SEO London, Edinburgh Internet Marketing Breeze Media

Heatmaps can seriously improve the sales from your website!

You may think you have the best looking and funkiest website on the planet but did you realise that the design of your site may actually be preventing you from making sales? It’s been a widely (and wrongly) held belief that a well designed website with lovely graphics will attract more sales on it’s own. Whilst this “may” work for a very tiny number of websites the facts are that fancy design is well down the list when visitors first look at your pages.

Web users know what they want – so don’t make it hard for them!

Web users have evolved. They’re less impressed by fancy design and more concerned with what they want. They’re spoilt for choice and will typically only spend 4-10 seconds evaluating your front page before deciding to stay and read on or puke and go check a competitor. Obviously you want them to stay and buy so we need to find out what’s causing them to leave – cue the heatmap.

What are heatmaps?

Heatmaps are invisible click counters that measure where your visitors click on your web page. Whenever a visitor clicks on your web page the heatmap records where they clicked and stores this for you to view later. If many visitors click on a certain link then the colour of these clicks are displayed as “hotspots” hence the term heat maps.

In online marketing heatmaps are used to obtain vital inofrmation about where visitors are clicking on and equally what they are NOT clicking. From this we can make improvements to the website and subsequently make more sales.

The heatmap image below shows hotspots generated from visitor clicks. These are popular so we need to keep these. The areas where there are little or no clicks are wasting valuable space and should be replaced by other better links.

So why would you deploy a heat map?

Heatmaps can provide you vital information on how visitors are reacting with your website. The click hotspots that are generated tell you that these are areas that visitors are interested in whereas the areas with very few clicks are not. From the heat map you can then adjust your website to move these non performing areas to a lower part of the page and replace them with your important calls to action such as a buy now or register now link.

Keep your best performers in sight

We know from hundreds of heatmaps that up to 95% of all clicks occur in the area before visitors have to scroll – this is called the “fold”. More importantly however – this means that 95% of your visitors will never scroll if what they want is not on the page! So do you really want to hide that buy now button at the foot of your web page?

How a heatmap improved our client’s sales.

Look at the Google analytics snapshot from one of our client’s websites. Their website was already doing quite well but we knew we get some extra sales so we deployed a heatmap to see where they were clicking. After a couple of weeks we noticed very definite hotspots and very definite cold spots. We removed these coldspot links and replaced them with warmer links from other areas of the site. The result was that traffic increased, bounce rate dropped, visitors were staying on pages longer, sales improved and the client was happier*.

* We can provide details of this case study on request if you are interested in conducting a heatmap study for your site. Please contact us for more information.

Image below shows clear performance increases accross the board after changing the layout of the site to increase sales. The red dot signifies the change in design. Note the graphs show increases (good) for time on site, pages per visit and a decrease in bounce rate (also good).

We