How To Use Heatmaps for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

When it comes to CRO, guesswork is not an option.

You can't simply launch a website, sell a product or service people seek, and expect orders to pile up. Entrepreneurs often get so caught up in their "winning product" that they neglect user experience. A year later, they wonder why their conversion rate is dismal compared to competitors selling the same products.

All other business facets being equal—marketing, copywriting, and advertising—a poor conversion rate boils down to your website.

Design and interface aside, you must sprinkle a good level of behavioral psychology to drive meaningful conversions. Understanding user behavior gives you valuable insights into increasing your conversion rate. Such is the working principle behind heatmaps.

This article explores heatmaps, how they work, and how you can use these tools for conversion rate optimization. Let's dive in.

Heatmaps, Explained!

Heatmaps, or heat maps, are visual analytics tools that display user interaction data on your website. They often use color-coded representations to show how visitors engage with various elements. 

For example, warmer colors like red and orange are typically used to highlight high-activity areas, such as frequently clicked buttons or sections where users stop scrolling. Conversely, cooler colors like blue and green are intended for areas with low interaction.

In other words, heatmaps show how users interact and behave on your site, like where they click and where they spend their time. This reveals specific behavioral patterns, helping site owners identify what's working, what isn't, and what can be improved to boost the overall user experience and, by extension, the conversion rate.

Heatmaps come in different formats, each focusing on tracking specific user behaviors. Here's a quick run-down of the major types of heatmaps:

Click maps

Screenshot provided by author

Click maps show where visitors click on a web page. They help site owners distinguish which buttons, links, or elements drive engagement and which are overlooked. In practice, click heatmaps can help isolate elements that distract users from clicking the CTA button and converting.

In the example above, LinkStorm’s website receives the most clicks on its free analysis section, pricing, and sign-in buttons.

Scroll maps

Screenshot provided by author

Scroll heatmaps track how far users scroll down a web page. These maps help determine whether critical elements, like CTA buttons or key information, are placed in sections users frequently view. 

For instance, if users rarely scroll past half the entire page, putting a CTA button before that section might boost conversion. In the case of IndexCheckr, site activity is highest at the top of the homepage and tapers down as the page goes down.

Mouse-tracking heatmap

Source: Research Gate

Besides the eyes, the mouse is the best heatmap tool that offers insights into user focus and intent. Mouse-tracking heatmaps visualize user interaction by recording cursor or mouse movement on a page. They store heatmap data on areas where users hover, linger, or actively move their cursor. 

While mouse trackers are not direct indicators of eye movement, how a person moves their mouse has some correlation with attention. For example, they might hover over elements that are engaging or confusing. Analyzing these patterns can help you make informed decisions on what actions to take.

Eye-tracking heatmap

Source: Neil Patel

Unlike mouse tracking, which only estimates attention based on mouse movement, eye tracking is more precise in identifying what users see and prioritize. These tools can help you evaluate if visitors can see important elements like CTAs or if they fixate on other visual content, overpowering CTA buttons. 

Unfortunately, eye-tracking technology requires specialized webcams or infrared cameras for accuracy. Participants must also consent and sit at a certain distance for the technology to work. As such, eye-tracking is less popular among customers and may be more effective for experimentation.

Advantages of Using A Heatmap for Your Website

The content above touched on a few benefits of heat maps, but here are the specific advantages of investing in them for your business.

Provides insights into overlooked user behaviors

The most significant benefit of heatmaps circles back to its core purpose: to reveal how users interact with your site. 

Beyond essential Google Analytics data, heatmaps measure often-overlooked user behaviors, such as cursor movement, scroll depth, and precise click patterns. This can help site owners make a more intuitive experience for visitors.

Visualizes sitewide behavior

Instead of relying on numbers and raw data, heatmaps provide a visual representation of user activity on your website. This bird's-eye perspective is invaluable for visual learners as it transforms complex analytics into intuitive, color-coded maps. 

With heatmaps, you can easily identify high- and low-performing areas, making it easier to pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

Helps site owners make data-driven decisions

As with other non-visual analytics tools, heatmaps transform raw data into actionable insights that eliminate guesswork. 

Site owners can prioritize changes that matter most and significantly impact the business. Whether repositioning CTA or giving the website a design overhaul, every visual improvement is backed by concrete data, increasing conversion rate in the process.

