Optimize your user experience with heatmaps

How do your visitors use your website?

I don’t just mean what pages they look at or what links they click on. I’m talking about seeing precisely how far they scroll down the page or tracking exactly what they’re clicking on. If you’re big into your web analytics tools, you might know exactly what I’m describing here. They’re called heat maps and they let you see a colored overlay on your website to visualize user activity.

There are a bunch of different types of heat maps. For example, scroll maps allow you to see how far users are moving down the page. As we scroll down here, we can see that viewers are dropping off at a certain point. And now that we know this, we can investigate. Is the content too long? Does it have errors? Is it boring? Now you can make informed changes and your scroll maps will show you if they’re working.

There’s also click maps that show you what users are clicking on, so you can easily see what the most popular or least popular links and buttons are on every page. Interesting. Not many people seem to like this blog post.

Here’s something you might not have considered.

As we said, click maps are all about where people are interacting with your site. But what if visitors are clicking on things that aren’t interactive? Here’s an example. These blog posts all have “Read more” buttons under them. You can see on the click map that people do click on those buttons. But in the frustration maps, we can see that they’re clicking on the titles. A lot. Clearly, we need to change the page to meet our users’ expectations, like making sure the titles are links.

To recap, scroll maps are a good indicator of where users are losing interest in your content. Click maps are great for seeing what’s capturing your visitors’ attention, and frustration maps identify areas of your site that look to users like they should be interactive, but are not.

When it comes to your website, your visitors often know more about using it than you do. Let us help you listen to them. To find out more about Silktide analytics, visit Silktide dot com slash analytics.