5 Benefits of Using Heatmaps for eCommerce

Having a successful eCommerce business means knowing what your customers like, what they respond to, and what site pages they stay on for the longest. Knowing exactly what parts of your website are favoured by your visitors is critical information for the growth of any digital business. Luckily, eCommerce companies can harness this essential data in the form of a visual heatmap.

In this post, we’ll dive into what a heatmap is, and the ways heatmaps can be used to your competitive eCommerce advantage.

What is a heatmap?

Heatmaps enable eCommerce marketers to assess their visitors’ on-screen behaviour, including what they visit on your site and for how long. A heatmap can help you determine why your visitors might click on one CTA versus another, and even convey how much of your blog posts they read. They make complex data sets instantly easy to digest by visually demonstrating the ‘hot spots’ of your site.

Heatmaps are widely used to:

 

• Analyse content reach
• Assess CTA effectiveness
• Track user behaviour on non-clickable aspects of the site
• Monitor distraction levels
• Monitor site relevancy levels
• Detect varying device engagement

Why you should use heatmaps for eCommerce:

1. Heatmaps give you an immediate overview of essential web performance parameters

Heatmaps differ from other analytics tools because they quickly draw attention to major issues on your site. Unlike Google Analytics, heatmaps are capable of recording on-screen behaviour, as opposed to only monitoring on-screen actions. There are different types of heatmaps, for example:

 

• Click heatmaps reveal the clicking patterns of your site
• Scroll heatmaps expose the average visibility of your pages
• Attention heatmaps display which parts of your site are most engaging
• Movement heatmaps track mouse movement
• Geo heatmaps reveal anonymous user locations

In short, heatmaps tell you at a glance what’s working on your eCommerce site and what needs revisiting. With diagnostic heatmaps, the problem-solver can efficiently determine what’s wrong. For instance, folds in the scroll heatmaps and cold spots quickly identify problem areas on your site and where you can focus your energy to convert more leads.

2. Heatmaps present complex data visually

Wouldn’t you much rather look at a picture over an excel sheet to understand your data? Heatmaps, while just as accurate as excel, can show you what your data means on-screen. Interpreting your analytic data on excel will tell you the what, but not necessarily the why. Why is your click-rate problematic? Well, a heatmap can help you discover that the link is buried under other distracting page elements. Or, what’s causing a high bounce rate? A heatmap could convey that it’s due to a low-visibility page. Heatmaps also increase communication over data sets, helping people understand and conceptualise their data by showing clear, understandable data patterns. This enables your company to always have intelligible data and results to show clients, making it easier to relay important data trends and observations.

3. Heatmaps invite customer feedback

In web design, learning from your users is the difference between a successful site and an unsuccessful one. Heatmaps help you understand what your audience does, and why, as they respond to and navigate the design of your site. What your visitors tell you about your site might not be what their actions indicate – that’s why Heatmaps are great at generating user feedback because they track the true navigational patterns of your visitors. You can take this one step further by combining heatmapping with A/B testing, to ensure you’re learning as much as you can from users without being intrusive.

4. Heatmaps improve CX

When you’re consistently tracking how your visitors interact with your site, you’ll not only start to understand your brand better, you’ll also understand your audience better. Your company should have a vested interest in your visitors because they are the ones who react to your messaging, and without them, there wouldn’t even be a conversation. Heatmap filters reveal how audiences react to the same message, whereas friction scores on heatmaps can help demonstrate where your visitors experience frustration with your site. Important intel such as this can determine how effective and beneficial the customer experience (CX) is. Listening to specific audiences allows you to offer them a better overall experience while giving you ample information to keep improving it.

5. Heatmaps increase the bottom line

Heatmaps guide decisions that ultimately improve sales and drive business results. By helping managers make better web design choices that boost engagement and the lead conversions required to make sales, heatmaps unquestionably improve the bottom line. eCommerce businesses that utilise heatmaps are not only dedicated to their customers but also their ROI.