What is Heatmap? A Comprehensive Guide.

Update date : 20 Apr 2023 | 5 Min Read

Banner image of what is heatmap

Ever wondered how businesses analyze their website performance depending on which website function is most clicked by visitors? Realizing the website's performance is crucial for successfully implementing any SEO practice. Heatmap helps marketers, product developers, and data analysts to evaluate website performance from a broader perspective. Understanding the unpopular elements on the website gives clarity on the optimization process. This article will provide you with clear insight on:

  • What is heatmap
  • How it helps
  • And It's types

What is a Heatmap?

Heatmap is a 2D representation of the user journey on a website to understand how a website interacts with its platform. Leveraging the data visualization technique:

"Heatmap depicts the data in the form of a colored map with the variation in the hue of the colors to differentiate between the most clicked (hot) and less clicked (cold) elements of the website."

Traek website heatmap tool

Businesses can improve their user journey by studying how users interact with the website.

"In my digital career, I have often encountered websites that provide horrible user experiences and need to get a good rank over SERP."

This is due to the want for proper website evaluation and optimization. Heatmap solves this challenge by depicting a detailed analysis of what elements of the website are performing well and where the website could be improved to get user interaction.

Types of Heatmaps

Heatmap aggregates user behavior and concludes the qualitative and quantitative data about how the target audience interacts user journey on the site. There are different types of heatmaps to analyze various data, including what elements users click on, scroll, or neglect to identify trends and optimize services and site accordingly to increase user engagement and sales.
Here are the following heatmap types based on the user activity:

1. Click Heatmaps

The click heatmap depicts the data concerning the visitor's clicks on the website. Different color saturation & hue variations are utilized to show the data. With this type of Heatmap, it is easy to understand what elements of the website are getting more clicks and if visitors are interested in knowing about your services. Click heatmaps are also called touch maps if observed for mobile visitors.

Screenshot showing click heatmap of traek
Click Heatmap

2. Scroll Heatmaps

Scroll heatmaps depict the data on the user percentage scrolling through the website. The most scrolled page shows that the visitors are interested in the company's services and want to know more. Website heatmap tools help businesses to analyze & identify the potential leads interested in their services. This heatmap tool can be easily synchronized with the company’s website to track user interactions.

Screenshot of scroll heatmap of traek
Scroll Heatmap

3. Attention/Move Heatmaps

The Move Heatmap represents how visitors navigate the website and move their cursor on the desktop. The data about how visitors move their cursor on the page is analyzed following the correlation between where they are looking on the site.

Screenshot of move heatmap of traek
Move Heatmap

Benefits of Heatmaps

When I started delivering my services as a marketing consultant, I primarily focused on analyzing visitors' data on my service page, studying it, and optimizing my service pages. At various points in the article, I mentioned that businesses could only survive with an effective marketing & lead-generation strategy. One of the primary advantages of a heatmap is if you understand your visitor's behavior well, it is easy to determine the required changes to promote your services digitally.

Following are the core benefits & uses of integrating Heatmap:

1. Effective Website Optimization

Heatmaps generate a visual representation of the user behavior on the website. This will give an insight into the website's best and worst-performing elements. Leveraging this data, businesses or marketers can competently optimize their websites, landing pages, or services to get more leads.

2. Business Analytics

Heatmap is also used as an analytics tool to obtain quick visual data about the current results and website performance. Marketers can integrate the heatmap into the business workflow for the website's growth. This suggests the improvement areas of the website, intensity area where most visitors are reflecting, and cold elements of the website.

3. Marketing and Sales

Heatmap detects the website's hot and cold elements, which can be used to improve marketing response rates by targeted marketing. For example, if you run an ad campaign for a particular website landing page, it is easy to identify whether the visitors are clicking for the CTA.

Best Practices for Heatmap

  • Follow a Simple Approach

Heatmaps should represent the visual data in a simple manner. Any complexity of the heatmap would create challenges in reading the analytical data.

  • Use Color Effectively

Choose colors that make it easy to see where the hotspots are. The color variations are obtained with different hue and saturation settings.

  • Use Labels

Label the heatmap with clear, concise labels explaining the data's representation.

  • Scale Appropriately

Ensure that the heatmap scale is appropriate for the data being presented.

  • Consider Context

Always provide context around the presented data so viewers can better understand what they see.

Traek: Heatmap

Traek is an all-in-one marketing and sales tool that helps marketers and businesses get a sneak into their website's performance and analyze their brand's online presence. Traek incorporates two types of heatmap:

  • Click Map
  • Move Map

After integrating traek with the company website, it is easy to track your website performance and check the visitor journey using heatmaps.

Summing Up

We often need clarification about various factors while providing services in the vast market. From this standpoint, one can quickly get confused about what to improve and where to start. Heatmap, however, helps you study where your website needs improvement based on users' behavior.

Analyzing the user interaction on the website is the most effective way to understand the subjective preferences of the visitors and optimize the website accordingly. Selecting an all-in-one marketing & sales tool is the best way to advance in the broad digital spectrum while efficiently understanding the targeted audience. Traek includes everything from lead generation tools, heatmaps, live chat, and user journey recording.

FAQs

What is a website heatmap tool?

Heatmap website tool like traek represents the visitor's website interaction following the data visualization technique. Heatmap depicts the user's journey in the map format with color variations obtained from different hue and saturation settings. Visual representation of data is easy to understand compared to the complex table format.

How does Traek Heatmap work?

Traek website heatmap tool can be easily integrated with any website. It tracks the visitor session on the website based on the clicks and the cursor movement. The integration process of Traek heatmap is quick & straightforward. Traek heatmap can be set up for multiple pages on a single website.

What are the types of heatmaps?

There are mainly three types of heatmaps, including:

  • Click Heatmap: Represents visitors' visual data of clicks on the site.
  • Scroll Heatmap: This represents the scrolling action of the visitors on the site.
  • Move Heatmap: Represents the cursor movement of visitors.

How does the heatmap show the data?

Heatmap follows the data visualization technique and is analyzed using the correlation approach. Heatmap uses the color-coding system to show the different data values. Heatmap shows the user behavior on the particular webpage of the website.



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Tapan Patel
Article by
Tapan Patel
BDM

As the head of sales & marketing, Tapan has expertise in the execution and planning of business growth strategies aligning with marketing trends. Tapan has over 10+ years of experience in IT marketing for creating growth strategies and managing sales.

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