Why is heatmap important: 5 heatmap tools to increase conversion rates

Do you wonder why your website fails to convert despite all your efforts to optimize your content? 

Well, you’re not alone! Many businesses struggle to make accurate data-driven website optimization decisions. Mostly it is due to a lack of qualitative data. 

Tools like Google Analytics can help with insights into high bounce rates, average session duration, page views, etc., but what about qualitative insights such as user experience?

To increase conversion rates, you must understand how your user interacts with the various elements of your website. For example, knowing where they click, how far they scroll, or where they are getting stuck is essential for accurate layout adjustments; the precise reason you need heatmap tools.

What is a Heatmap tool? 

The Heatmap tool captures the user behavior in color-coded graphical information for you to see. It helps you get in the user's shoes and experience what the user is experiencing. How does it do that? 

Generally, a heat map uses hues between red and blue to chart user interaction: Red means the most clicked or visited sections with the most engagement whereas blue represents elements least interacted with.

Every little movement - mouse, scroll, and clicks, is captured in this graphical report. 

How does Heatmap help improve conversion?

To understand this, let's draw an analogy! 

Think of your website or app as a physical store with the best products in the market. But due to incorrect price tags, sloppy customer service, or cluttered and unorganized shelves, the customers never get to see your best offerings. 

Similarly,  lousy UX design, badly done graphics, or poorly written copies dissuade users from reaching important information, no matter how good your website initially seems. As a result, you have a high bounce rate and no real conversions. 

But when you deploy a heatmap tool, you get to see every movement, every scroll or click done on the website interface. Such insights give you an x-ray vision to see underlying issues hampering your customer’s experience. As a result, you can now make process changes in the layout to increase conversion rates. 

So ideally, every marketer, UX designer, data analyst, or anyone wanting to optimize their website for better conversion rates should have a heatmap tool in their optimization arsenal. 

Now that you know what a heatmap tool is, why it is essential, and who needs it, let's look at the top five heatmap software that is easy to use, easy on the pocket, and dominates the current market. 

5 Best Heatmap Analysis Tools today

1. HotJar

With a loyal subscriber base, Hotjar is the most popular and earliest heatmap tool in this list. Easy to use and intuitive, it provides detailed behavior analytics using heatmaps, surveys, session recordings, and a feedback widget. 

Let's talk about the most apparent feature - heat maps. Super easy to use and easy on the eyes, it highlights where users click and how they move or scroll on targeted website pages. 

When you log into the Hotjar dashboard, on the left side of the screen, you will see all the tools you have at your disposal. These tools can be divided into two categories - Analysis and Feedback. 

The analytical tools help generate heatmaps, video recorded user sessions, and offer critical insight all along the user journey via funnels. Additionally, the feedback section helps you understand why the user behaves a certain way directly from the user. These together allow making critical decisions in design to improve conversion rates.

You only get 100 Recordings in the free version, making it worth a try. 

Pricing

Hotjar charges you for analytical tools and feedback features separately. 

The analytical tool comes in a free version, allowing up to 1,050 sessions/month, with unlimited heat mapping. But if you need a more versatile, feature-heavy version for your business, it will cost you $80 per month. 

The business version comes with an interesting analytical tool that reports where your users are getting frustrated or confused.

Again, you shell out $64 monthly for the feedback feature to unlock the business-grade feedback feature. But if you are new to heatmap tools, you should try the limited free versions, which is a perfect way to get started. 

Pros: 

Detailed heatmaps of clicks, scrolls, mouse movements, and taps 

A robust collection of apps combined into a single analytics tool.

Allows recording user sessions 

Gives insight into the customer journey with conversion funnels

Incisive customer feedback from Polls and surveys

Cons:

Funnel generation toll is limited to Page URLs

Unable to monitor embedded iframes

Sometimes the screenshot is glitchy and does not entirely load.

Videos may lag when you watch user sessions. 

Pricing is somewhat expensive, with the scale package costing $389 per month and the basic package costing $99 per month.

Our Verdict

Overall, Hotjar takes you from a hunch-based analysis to a clear visual insight into what you need to optimize to increase conversion rates.

So If you want data presented in well-organized categories without strewn about, HotJar is the tool for you. In addition, its straightforward style makes analysis simpler.

Here is an official Hotjar video about the primary uses and offerings. 

2. Crazy Eggs

Crazy Egg is a web-only conversion rate optimization (CRO) and web analytics tool that giants like eBay, Zappos, Dell, and Amazon prefer. 

What stands out about Crazy Egg is how easy it is to implement. 

To get started, all you need to do is insert a simple code into the HTML of the website page, and you are all set. Then, you have insights into critical data from live monitoring to every click visitors make.

Crazy Egg offers viewing results in different ways; heatmaps, scrolls, overlays, and confetti. Each view offers insight into various metrics. For example, the heatmap provides where the user clicks on the page while the scroll tool allows seeing the color-graded breakdown of how far down the user scrolled. 

