of high visitor frustration and reading struggles. Such insights are especially useful when seeking to optimize complex web pages made up of text, images, varied dynamic elements, and more. 

The trending discussion at this hour around mouse heatmap pertains to its interchangeability with eye tracking heatmap or if the former can be a more scalable alternative to the latter. Even though the contribution that both these heatmaps make towards gauging webpage usability and user attention, there is one added promise mouse heatmaps offer that eye tracking heatmaps don’t – “the ability to estimate the relevance of search results in the presence or absence of clicks for improving search relevance estimation, to study web usability design and to determine preferred reading regions that help in inferring which portions of long documents receive more user attention.”

Let us look as more such applications of mouse heatmaps that make it an equally good if not a better alternative to other website heatmap types:

1. Predict and measure user experience

By tracking and visualizing users’ mouse or cursor movement trends, mouse heatmaps help uncover insights that offer signals to predict whether your website’s user experience (UX) is good or not, to infer user attention pattern in complex pages, and how it may be different for varying page layout, to identify popular part of the page that grabs the most attention, and to identify distractions. Given below is a heatmap plotted on one of our blogs:

The heatmap shows that visitors paused the most over the images in the blog when compared to other sections. Among other things, this means that the images or the section in which the images were placed were capturing more visitors’ attention. Insights like these can expedite the decision-making process by providing data-backed actionables.

Such a multitude of data serves as an idea repository that can be revisited time and again to look for solutions to experience breakage.

2. Take cues to influence decision making

Mouse heatmaps function more on observing the psyche behind actions rather than on the mere behavioral observation of choices. While other heatmap types track and represent on-site choices/actions that visitors make, the scope of mouse heatmaps extends beyond this to take into consideration the process behind the choices/actions. What this means is that for every choice made, the mouse movement made towards or away from the other available alternative actions signals that those alternatives were also considered during the decision-making process. By helping you trace the entire process, mouse movements help you make changes in your interface or product that have a greater impact on visitor attention.

An eCommerce analyst can take a quick look at the mouse movement pattern right before visitors drop off from their checkout page to identify elements that almost caught their attention but failed to be captivating enough to retain it, and then optimize those elements so that the next visitor from that segment finds it rather interesting to stick around longer or to click it and convert. For instance, the analyst can look at the checkout page’s mouse heatmap to trace mouse movement tracks and uncover hover data around the main call to action button (CTA) to analyze if it is getting traction or not. And if the CTA is failing to draw visitor attention, what can be the reasons behind it: are there distractions, did visitors even move their cursors towards the CTA before dropping off, and so on.

3. Capitalize on existing website traffic

No one is a stranger to the fact that thousands of dollars go into acquiring new traffic for a website. Mouse heatmap eliminates the need for such heavy investments as it capitalizes on your existing website traffic for insights that would make the existing traffic convert more.

For instance, a SaaS marketer can run highly targeted and personalized campaigns for specific audience segments, and UX designers can curate website designs that resonate highly with the target audience by using the visitor behavior insights that mouse heatmaps equip them with. Mouse heatmaps come as a hugely cost-effective option when looking to optimize website conversions, at the same time, retaining the existing traffic.

4. Increase conversion rate

All of the benefits of using mouse heatmap boils down to contribute to one overarching goal – optimizing a website to increase conversions. Mouse heatmaps provide valuable insights that can help identify high-attention areas, distractions, frustration points, broken links, or confusing navigation, and also help in assessing the effectiveness of your content, design, and overall page/website layout. For instance, an eCommerce marketer can look at the mouse heatmap of visitors on their product page and discover if visitors are finding it difficult to look for product information, if visitors are clicking on image thumbnails expecting them to open up, and more. Here is a screenshot of another heatmap that we ran on our blog :

A glance at the heatmap will tell you that the search bar garnered the most attention on the entire page. Maybe such insights tell you that it’s time to optimize your blog search algorithm, or that you need to optimize the design and placement of the search bar itself. 

