Do you know what your website visitors are doing? Are they clicking links? Pushing calls to actions (CTAs)? Reading pages?
If you don’t have a way to track visitor actions, you’re probably just taking guesses about what visitors do on your website.
Without a heatmapping tool, you have no real way of knowing.
Here are some of the awesome things a tool like Hotjar can do and how this knowledge will benefit your business – we threw in a few before and afters screenshots from our own clients, too, so you can see exactly how beneficial Hotjar heatmapping software can be.
Full Disclosure: We use Hotjar as part of our inbound marketing and growth-driven design strategy for every client. It gives us cold, hard data about what’s working and what’s not so we make educated, informed decisions about our clients’ websites that get results.
First, let’s dive into a few insights that heatmapping offers.
Here’s an inside view of how we use heatmaps to boost our client’s results.
Here’s a look at our client’s original website prior to working with Flight Media.
Client homepage before working with Flight Media on a redesign
In the screenshot below, which shows the redesigned site, the heatmap captures how users are engaging with the navigation and hero image on the homepage.
The heatmap was created a year after the new site was launched. The data collected was for 2,000 page views. The heatmap shows that “Get a quote” got the most clicks, so we kept it in the navigation.
We also added a “Contact us” button in the navigation to capitalize on the consumer’s desire to get a quote and presented another opportunity to connect with prospects.
Homepage heatmap
After running heatmapping tests for awhile, we discovered the footer was getting lots of traction in a few areas.
Footer heatmap
Since users are clicking on “Team” in the footer, we decided to add it to the primary navigation.
In addition, the footer data also contributed to the decision to add the “Contact us” button in the main navigation (see the previous screenshot).
Users are also clicking on “Videos” in the footer, so we added a video to the homepage on a later design update. In this final image (below), you can see that “Get a quote” is still getting lots of engagement, like on the previous heatmap.
Having two opportunities to capture quotes increases the volume of prospects getting in touch with the client.
Homepage heatmap
Since users were interested in footer items like “Team” and “Contact,” we decided to make these items more prominent by adding them to the hero image.
Users can now learn more about the team (through the “Learn More” CTA) or get in touch with the client (through the “Contact Us” CTA). We also made changes to the hero imagery.
The updated images are more personal (and they are NOT stock photography).
This was our client’s original website.
Original website before working with Flight Media
After running heatmapping tests, we discovered that the website and original design didn’t elicit a lot of engagement.
The hero image, which is an important piece of real estate, wasn’t getting any clicks – visitors weren’t interacting with it – because it lacked a call to action.
The screenshot below shows the new homepage, complete with a call to action that is getting more engagement. In addition, we changed the labels in the navigation so that they are more conventional, meaning visitors would quickly know what to do. For example, in the original design, there was a label “knowledge center,” which got minimal clicks.
In the new design, we gave this label a new name, “Resources.” Users heavily engaged with this label, increasing clicks by 1,050%.
Here is a heatmap of our client’s original website. It tells us that the user wants to know more about what this company does because they are clicking on the “Services” item.
Original website before working with Flight Media
The screenshot below is a heatmap of the client’s redesigned homepage. Since “Services” was a heavily clicked item in the navigation, we provided the user with another opportunity to learn more about the client’s services in the hero image of the redesign.
The hero image is an important piece of real estate on the home page and should showcase what users are most interested in, as well as relating to the goal of the website.
In addition, one of the main goals for this website was to get more people in touch with the client, so that’s why we emphasized “Contact” calls-to-action (CTAs) on the upper part of the homepage.
There are two “Contact us” CTAs on the homepage.
If you don’t know what your website visitors are doing on your site, how can you make changes to affect engagement, conversions, and sales?
What’s your strategy for discovering the motivations behind web users actions if you don’t use heatmapping software?
