Improve eCommerce UX by using heatmaps

Improving the UX (user experience) of your ecommerce store is a long and tedious process. It’s more than possible, but you need to understand your users better – and find ways to improve your site if you want to see good results.

Luckily, you can use tools like heatmaps, which are one of the most used analytics tools in the ecommerce industry and give you a way to understand user behavior and how certain pages are performing.

Not sure what heatmaps are and how they work?

Let us explain how you can use heatmaps to ensure an optimized shopping experience for your visitors.

What are heat maps?

Heatmaps are graphical representation tools that present website data in a unique way. Instead of looking at endless spreadsheets or other data representations, a heatmap lets you visualize critical data concentrations as bright dots on a screen according to a color-coded system.

For example, if you have a website heatmap that represents where website visitors move their cursors or click most often, the most clicked areas will be displayed in red or orange. Less clicked areas will instead appear in cooler colors like blue or green, or have no color.

Expressed differently; Heatmaps show concentrations of data as “heat” on a screen.

Source: Hotjar

advantages

Heatmaps can offer many great benefits to ecommerce business owners and website owners, including:

• Optimizing your conversion rate. With heat maps, you can identify the areas of a website or page that resonate best with your website visitors and take practical steps to improve customer retention.
• Improving the discoverability of certain areas of your website. In addition to visualizing areas of the page that resonate with visitors, heatmaps also reveal areas that users see little or no traffic. This might be important to you, either as part of the customer retention process or as part of your lead generation approach.
• Simplification of numerical data. Heatmaps allow you to analyze data without learning complex statistical formulas or methods of analysis, allowing you to visually see how people are interacting with your website instead of having to figure it out by numbers.
• To make it easier for you to understand how Visitor data relates to their behavior. Heatmaps can help you understand how your visitors are responding to a product, service, or idea, and identify where and when users may be frustrated or distracted.
• Helping businesses plan their content marketing strategies, project sales, revenue forecasting and cost reductions.

Website maps are invaluable for website owners, managers, business owners, entrepreneurs and everyone in between. It’s just more intuitive to look at heatmaps than looking at tons of numbers over and over again.

Types of heat maps

Heatmaps are available in various website toolsets and in many different types. The type of map you use can affect the data you receive, how you interpret the data, and how easily your website is updated.

The most common types of heatmaps include:

• Click Heat Maps. Click heatmaps help you analyze which webpage areas are getting the most clicks, such as: B. Your landing page, contact page or even product pages.

Source: Hotjar

• Scroll through heatmaps Use warm-to-cool color shifts and transitions to indicate how far a viewer scrolls down a given page. Warmer areas of the page show you where most of your website visitors spend most of their time. Cooler colors, like greens or blues, show you which parts of the page or which content is mostly ignored.

Source: Hotjar

• Heatmaps for traffic segmentation. Traffic Segmentation Heatmaps provide you with website traffic data and categorize it into different customer demographic segments. You can customize which customer segments you see based on factors like age, gender, location, and more.
• Mobile and desktop heatmaps. These are dedicated snapshots for desktop and mobile website pages. These comparisons allow you to see how differently your users are interacting with your mobile site compared to desktop sites.
• Mouse tracking heatmaps. As the name suggests, mouse tracking heatmaps directly track where users’ cursors are moving on your web pages. This can tell you how focused or distracted a user is while browsing your site.

Source: Hotjar

All of the above can be beneficial, especially if you use them wisely. Sometimes interpreting the heatmap results can be as difficult as learning a new language. You want to make the most of any tool you integrate with your ecommerce store, so we advise you to do some thorough research into the types you’ll be using and take the time to analyze the information they provide.

How to use heatmaps and interpret their results

The following tips can help you use heatmaps strategically and easily identify opportunities to improve your business:

• Use heatmaps on the right pages. Ideally, you should use them on your most visited pages; The more data you have, the better you can use the heatmaps to understand your visitors’ behavior patterns.
• Discover how visitors shop on your eCommerce store. This can help you improve your product pages and get more sales.
• Optimize your calls to action. For example, if you find that a call-to-action on a webpage isn’t getting much attention, move or update it and see if that improves it.
• Find out which areas of your website your visitors pay most attention to. This allows you to improve the presentation of content on the page and position important elements where they receive maximum attention. Optimizing each page based on user behavior helps increase engagement and drive more sales.
• Discover usability or navigation problems on your website. For example, if you notice a drop in user engagement (like a drop in clicks), heat map data can help identify unusual activity that you should investigate further.
• heatmap data can indicate whether customers are Problems navigating the checkout page and complete their purchases. Use this data to identify the “dead elements” on your checkout page that get little attention but take up valuable space and replace them with something more engaging and valuable.
• Check which payment methods shoppers use most often for their purchases. This can help you further prioritize your checkout page while reducing costs. You can eliminate payment processors you don’t need while focusing your resources on innovative infrastructure like digital wallets to accept and store crypto and other digital assets.
• Use heatmaps to Analyze how users behave on different devices such as smartphones and desktop computers. You may need to unify user experiences if there are major differences.

Source: Hotjar

There are times when a heat map analysis doesn’t provide a sufficiently clear way to improve your conversion rate. Try to supplement your research with the session recordings, as most heatmap tools also store recordings of the specific movements of visitors on your website. The analysis can take some time, but a customer-centric company will benefit greatly from valuable insights gained from observing the specific behavior of your customers on your website.

For better understanding..

Any business with an online presence can benefit from insights gained from heat maps and session recordings. Regardless of the type of digital touchpoint, whether it is a presentation page, online shop or mobile app, this type of Analysis Tools can gain valuable insights that help you to optimize your users’ path to the conversion point. Let’s look at some examples:

The credit card company re:member used the heatmap from HotJar and recording solution to find out what important website information visitors missed, what areas users would click on that weren’t clickable, and what happened when users encountered an error in their website flows. The insights from this deep dive led to website optimizations that increased the number of applications for the company by 43%. Read Hotjar’s full case study.

Leather bag maker Bros Leather Supply Co used Sumo’s e-commerce analytics tool Discover the interest of the visitors in qualitative product images. The results of their experiments allowed the manufacturer to invest more in the type of visual elements included on the product pages Optimizing user experience on the website. Read Sumo’s full case study.

Conclusion

heat maps are invaluable tools you shouldn’t ignore When used properly, heat maps can help and enable you to better understand your website visitors to enhance and streamline Your website for big conversion boosts.