Have you ever wondered what visitors do on your website pages? Where do they click? What grabs their attention? How do they move their mouse cursor? So many questions that heatmaps can be answered.
A heatmap — which can be translated as a "heat map" — lets you spot hot zones on your web pages, that is, the places where your visitors interact most with your site.
By understanding what interests users most and, conversely, what doesn't work, you can greatly improve your website's user experience.
In this article, let's explore the usefulness of creating a "heat map" to improve user experience, as well as 10 heatmap tools to try!
What is a heatmap?
A heatmap is a graphical representation describing how visitors navigate your website. Using a color code, you identify the most visited and least popular sections of your pages.
Generally, warm colors represent areas frequented by your visitors. Cool colors refer to those that fail to attract their attention.
There are different types of heat maps:
Click maps
A popular heatmap format, click maps show you the areas where users click.
The information provided helps you optimize the placement of your call-to-action buttons and remove friction points. The goal is to improve visitors' progression toward conversion (purchase, content download, newsletter subscription, etc.).
Scroll maps
As their name indicates, they represent visitors' scrolling behavior on a web page.
Scroll maps show you how many visitors scrolled to the bottom of a page or left before. They help you determine the ideal length of your contentThis can also help you decide where to place important elements on a page.
Mouse movement maps
Movement maps analyze your users' mouse movement. They allow you to spot the frustrated users by showing the places where they hover, hesitate, or jiggle their cursor.
This type of heatmap helps you improve navigation by optimizing buttons or dynamic elements that hinder the experience. It can also help identify broken links or design issues.
Error click maps
Encountering errors or problems on the site can be frustrating for your users.
Error click maps let you quickly find and fix bugs. This significantly improves the user experience… and their progress toward conversion.
Dead click maps
Sometimes visitors mistake non-clickable elements on a website for a button, resulting in a dead click. These maps reveal non-functional elements on your page to reduce user confusion and frustration.
They can also help understand behavioral trends over time. You identify new opportunities such as buttons or sections to place in a specific spot on the site.
AI-generated heatmaps
AI-powered maps predict the sections of your website that users are likely to engage with. They mimic the first 3 to 5 seconds of visitors' attention to identify the most viewed elements and those that are completely ignored.
However, AI-boosted heatmaps work best on high-traffic pages. The more data there is to analyze, the more accurate the algorithm.
Why use a heatmap?
Heatmaps help you visually track visitor engagement. The goals? Better understand user behavior and check whether your calls-to-action are well placed, in order to improve the conversion path.
With a heatmap tool, you'll know:
- Where visitors click to reach the final page
- If visitors have difficulty finding your CTA
- If there are problems depending on device type or browser
- Which non-clickable elements create distractions and harm conversion
- Which links get the most clicks
The 10 best heatmap tools
Now that you know more about these tools, let's discover the ones you can use.
1. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is described as 'an X-ray pair of glasses' that lets you see exactly what visitors do on your website.
While it allows you to analyze scrolling and clicks with its heatmaps, the tool also helps you learn where your visitors come from and where they click the most.
For example, you can deduce the preferences of visitors who came from Facebook and compare them to those from Twitter, and thus adapt your social posts to optimize their performance.
2. Contentsquare
Contentsquare (formerly Clicktale) allows you to create extremely precise heatmaps, whether on desktop, mobile or tablet.
Click zones, mouse movements, page scrolling: it's all there.
Additionally, for those who prefer learning from text and numbers rather than visuals, Clicktale offers reports rich in data and statistics to understand your visitors' behavior.
3. Lucky Orange
The heatmaps of Lucky Orange have the particularity of being dynamic and interactive, which means you can follow them and obtain interesting data in real time.
The tool also offers advanced segmentation possibilities to better understand your website visitors.
Lucky Orange also includes other very interesting features. For example, it automatically captures a video screenshot of each of your visitors: a very good complement to heatmaps for analyzing navigation on your site.
4. Heatmap for WordPress
Heatmap for WordPress is a plugin for the WordPress CMS that helps you understand which of your content performs best using heatmaps.
It records users' clicks on your website, as well as interactions on touch devices, and provides access to real-time statistical analyses.
5. UXWizz
UXWizz (formerly called userTrack) is another quality tool for creating heatmaps and analyzing navigation on your website.
It generates heatmaps from your visitors' clicks, mouse movements and page scrolls.
6. Mouseflow
Mouseflow It gives you more than heatmaps. In addition to click and scroll zones, it reveals a visitor's journey from one page to another.
Thanks to session replay, Mouseflow shows you user engagement in real time so you can track behavior and guide your future decisions.
Very intuitive, this heatmap tool lets you filter data by location, duration and traffic source. You can even compare the behavior of new visitors with returning ones.
7. Hotjar
With Hotjar, you can create heatmaps that highlight clicks, mouse movements and taps on the page. Heatmaps are generated on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to improve the user experience on both.
Hotjar records sessions that you can share with your team. The goal is to help you improve the web design and content of your pages or forms.
8. Inspectlet
Inspectlet uses eye-tracking to create heatmaps. The basic principle of the tool is that the eye moves with the mouse cursor. The idea is to put you in the visitor's shoes by seeing through their eyes. These advanced heatmaps also focus on clicks and page scrolls.
The tool records user sessions so you can watch them at your leisure with your team. Many options let you filter them by visit duration and navigation path. These are very useful for improving your conversion funnel.
Finally, know that Inspectlet has a feature to run A/B tests and build more effective landing pages.
9. FullStory
Comprehensive user experience analytics solution, FullStory gives you an in-depth view of user behavior. This heatmap tool highlights frustrations and funnel drop-offs. Its intelligent analysis of the purchase journey provides insight into why website visitors did not convert.
Of course, you'll also be able to create click and scroll maps to discover the hot and cold spots on your pages.
10. Clicky
Specializing in web analytics, Clicky also offers a heatmap tool. Its clean interface makes it very easy to use.
With this solution, you can filter heatmaps by visitors, pages, or events. That will help you easily track visitor paths to understand how they convert (and why some don't complete the funnel).
Conclusion
While all these heatmap tools can help you better understand your visitors and their behavior on your site, conducting a user test is also a good solution.
Then, all you have to do is find a freelance web designer to improve the user experience of your website.