All such insights contribute to the creation of a data-backed repository of ideas to be tested for optimization – set up mouse heatmap/s, wait out the sample period, analyze heatmaps for insights, prioritize and create variations based on the insights, test the variation(s) and control, and deploy the winning version.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Top 3 free open source mouse heatmap tools for your website

Investing in any third-party tool is always a daunting task, especially because when it comes to online businesses, all third-party tools are connected to the website. In addition to the cost factor, there is also an element of trust that needs to be met. Installing too many or a sketchy third-party tool onto your website can drastically impact its performance metrics, particularly load time. To help you take mouse heatmap for a spin before making a monetary commitment to any available product, and to help you gauge if mouse heatmap is the way to go about achieving the concerned goals or not, here’s a lit of top free mouse heatmap tools that you can test for your use case:

Mousetrap

Developed by Pascal Kieslich, Felix Henninger, Dirk Wulff, and Jonas Haslbeck, and published under the GNU General Public License (version 3), Mousetrap offers capabilities for “importing, preprocessing, analyzing, aggregating, and visualizing mouse-tracking data.”

OGAMA

OpenGazeAndMouseAnalyzer or OGAMA is an open-source heatmap tool that tracks and analyzes mouse movement in slideshow study designs. In addition to mouse heatmap, OGAMA also offers eye tracking capabilities. In fact, OGAMA offers 8 different modules for behavior analysis, some of which are the attention map module, fixation module, and areas of interest module.

MouseTracks

MouseTracks tracks and displays mouse movement. It is engineered in such a way that old movements fade away over time, so the heatmap can be left running for as long as required. It generates colorful mouse tracks and a heatmap for all the clicks recorded. Its current version is fully supported on Windows and, to some extent, on Mac and Linus, but its a work in progress for the latter two.

Conclusion

The insights that mouse heatmaps generate are of a very different nature than mere mouse click and scroll behavior data. Click and scroll data does not provide an insight into what visitors did on the page apart from clicking where they did and their scroll depth. As iterated above, mouse heatmaps track everything ranging from clicks and scrolls to pauses and hovers.

By providing all-round data on visitors’ on-page behavior, mouse heatmaps empower its users to unlock a very dynamic caveat of visitor behavior insights. When used in combination with other analytics tools like session replays or form analytics, all the findings from a mouse heatmap can be easily corroborated and verified, so there is no room for any possible guesswork. So get your heat mapping socks on, identify friction points in visitor journeys, and optimize experiences for increased conversions.

FAQs on Mouse Heatmap

If UX research paper linguistics is not your flavor of the day, allow me to keep it simple – “Where do people look at, in your interface?”

Heatmaps hold the key to much of that deceptively simple question. Put simply, heatmaps are a rich visual interpretation of responses triggered by interacting with digital systems. A typical characteristic of the visual interpretation is the abstraction of large swathes of this interaction data in actionable quant – elements with most clicks, pages with deepest scroll depths and interface areas with the highest density of mouse movements, to name a few.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

This quantification has powerful ramifications for UX teams. By means of this article, we attempt to decode a few interpretations and their practical applications for better usability.

Leverage Every Click, Pause, and Scroll for Your UX Design

There are 2 types of data that can help you find a solution to the aforementioned dilemma: quantitative data and qualitative data. 

Quantitative data is gathered using research tools like Google Analytics (GA). The problem with relying on quantitative data alone is that even though it can give you a performance number against each metric that you track, it, however, fails to provide any insight into the reason behind the performance – good or bad. For example, if a visitor churned when moving from stage A to stage B in their journey, quantitative data will only tell you that they churned and not why they churned. And this is where website heatmap, a qualitative UX research tool that tracks and visualizes visitors’ on-site or on-page behavior, comes into the picture. 

The first thing to keep in mind when designing an interface or when designing for better UX is that this process is a continuous one – there is no one final, fixed design that will work forever. People change their choices and often modify their needs. This, coupled with the n number of updates on every digital platform, calls for continuous design iterations and hence, makes the exercise of gathering, analyzing and leveraging user interaction data ever more important. And what better way to achieve this than leveraging the power of a robust website heatmap tool. Heatmaps tell you exactly what works and what doesn’t, and also provides actionable data, so the changes you make are data-backed. 

Additionally, website heatmaps offer 5 different types of data collection and visualization methods, namely heatmap, clickmap, scrollmap, eye tracking heatmap, mouse tracking heatmap. Each click, scroll, cursory hover, gaze shift, gaze frequency data gathered using the various types of website heatmap empowers you to test and optimize the main design elements of your website like CTA buttons, navigation, images, text, and the overall layout. Let’s now see how each heatmap equips you with actionable data that can help you optimize the user experience your website delivers:

CTA Buttons

CTA buttons are one of the major elements on both a website and an app, and having clear CTAs with optimized copy and placement can make all the difference to its UX, and ultimately conversions. For visitors to have a seamless experience, the copy of your CTA should be self-explanatory in terms of what the button is about, and it should be placed in a way that visitors and users do not have to struggle to locate it. 