8 Ways to Use Heatmaps to Boost Your Conversion Rate

Wondering how you can maximize the use of heatmaps to optimize conversations? Here are 8 actionable ways you can try: 

1. Assess the performance of CTA

Calls-to-action or CTA refers to the next step you want leads to take. On a standard landing page, site visitors will find the CTA somewhere visible and prominent. Design and interface aside, the value of a CTA is only as the number of clicks it receives. 

This is where heatmaps come in. Heatmaps, particularly click and mouse-tracking, let you see whether CTAs are attracting the attention they deserve.

For example, a click map might reveal that users ignore a CTA because it is positioned too low, lacks a compelling design, or gets lost in a sea of visual content. Take a look at the old homepage of Big Barker:

Source: Growbo

As seen above, the unique sales proposition, hero image, and supporting copy seem fine, but no visible CTA exists. The "Buy Now" button on the navigation panel is too small, overpowered by the humongous copy surrounding it. Moreover, there are two of them, which might confuse site visitors.

You can use heatmaps to see how users interact with the page and make necessary edits, such as simplifying the background and adding a CTA button directly under the copy.

In fairness to Big Barker, the new and improved homepage now has a clear CTA button:

Screenshot provided by author

2. Improve content layout

Sometimes, your website's content layout (or how the information, text, images, and other elements are structured) can limit your conversion rate.  Heatmaps can identify sections of your page that users engage with most and which they overlook. 

In 2009, James Dooley, CEO of Objective Experience, conducted a study on how content layout influences user engagement, particularly with the use of baby images in a diaper ad. 

On the first landing page, the baby model faced the audience. People fixated more on the baby's face than the headline and copy.

Then, they replaced the image with the baby now facing right. Visibly, the participants focused their gaze more on where the baby was looking, which was the headline and copy.

Humans are evolutionarily predisposed to focus their attention on infants, which is the point of this eye-tracking experiment. A simple shift in content layout greatly influenced how website visitors behaved. 

The same application can be practiced to increase your Shopify website’s conversion rate.

3. Refine navigation structure

As the name suggests, your website's navigation structure is the primary method for users to navigate and find key pages on your website. As such, it must be easily accessible to help users find what they need and improve the user experience.

More often than not, poor navigation systems are popular among older websites, such as this one:

Screenshot provided by author

However, even modern websites, like Goodreads, sometimes fall for poor navigation structure problems.

Unlike modern websites, Goodreads lacks a main navigation up top; instead, it provides an opt-in form and several untargeted book recommendations. To find the search bar and major book genres, users must scroll further. More likely, this is how the scroll map looks like:

Screenshot provided by author

In other words, many users will bounce off the page if they don't scroll further to find the search bar and book genre options. This can negatively impact the user experience and limit conversions.

4. Measure the impact of A/B testing

Heatmaps are perfect experimentation companions, especially if you want to introduce minor or major changes on a website. Visually tracking user interactions on different web page variations lets you see which design, layout, or content variations will perform better.

For example, will changing the placement of a CTA button generate more clicks? A/B testing using heatmaps helps understand the results.

One good case study about A/B testing web page conversion rate is Bannersnack, the HTML5 banner-making company. Their old website struggled to generate clicks on their CTA button, as shown on the heatmap report below: 

Upon analyzing the results, the design team concluded they needed to make the CTA button bigger and add more contrast. After redesigning the homepage, the team managed to optimize conversion and increase the number of clicks:

This granular insight outweighs traditional metrics like conversion rates because it shows how user behavior differs between versions. 

Heat maps can help you make informed decisions by identifying which elements resonate most with your audience, ensuring that every improvement you implement is backed by data.

5. Understand how visitors digest content

Content marketing is an essential pillar for any website, ecommerce or not. I think of content as your “passive sales marketer” who diligently demonstrates your expertise. Therefore, optimizing content for conversion rates is equally as necessary— heat maps can aid in this.

Arguably, the most popular method for how site visitors digest content is the F-shape viewing pattern. As the name suggests, this is characterized by an F-shaped reading habit that is most prominent at the top and slowly tapers as readers go down the page.

Here is how Nielsen Norman Group described the F-shape pattern using their eye-tracking software: 

Popular websites like Wikipedia also use the F-shape pattern in presenting content, as seen below:

Source: Nielsen Norman Group

With this information, you can use heatmaps to see if your website's content aligns with people's default reading patterns. If not, adjust the content so users can absorb the most essential insights or unique selling proposition within the first two paragraphs. Moreover, effectively use headings and subheadings so readers can skim their desired information quickly and easily. 

