The first question you may have, when heatmaps are brought up, is what they actually are. Well, to answer this briefly, heatmaps offer an accurate way of tracking how your website visitors interact with your site. The buttons they click, the things they hover over the most, even what they scroll past and what they linger on. All can be revealed using a heatmap. Of course, while the process is somewhat more complicated, there are, in fact, ways to use other software tools to get the same result. What, then, are the advantages of using heatmaps? What makes them worth using over any other kind of similar software? And what justifies investing your time and money into them? In this article, Movers Development explores the extent of the role of heatmaps.
#1: Swift results
Compared to other ways of analyzing your site data, one of the advantages of using heatmaps is how quickly they generate results. You do not need to wait for tons of data which then needs to be analyzed. Do not need to wait for weeks before your results are reliable enough to use. You just need to have visitors on your website for heatmaps to immediately show their worth. You can even track the activity of your website visitors in real-time. And, in the world of business, time is definitely one of the most valuable resources to have.
#2: Optimal website design
A potential benefit is their ability to help you improve your web design. Most people want to include all kinds of different options in their websites. But they never pause to think about whether their site visitors would be even interested in them. Now, you can know exactly what drew your site visitors. What they hovered over, what they clicked on the most, etc.
But you can also see which parts of your website they ignored and at which point they ended up leaving your site. That way, you can eliminate unpopular sections or calls to action, which would allow you to further streamline and beautify the look of your website! You should not scoff at the importance of this, since experience has shown that people prefer clean-looking and easy-to-use sites. In fact, you could easily double your traffic by making your site more appealing.
#3: Easy to interpret
Another of the advantages of using heatmaps is how easy they are to implement and interpret. There is nothing overly complicated when it comes to analyzing the results of a heatmap. You do not need to be an analytics expert to see what the most popular aspects of your website are. The ability to actually see what your site visitors hovered over, what they passed in their scrolling over or just quickly went past, is as intuitive as it is helpful. That is to say, immensely!
On the other hand, even the next simplest way of analyzing your site data would take a lot of work. Not to mention some specialized education on the part of your employees. As such, the ease of use is undoubtedly a selling point of the heatmap method of analyzing your website data.
#4: Excellent for analytics
This is not to say that you need to give up on other analytics software tools! In fact, heatmaps are best used when combined with other software options to provide a bigger picture of what is happening with your website. So, make sure to include other add-ons and tools in combination with heatmaps.
The more traditional approach can offer better number-based data, which you can use to collaborate your heatmap findings. Similarly, heatmaps can clarify certain questions which more traditional analytics software either leaves murky or fails to answer entirely. In other words, you can, in fact, have the best of both worlds.
#5: Great for understanding site visitors
Now, there are obvious advantages to knowing what your most popular services or products are. However, have you ever wondered about which of them tempted your website’s visitors the most, only to have them give up on them partway? Heatmaps offer you the chance to find that out, which in turn provides valuable data for your marketing and sales departments.
Sure, knowing which of your products or services your potential customers took a liking to before giving up on purchasing them does not tell you why they did so in the end. But you will then be able to take advantage of your other resources to find out. Perhaps publish a poll, or have your employees ask about it in your stores. At any rate, it would be a useful way of getting on the right track to generating more moving leads.
#6: Better customer service
Perhaps one of the main advantages of using heatmaps is how useful they are to customer service. Do your customers like using customer support? Do they use an instant moving quote calculator or prefer fetching your number from the site and calling to talk to an employee? How much research do they do on your website before deciding to do any of the previously mentioned things?
Such information can help immensely when planning how to best approach your company’s customer service. If your customers prefer online cost calculators, then you need to invest into making them more reliable. If they prefer to talk to employees, then you might need to hire more people to work as a call center. And, if you know what info they usually approach your employees with, then you would have a better idea of what information your employees can just briefly cover and which to emphasize.
In summary
Heatmaps are very easy and intuitive to use. They provide quick and reliable results. They highlight a whole host of improvements and important data which you can then use to better your business! And, just as importantly, they slot very nicely into the results provided by other analytics software. So, there is nothing to lose and plenty to gain if you opt to make use of heatmaps on your website. For more information and guidelines on how to grow the online presence of your business, reach out to our team!