Using heatmaps, UX designers and analysts can identify if the main CTAs are indeed getting traction or not, identify elements on the page is getting clicked on if not the CTA, if the CTA copy is compelling enough or not, if the CTAs below the fold are getting enough attention or not, and much more. For instance, SaaS demand generation teams can quickly scan through their resource page’s heatmap to see if the CTA with the download link to their blockbuster ebook that cost them thousands of Dollars and a whale of their time is getting clicks or not.

And all these insights can be unearthed by studying the on-site behavior of existing visitors, thereby eliminating the need for investing in acquiring new traffic.

Navigation

Flawed navigation with multiple friction ares or one that does not match visitor expectations calls for an experience breakage and hence a bad UX. When visitors have to struggle to find what they came looking for on your website or when the navigation flow demands higher cognitive load on the part of the visitors, frustration ensues, leading to visitors dropping off without converting.

Heatmaps can help you track and analyze visitors’ navigational patterns so that you can construct a navigation map that matches visitor expectations. Website heatmaps also equip you with data that helps identify missing/broken links as well as redundant ones that affect the overall navigation of your digital property. 

For instance, an eCommerce website’s UX team can analyze their homepage’s heatmap to ascertain the discoverability of the navigation bars and icons on it and analyze the ease with which visitors are able to move from point A in their journey to point B as well as identify potential distractions.

In fact, the above heatmap is from a test that Galeton ran on its website’s navigation bar. Testing ideas based on the insights collected using heatmaps, Galeton optimized their navigation and witnessed a 14% increase in sitewide conversion rate.

Images and Text

Images and text comprise the major part of a website’s design. The challenge here arises when these two elements are not at their most optimized forms in terms of conversion driving quality and placement. 

Using heatmaps, you can identify the most popular section of a web page and place the most critical text and images in those sections. Using mouse tracking heatmap, you can follow the movement pattern of visitors’ cursor and discover if the copy is confusing based on the cursor’s hovering pattern. Using clickmaps, you can identify areas where users click the most, where they expect a certain image to be, identify images that are expected to be hyperlinked, and more. Using eye tracking heatmaps, you can gather data on visitors’ gaze length and frequency and find out where visitors are looking at the most, which images catch their attention, which text makes them linger around longer, and so on.

For instance, the above image shows the heatmap of 2 different ad versions of the same product. A quick comparison of the two heatmaps can tell designers and marketers that in the second design where the endorser is looking directly at the product, the latter attracts more visitors as compared to the first design. Even the copy in the second design gets more traction than in the first design.

The list of use cases can go on, but the bottom line is that website heatmaps help you unravel the dynamic and ever-changing universe of visitors’ needs and behavioral trends.

Page Length

Nobody likes scrolling endlessly on their phones or desktops looking for something on one single website. This being said, every business is different, with each of their websites flaunting unique goals. Hence, the page length always depends on the goal/s that particular web pages or websites aim to achieve. 

Scrollmaps can be of ginormous assistance when determining the page length for your website

For instance, using scrollmaps, blogging and publishing websites can identify the sections of a page where visitors are scrolling to the most, pinpoint the fold beyond which visitors don’t bother scrolling or which witnesses highest number of bounce-offs, gauge the readability or traction that the below-the-fold content warrants, discover false floor, and much more. They can ascertain the ideal length for their blogs and articles by leveraging such actionable insights that website heatmaps arm them with.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Overall Page Layouts

Testing every element in silos and ensuring that each of them works does not necessarily mean that each of these elements works together as well. 

You may have a world-class product or service, you may even have the best copy written for its website, and the most appropriate images shortlisted. This does not automatically mean that all of these will work together – your copy may be compelling, but the image next to it may hijack all the eyes; your product page may be splendid in terms of product images and specifications, but the CTA button may be hard to find; you may also strike the right balance between the various elements on your page but too many folds prevent most visitors from reaching the main CTA at the bottom – the list can go on.

By highlighting the most and least popular sections of a page, by equipping you with actionable insights on possible experience breakages, website heatmaps help you place important information in the most popular sections and design the perfect layout for high converting landing pages, homepage, checkout page, product page, and so on.

