Some Like it Hot…Crank up the Temperature with Heat Maps

By Beacon News | Published December 10, 2010 | Categories: Web Development

When maintaining your website, every inch of space on the screen is crucial to helping you hit your conversions. Why would you leave anything to chance?

You never want to waste space or hide an important call to action because it may cause your visitors to grow frustrated; consequently, you could continue to lose sales. Therefore, the million dollar question is: How do we determine the effectiveness of your layout site? The answer, my friends, becomes apparent with the use of heat maps, which illustrate the behavioral trending of your site’s visitors, or to know where potential customers are clicking, and more importantly, where they are not.

How the software works

When we optimize a client’s website, we install a special application that tracks movements, hovering, and clicks visitors make on your site. What is most impressive from this application is that we can analyze the data in several ways, all of which start with a true-to-form heat map that registers density by click. From here, we can break down the clicks and divide them by search engine source, day of the week, time of day visited, new vs. return visitor, IP location, referral paths, search terms, etc. We can also filter and block specific IPs to refine our data better as well.

At this point, we can begin testing and monitoring test page variations against each other to optimize sales-driven pages more effectively.