A 35% increase is no small feat. Assuming you have 1000 unique visitors daily, that will work out to 350 out of the thousand.  Bold claims, indeed. However, I am not bluffing or trying to hook you into buying something you might regret later. I am just going to tell you an open secret you may already know, but fail to harness its power - Heat Mapping your website.

What is Heat Map?

Scientifically, it is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors (You’ve gotta love Wikipedia). :-D

In terms of your webpage or site as a whole, it is the visual representation of mouse clicks on a single HTML page. It looks something like the following image below:

A very bright red colour means a lot of visitors are clicking on that particular portion of the page, while blue means lesser clicks and no clicks shown with no colours.

So, What does Heat Mapping Your Website got to do with Increasing Sales?

It is a very useful tool to help you analyze your website design structure. Heat mapping your webpages allows you to know and understand what and where your visitors click. You can use the information to properly design product placements or banner locations with a higher click ratios (in this case, locations with bright red markings) within. Sales is all about the numbers; therefore, a higher click ratio is equal to a higher sales conversion rate.

Here’s a simple 3-step design checklist:

  1. Are your important information being seen by visitors?
  2. Are your visitors clicking on the navigation and action items?
  3. Are visitors being directed to call-to-action pages in a logical manner?

Of course, the point of this article is to show you what tools you can use to heat map your websites. These tools are going to help you increase your conversion rates by 35% or even more.

There are a number of good heat mapping tools out there; some are paid, while others are provided free-of-charge. The following below are two tools I recommend:

Crazy Egg

One of the best I have seen so far is from CrazyEgg. They have a myriad of analytical tools to help you visualize what visitors are doing.

It includes features like: Confetti - which allows you to see what people are clicking on based on certain factors such as their operating system and where they came from, Overlay - providing you with tons of data about particular links, and Report sharing - enabling you to share the data with team members and clients.

They do offer an array of pricing structure, including a free 4 page per website version with up to 5000/site hits.

ClickHeat

If you are not into a paid subscription yet, don’t fret. Although it is not comparable in terms of features, I guarantee that you will not lose out in terms of analytical data intepretation. ClickHeat is an open source visual tool for showing “hot” and “cold” zones of a web page. It allows you to see which spots users click on most, and which spots are being ignored.

Easy to implement too. Just insert a JavaScript into your webpage and the application will track all your visitors’ clicks. Check it out here.

Test, Test and Test Some More

Last but not least, test it out. There is no tried and true method. If you initially thought and placed a banner within a “hot” zone only to find it didn’t live up to your expectations, do not give up. You need to test out your newly designed webpages before hitting the correct spot. Just move the banner or signup box to a different position that is equally hot, but will grab your visitors’ attention.

Posted on August 5th, 2008. Categorized under Tutorials.
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