How Heatmaps Came to Dictate UX in Omnichannel Experiences?

There is no second-guessing that the credit for the dominance of website heatmaps when it comes to designing for a stellar UX majorly goes to the incomparable, quality insights on visitors’ on-site behavioral trends that they arm marketers and UX designers with. But, there is another element at play here that appears to be slowly becoming a major contributor to this dominance, namely omnichannel experience. 

The aggregate experience that a website delivers to each visitor, across devices is an omnichannel experience.

That being said, we live in an age where each individual can own a  desktop, a mobile phone, a tablet, or any other device all at the same time. And they use all of these devices to browse through different websites and sometimes, the same website using different devices. In a conundrum like this, where there is no certainty about which device a visitor starts their journey on, and on which they end it, it becomes imperative that the interface be designed in such a manner that each element is in its most optimized form (as far as visitor expectations are concerned) and is consistent in delivering a good user experience throughout the journey, across devices. 

Delivering a good omnichannel experience to each visitor has become everything now, and this is why website heatmaps have gained a further impetus into assuming a pivotal position in the entire UX designing process. With its ability to track and visualize user behavior data on each device type individually as well as the ability to create aggregate heatmaps of data from all devices combined, website heatmaps empower you to collect, visualize, and analyze data from multiple devices in a way that best suits your roadmap to achieving your UX goals.

Conclusion

That website heatmaps became an analytical frontrunner in the entire process that goes behind designing for spectacular UX comes as no surprise. When combined with A/B testing, its ability to enable marketers and designers to step into their target audience’s and visitors’ shoes to test and build the website experience from the latter’s POV makes website heatmap a highly valuable and indispensable analytics tool. With the entry of testing in the picture, the Heatmap-UX duo only got stronger. It is only a matter of time that like CRO and UX/UI, website heatmaps will come to assume central positions in other fields of the online world as well.

Understand visitor behavior analysis in detail with this video.

FAQs on Heatmaps for UX

This article is not for readers who are versed in the advantages of analyzing heatmaps for their WordPress websites. This post addresses the nuances of heatmaps for uninformed readers who chanced upon the term casually and were curious to know more. 

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

This blog will try and take you through what WordPress is, some benefits of using heatmaps for your WordPress website, and concludes with some of the most popular tools to start your WordPress heatmap campaign with.

What is WordPress? How do WordPress Websites Function?

WordPress is a free, PHP based, open-source tool that helps create business websites, blogs, portfolio websites, and more. It is arguably the easiest, most powerful, and widely used content management system (CMS), with almost 43% of all the websites on the internet being powered by it.
All that is needed of you is to go to either WordPress.org or WordPress.com and download it.

By definition then, a WordPress website is any website that is hosted on or powered by WordPress. And, when we talk about the optimization of WordPress website, two components are involved: first is backend optimization of WordPress so that the website hosted on it performs well. This can include tracking plugins, optimizing images by maintaining a suitable standard size or file type, and so on.

Second is the frontend or ‘client-side’ optimization of your WordPress website, and this is where heatmaps come in. It entails the optimization of that part of the website that visitors see and the webpages that determine whether or not a visitor completes the journey and becomes a customer. 

For a website to deliver stellar digital experiences, both of these components have to be kept in check.

Leveraging Heatmaps for WordPress Website Optimization

Optimization of a website entails the use of both quantitative and qualitative data on its visitors’ on-page behavior. Where on the one hand, quantitative research tools like Google Analytics (GA) quip you by giving you numerical data on how your website is performing, on the other hand, qualitative research tools like website heatmaps help you fill in the data-gap by telling you the exact reason behind your numbers being the way they are. GA can give you the numbers like bounce rate, page views, and so on, but cannot help you visually analyze visitor behavior. To fill this gap, heatmaps help you gather and visualize visitor behavior trends on your website by stepping into your visitors’ shoes. Some of the key contributions that heatmaps can make in the optimization of your WordPress site are:

Tracking WordPress website visitor clicks:

By using clickmaps (or click heatmaps), you can track where visitors are clicking most, dead clicks and rage clicks, missing/redundant/broken links, etc., and then analyze the gathered click data to identify visitor expectations in terms of navigation, page structure, when browsing through your website.