Heatmaps can help you maneuver how readers digest your content and influence what information they absorb. Use this to your advantage.

6. Control user flow and sitewide behavior

Sometimes, the smallest changes can have the most profound impacts and optimize conversion rates. Heatmaps can reveal these seemingly minor factors.

A good example of implementing a minor change in the website flow is Grene. 

For the longest time, Grene has had issues taking users to the main checkout page from their mini-shopping cart window, as shown below:

People mistook the green "Darmowy koszt dostawy" (or "Free delivery cost") button for the CTA. There’s a good reason behind this. 

According to color psychology, green is more relaxed and laid back, while red represents anger, warning, and danger. Naturally, people will fixate on the green button. 

Moreover, since the red "Idz do koszyka" (or "Go to cart") button is located at the very bottom, some shoppers might feel discouraged from completing the purchase after seeing their total bill.

These issues bottlenecked the company’s operations.

To help in user flow, Grene added another Go to Cart button above the mini-shopping cart window. They also added options so users can remove some items from the cart. 

Here is the updated version:

This minor change resulted in a whopping 2x increase in total purchases. 

While Grene did not report using heatmaps, having click maps or mouse-tracking heatmaps can expedite finding opportunities for boosting website conversion.  

7. Fix drop-off points

Drop-off points refer to sections on your website that stomp leads from continuing or where visitors bounce off the page completely. One of the most prominent drop-off points on a website is email opt-ins.

Why? Because they pester users. 

Statistics tell us that all industries have an average email opt-in rate of less than 2%.

If we put that in heatmap perspective, having an opt-in on your landing page will give you a bluer-than-blue scroll map reading. Such was the case with First Midwest Bank, as explained by Unbounce.

In the past, they added an email opt-in right on their homepage, which scared users despite the bank’s generous $25,000 personal loan offer with a 1-day approval period.

Here is their old web page:

First Midwest Bank challenged conventional wisdom by removing the opt-in form and placing it down the page. By doing so, they inadvertently gave their hero image, headline, and supporting copy enough room to "sales talk" site visitors. Once leads are convinced to take a loan, the opt-in form comes up as they scroll the page further.

Here is the updated landing page:

This increased the bank's conversion rate by 52%. 

Like Grene, First Midwest Bank did not report using heatmaps, but that doesn’t dismiss their usefulness. Having a heatmap for your website can help you discover drop-off points immediately, transforming the existing interface into a better user experience design.

8. Streamline user journey

Heat maps are great because they provide insights into user behavior. Sure.

However, heat maps would be significantly better if they showed which sections of your website bring the most money to your business. Knowing your high-value pages can help you streamline the user journey by consciously taking users from low-conversion to high-conversion pages. 

SquidVision does exactly that.

SquidVision uses revenue heatmaps to track which pages rake in the most business value for a website. 

For instance, here is the data on JustReachOut's homepage:

As seen above, SquidVision shows the amount each clickable element brings to the business in the revenue bubble.

For instance, the Case Studies button has a business value of $168. You can take advantage of this insight by referencing case studies from blog articles using internal links. As a result, every person clicking through those case studies from the blogs will be more likely to convert into buying customers. 

Conversely, the large homepage CTA generates $2,000 in business. It stands to reason that effectively adding the same CTA button in strategic locations throughout the website might produce the same results. 

In other words, SquidVision can help you streamline the user journey and generate the most business for your website.

In Conclusion

Coupled with reasonable analytical interpretation, heatmaps offer actionable advice on how you can work toward conversion rate optimization.

Beyond standard CRO tools, like scroll maps and click maps, revenue heatmaps are a relatively newer technology, but they can impact a website just as effectively (if not more!).

SquidVision offers an innovative solution for optimizing conversions: it shows the earning potential of each clickable element on your website.

Using this information, you can take users to key money pages, maximizing your business's revenue potential.

Interested?

Start tracking your website now with SquidVision.

Author’s bio:

Joel John Cariño has always been fascinated with SEO and the works. For over four years, he has helped clients boost their online visibility through top-notch SEO content with a kick of direct-response copywriting. He now works as an SEO specialist and content writer at Linkody, a must-have backlink monitoring toolkit for site owners.

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