Identify hot & cold attention spots:

By using website heatmaps, you can identify the most and least popular sections of any given webpage. The hot and cold areas on a heatmap indicate sections or elements of a webpage that visitors find most informative or engaging. Such insights are uncovered by tracking where visitors spend their time, where they click, where their cursors hover around, where their gaze is drawn toward, where they abandon your website, and so on.

These insights help you identify if all the necessary information is on the page, place high-value content in the most easily discoverable and popular sections, and so on, thereby increasing your WordPress website’s conversion rates.

Leverage scroll behavior data:

Website heatmap offers scrollmaps that can be specifically used to gauge the optimum length that a page should be. Scrollmaps gather data on visitors’ scrolling behavior by tracking how far visitors scroll through a page, the number of visitors who scrolled through half of the page, but not till the last fold, at what length the page witnesses maximum drop-off, and so on. All these insights help in identifying the best length for your pages, ascertaining the most suitable and attention-drawing areas where critical assets like CTA should be placed, discovering false bottoms or false floor, and so on.

Heatmaps. clickmaps, scrollmaps, mouse tracking heatmaps, and eye tracking heatmaps together form a loaded arsenal of visitor behavior analysis weapons capable of tracking every possible kind of action that a visitor can take on your website. The above mentioned are only some of the most common benefits that WordPress websites can reap out of heatmaps. Once put into action, heatmaps act as nothing less than a Pandora’s box when it comes to providing actionable insights on visitors’ on-page behavior that can help move your north-star metric drastically.

Top 6 WordPress Heatmap Plugins and Tools for Your Website – Free & Premium

As competition in the online turf gets stiffer, the demand for qualitative research using heatmaps, whether it is a third-party tool or a heatmap plugin for WordPress, is also increasing. This is because the wonders that heatmaps can do for your conversions are barely unknown today – the internet is swamped with success stories and testimonials verifying the same. On the flip side, the internet is also getting swamped with a plethora of sources claiming to provide world-class heatmap tools and plugins that can help optimize your WordPress website. To make the decision a little less daunting, below is a list of some of the best WordPress heatmap plugins and third-party tools that you can keep under consideration:

Clicky

Clicky by Yoast gathers visitor behavior on all the pages of your website and also gives you data on each user’s session duration.

With 20,000+ active installations, Clicky is one of the most popular WordPress heatmaps and can be installed in 3 easy steps:

• Upload the Clicky folder to /wp-content/plugins/ directory
• Go to the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress and activate the plugin 
• Input your Site ID, Key, and Admin Key.

ExtraWatch Pro

Once known as the ‘swiss army knife’ by virtue of offering a plethora of features like tracking clicks on links, gauging mobile-friendliness, and so on, ExtraWatch Pro WordPress heatmap plugin now stands amongst the top plugins that can be used to track visitor behavior trends.

Apart from helping you find the hot and cold areas of your webpage with its heatmap plugin, ExtraWatch also helps analyze traffic being diverted from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, etc., access data across devices in a single click, as well as target keywords that bring the most traffic to your website.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Heatmap

Heatmap is a real-time visitor behavior analysis tool that offers the capability to not only track user activities on static elements but also helps collate data around dynamic elements like drop-down menus, pop-up forms, cart page, and so on.

Additionally, it is also adaptable and responsive to changes like change in the webpage’s design, in an ad’s layout, and so on.

UXWizz

UXWizz WordPress heatmap plugin offers click heatmaps, mouse movement heatmaps, and scroll heatmaps so you can track exactly how a visitor went from point A to Point B  on a webpage. Some of the main USPs of userTrack plugin is that it comes in a 1MB file size, and does not slow the website it is installed on.

Hotspots Analytics

When we talk about free WordPress heatmap plugins, the best player in the market is Hotspots Analytics offering heatmaps, as well as insights on user activity and custom event tracking.

To accommodate responsive web design and touchscreen devices, Hotspots Analytics allows you to overlay heatmaps of mouse clicks, and touch screen taps on the webpage and offers a range of heatmaps with each page on your website having its own heatmap. And because all the data is stored on your website’s WordPress database, it eliminates the need to invest in any third-party tool.  To use this plugin, make sure your WordPress theme is HTML5 compliant, and your browser supports HTML5 canvas.

VWO Insights’ Heatmap

VWO’s heatmap tool for WordPress comes with a suite of visitor behavior and data analytics tools that include session recording, form analytics, on-page surveys, usability review, and funnels. And only one plugin works for all of these capabilities after which, you can create and run any campaigns without writing another line of code.

Install the VWO Insights’ WordPress heatmap plugin once and start creating heatmaps.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, this blog attempted to navigate your way through what WordPress and WordPress websites are, the benefits of using heatmaps, and a list of the 6 best WordPress heatmap plugins based on popularity and functionality. Now that you have all the necessary information on WordPress heatmap, you can hop on the visitor behavior analytics bandwagon and start mining for insights for the optimization of your WordPress website.

FAQs on Heatmaps for WordPress

Heatmaps are ostensibly the quirkiest analysis toolkits at your disposal: their color bombs fascinate conversion researchers, academicians write scientific papers touting its breakthrough AR/VR applications, and meteorologists have a field day slicing a continent apart in hot & cool zones.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

What is Eye tracking Heatmap?

Website heatmaps have a peculiar duality to them – on the one hand, they abstract large swathes of clickstream data for you to visualize it quickly and draw rapid conclusions around visitor behavior; one the other, they allow you to unpack this abstract data and dive into the nitty-gritty. For data visualization of overall webpage performance, it offers the classic heatmap; if you want to analyze if readers are truly engrossed in your content, you can opt for a scrollmap; or you can choose clickmaps for click data and mouse movement heatmap when you want insights around the portions of your website that are drawing clicks (and thereby interest). This literature dives into another fascinating data visualization method: eye tracking heatmaps.

Eye tracking heatmap gathers and visualizes data about the most and least attention capturing sections and elements of a web page. Data is gathered on how many times a visitor looks at individual elements and on visitors’ fixation length, which is then plotted in the form of an eye tracking heatmap. By helping unearth such insights on visitors’ eye movement, eye tracking heatmap helps UX designers, CRO practitioners, and marketers uncover information on the former’s attentional processes to identify elements of a webpage that they find the most and least interesting or engaging, and which elements they think are redundant or confusing.

How can You Make the Most Out of On-Page Behavioral Data Using Eye tracking Heatmaps?

Before eye tracking heatmaps were made, researchers conducted eye tracking studies or tests to identify issues in the user interface. As time passed, this test took on many forms of which, eye tracking heatmaps became the most popular visitor behavior analysis tool amongst UX & CRO professional circles. 

Eye tracking heatmaps have helped businesses optimize their websites and increase conversions. 

You may be wondering how data on eye-movement results in increased conversions. The answer is simple: it adds immense value to any CRO program or experience optimization program by providing uncomparable insights on website visitors’ on-page behavior. 

Eye tracking Heatmap & CRO

Have you ever noticed how some websites’ navigation wherein one element or page flows from the preceding one without much cognitive load on the user, whereas others require a lot of effort on the part of the users? Well, from amongst an array of tools and methods that help business owners achieve the former, eye tracking heatmaps play a major role.

Coming to CRO, if we look at its crudest and simplest definition, it is essentially a method whereby user feedback and analytics (both qualitative and quantitative) are used to improve overall website performance. The true essence of CRO lies in the fact that it empowers business owners to capitalize on their existing website traffic rather than investing in acquiring new traffic. The former is much more cost-effective and profitable than the latter, which demands huge investments.

And how, you may ask, does CRO ensure that its essence remains intact? – by leveraging visitor behavior analysis tools like eye tracking heatmaps.
Eye tracking heatmaps are a valuable asset for your website’s conversion and experience optimization program because they capture your visitors’ eye movement and uncovers insights as elucidated in the following examples:

• The general belief is that images are more effective than text. This eye tracking heatmap suggests otherwise:

• Eye tracking heatmap indicates that too much information may confuse visitors and also sometimes turns out to be distracting:

• Maintaining a balance while highlighting a product and the model endorsing the product is extremely important. Notice the attention areas in the eye tracking heatmaps of 2 different brands’ advertisements. The first is a perfume ad while the second image is about a new can size of a drink:

In both of the advertisement campaigns, visitors’ visual attention seems to be more drawn towards the human subject more (as can be seen in the first heatmap) than on the product itself. This then becomes an insight to act upon, to optimize the advertisements further, so attention is drawn more towards that main protagonist, i.e., the product and less towards supporting elements.

• Ads and sponsorship through ads have become an industry in its own entirety today. You may also, at some point in time,  consider buying some banner space and promoting your products, services, or content through them. But this eye tracking heatmap has something else to say about on-page banners and banner ads:

The banners, as you can see above, are spotless. And if an element on your webpage does not have even one heatmap watermark, either the element has some underlying issues, or its placement does. Eye tracking heatmaps give you these insights so you can test multiple ideas and hone-in on the root cause of the experience breakage. 

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

• We all know that personalization is the key to driving successful campaigns, be it marketing, sales, or promotional campaigns. Eye tracking heatmaps can help you uncover segment-based behavioral traits and patterns so you can deliver personalized content to specific segments. Look at the heatmap below that highlights the gaze pattern of male and female visitors:

All of these insights make up a huge repository of ideas to be tested so that your marketing campaigns, your landing pages, your home page, your product pages, and even your push notifications can be optimized to their best. The kind of user experience your website delivers depends on how well you understand your visitors and their needs.

For instance, you can use these insights to figure out if texts or images draw in more attention, if the CTA is placed correctly or not based on visitors’ gaze pattern, and optimize your campaign-specific landing pages. Or, you can figure out if visitors are convinced by the product images and descriptions on your product pages and can optimize then depending on the eye-movement data gathered. 

The possibilities for data-backed optimization are endless with such actionable insights at your disposal, and that is why eye tracking heatmaps have come to assume a pivotal role in existing CRO programs.

Eye tracking & Visitor Behavior Pattern

Conclusion

Using eye tracking heatmaps to identify “blind spots” and uncover bottlenecks that lead to customer confusion and a bad UX should not be a one-off project, and neither should CRO. The practice of regularly tracking visitors’ behavior on websites, identifying patterns and trends in them, and then using these insights to optimize your website and webpages, thereby increasing conversions should be installed as an iterative process that is religiously followed. Then, and only then will you be able to reap the full benefit of both these monumental instruments.

FAQs on Eye Tracking Heatmap

For instance, website heatmap dashboards allow users to access the report for a page and apply segments to look at data for specific visitor groups, and stock index heatmap dashboards allow you to configure the data you want to be plotted on the heatmap based on industry, time/duration, and so on.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Tools and examples of heatmap dashboard

If heatmaps lacked reporting dashboards, it wouldn’t be possible to leverage one of its most important benefits – the ability to deep dive into large data sets without having to go through each one of them. A look at some existing heatmap dashboards will give you an idea about their importance:

VWO Insights’ website heatmap tool

Online businesses get visitors and customers from across the world, falling in different age groups, belonging to different sexes, having different interest areas, different pain points, and so on. So, the data matrix involved is enormous, which, without heatmaps, would warrant the use of the bandwidth of multiple resources, sometimes, hours on end.VWO Insights’ website heatmap tool helps businesses gather and visualize visitor behavior data. Users can deep dive into the data with its segmentation and targeting capabilities. In addition, VWO’s free AI-powered heatmap generator allows you to predict how visitors interact with your web page. It enables you to gauge bottlenecks based on user experience for you to take required optimization measures.

Heatmap dashboard example for a website

Let’s look at VWO Insights’ heatmap dashboard to gauge the information and configurations website heatmap dashboards entail.

VWO’s heatmap dashboard allows you to configure your heatmap’s setting, enables data collection for heatmaps, view the heatmap of the URL you want, view segment-specific data, filter heatmap based on your requirements, and create multiple views. 

That’s not all!

The dashboard also lets you stop the heatmap by pausing data collection, clear existing data from the heatmap using the ‘Flush All Data’ option, and share the report directly from your user account in a single click.

By providing room for so many actions in one single dashboard, heatmap tools like VWO Insights’ heatmap eliminate hours of manual effort that would have otherwise gone into doing all of the above.

Watch the video to get an overview of VWO Heatmaps:

iCharts stock index heatmap tool

The iCharts free heatmap tool helps stock analysts create heatmaps of current market trends and analyze them with ease.

Heatmap dashboard example for a stock index

iCharts has a unique variation of the dashboard. On the one hand, on the top of the page, it allows users to customize the heatmap based on the indices and industry you want to visualize in it. You can also choose what trend you want to visualize: whether you want to plot the ‘Gainers to Losers’ trend or ‘Major to Minor Moves’. And, on the other hand, on hovering over a data point, a report pops up reflecting the data point’s symbol, full name, sector, and previous close value, current price, and the difference between the two.

As can be seen above, iCharts allows users to view the data they want by allowing them to configure the heatmap, while, at the same time, giving a performance report of each data point. iCharts’ dashboard empowers users to know the performance of each data point in the matrix, draw comparisons, and narrow down on the relevant data points – all on the same page.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

TheSmallman heatmap excel dashboards tool

Thesmallman.com is a lab for Excel ideas that contains information on dashboards, charting, financial modeling, VBA, and training. It also offers various courses on building dashboards for various industries and their use cases.

Heatmap dashboard example for an excel

Excel is a powerful tool for generating heatmaps. TheSmallman has some ready-to-use heatmap dashboard templates and also offers courses on how to build your own excel heatmap dashboard. Look at this dashboard template that can be used for creating Excel heatmaps:

The above dashboard allows you to change the full heatmap view simply by changing the selection in the dropdown on the left that reads ‘Avg Salary’. On changing the selection on this dropdown from ‘Avg Salary’ to ‘Unemployment’, the map as well as the charts on the right changes accordingly. All you need is to feed in the correct data, and voila:

Such a dynamic and well-configured heatmap dashboard empowers businesses to visualize gigantic data matrices on one Excel and also filter and configure data as per requirement. 

Conclusion

As can be seen from the above tools and examples of heatmap dashboards, a heatmap is incomplete without a dashboard. If heatmaps solve one pain point for its users, i.e., visualizing complex data sets in an easy to consume manner, heatmap dashboards solve the flipside of this coin—they make data interpretation and analysis of complex data sets simpler. Heatmap dashboard enables you to configure the data you want to visualize, narrow down and dive deep into data segments that are of high business priority, and draw data-backed conclusions from the same. 

FAQs on heatmap dashboard

One of Google’s most useful products is its location service, Google Maps. Let alone billions of people worldwide using it to get from point A to point B, the operation of businesses like Uber and Lyft completely rely upon Google’s location service. 

Google Maps tracks and stores data on literally every step you take, if the location services or GPS is enabled on the device. This location history data can then be used to visualize the number of location points and pins you visit over a period of time. The heatmap thus generated is referred to as a Google Maps Heatmap. 

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Create your own Google Maps heatmap in 3 simple steps

It is fairly simple to overlay your own Google Maps heatmap as there are many APIs and tools available on the internet that you can use to generate this type of heatmap.

These tools use the location history saved on Google’s cloud from your Google account and help create a heatmap of literally every place and location visited by a user. 

Here is how to create a Google Maps heatmap of your location history data using a tool called Location History Visualizer:

Step 1: Select data to be included

Head to Google Takeout to download your location history data. The Google Takeout page has a list of data that you can choose to export. On the page, deselect all then scroll down and select ‘Location History.’

After selecting ‘Location History,’ scroll to the bottom of the page and click next. After clicking next, you will be taken to the second step.

Step 2: Download data

In the second step, Google Takeout allows you to configure the delivery method, file type & size, and frequency.

After configuring the delivery method, file type & size, and frequency, click on ‘Create Export.’ Google Takeout will then process your Google Maps data and create an export. The time taken to create the export depends on the amount of data involved – it usually takes seconds but can take longer if exporting more data. Google Takeout sends an email to the corresponding Google account as soon as the export creation is completed.

Once the export is created, click on the download button. A zipped file will be downloaded to your device.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Step 3: Leverage location history visualizer, and voilà!

There are many free heatmap generators online, one of which is Location History Visualizer. Unzip the downloaded zipped file and open the folder named ‘Location History.’ Drag and drop the JSON file in the folder onto Location History Visualizer’s free-to-use heatmap generator. 

Location History Visualizer will take time to create your Google Maps heatmap based on the intensity of data points it has to plot – the higher the intensity, the longer it takes. And without any technical to-and-fro, a heatmap of your entire location history will be on your screen, with all the data points on a map. The heatmap generated looks something like the heatmap below:

Heatmaps: powerful, not just interesting

Heatmaps are a powerful way to visualize data that would otherwise be difficult to interpret or gain insight from. They can be interesting on a personal level as the above Location History example shows and can also be used in a business context to learn from your customers and website traffic. VWO Heatmaps can help your business drive more sales by understanding how website visitors are behaving on your website and optimizing to increase conversion rates.

Watch the video to learn more about heatmaps and heatmap reports:

FAQs on Google Maps Heatmap