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USPs: 

1. A/B Testing: The Crazy Egg A/B Testing Page Editor functionality stands out. It helps tweak page designs even before implementing them.

2. Analytics for campaigns: Crazy Egg also allows you to monitor visitors' behavior across email and advertisement campaigns. Additionally, it lets you record the entire user session of a website search and analyze the buyer's journey. 

3. Customized characteristics: The tool allows you to supply customized elements to analyze on-page behavior for more specialized inquiries. For example, you can see users who converted vs. those few who did not, who stayed logged in vs. those who left or users who converted vs. those who did not.

Crazy Egg features:

Heatmaps

Browse maps

Confetti report: showing which components receive the most clicks.

To determine the most popular CTAs, overlay reports show you what proportion of your interactive components are used.

List reports—numerical summaries of users' actions on your website—are available.

Users' activity logs

Testing A/B

Pros:

Pricing tiers based on the volume of your visitors

The scroll map demonstrates how much further users navigate without leaving a page.

Divided by search queries and referrals, site visits

It's simple to figure out what's popular on your website to make adjustments.

Cons:

The UI is complex.

Only premium packages with mobile support

Data isn't always reliable.

Pricing:

Since Crazy Egg is not accessible, the entry-level subscription costs $24 per month. However, you'll have access to a wider variety of historical and data storage. Free 30-day trial; monthly rates begin at $9.

Added Bonuses: The most popular WordPress heatmap tool with up to 88% base control

Our verdict:

Crazy Egg excels at one task. However, it's difficult to locate anything that compares to Crazy Egg's mixture of accessibility, dependability, and price as the all-heat mapping solution for CRO. 

3. ContentSquare

Formally known as ClickTale, ContentSquare is a terrific heatmap tool used by corporate giants like Walmart, Abercrombie & Fitch, and The NY Times as a complete statistics and CRO tool.

It gives us information on four types of heat maps - click maps, mouse movement maps, and attention maps.

Moreover, it allows recording user sessions and replaying them later to see how visitors engage with your page. If you want to know the precise position of your user's cursor, what they click on, which web page components they focus on most, and how they engage with your success dimensions, the screen recording features hit home.

With ContentSquare's Core conversion funnel, analytics, and session playbacks, you can increase conversion rates, monitor customers' behavior, and gain high Return of investment insights throughout all online platforms.

Pros:

Enables recording of visitor mouse movements and mouse-move heatmaps

Comprehensive analysis feature

CS Live Chrome allows analyzing pages outside of the platform while browsing your website.

Reliable customer support

A fast-growing community 

Cons:

No cost information without first approaching a salesperson.

Need 500,000 monthly page visits to be used.

Form statistics lack accuracy.

USP's: 

The most thorough heatmap analysis tool

Our verdict:

Try ContentSquare. It is a well-rounded UX analytical tool that is easy to use, and the vast, knowledgeable community is worth being a part of.  

4. Mouseflow

One of the best heatmap tools for identifying trends in user behavior and web analytics is Mouseflow. You can quickly construct scroll, click, attentiveness, geographic, and motion heatmaps using Mouseflow to make the connections and eliminate all uncertainty.

Additionally, you can use the Session replay function to watch your visitors in action.

The program generates automated Friction Scores to assist you in choosing which areas to concentrate on first and displays to you precisely what potential customers are doing while viewing your site.

Mouseflow also enables you to build unique funnels, retrieve abandoned forms using form statistics, and gather accurate feedback using feedback campaigns. In essence, Mouseflow aids in informing all corporate activities, including marketing and analytics.

It even smoothly interacts with your marketing, e-commerce, and CMS platforms. Clicks, mouse clicks, and scrolls are all tracked by Mouseflow. In addition, it displays a record of each user's behavior on your site, simulating CCTV, and even allows you to filter or segment them.

Pros:

Provides user analytics video recording.

Can create unique funnels to observe the behavior of various traffic sources on your website.

Cons:

Data retrieval may be laborious.

Only expensive plans with mobile support

Data is only sometimes reliable.

Pricing

Price: $19/month for the free program, which has a cap of 100 recorded encounters for a single site.

A free heatmap tool, Mouseflow allows you to record 500 user sessions per month. Paid plans range in price from $24 to $399 per month.

Any of its paid programs are also available for a 14-day free trial.

Our Verdict 

Mouseflow is expensive while offering nothing unique as such. It is better to use Hotjar if you seek the same results at 1/10th of the price. Although the data in the basic version of Hotjar is sampled heavily, it does get the insights you need to take action. You do not necessarily need 5000 mouse clicks and thousands of movement samples to arrive at a decision.

5. SquidVison

"Like Hotjar or Crazy Egg, but you track revenue instead.

The above copy is what you'll see on the company's homepage. That sums it up. Unlike most heatmap software, SquidVision allows tracking precisely the links, buttons, or images converting, bringing in the most money. The company calls it 'revenue heatmaps.'

It is a game changer as it takes one of the premium offerings of competitors and packs it into an inexpensive offering available for all. 

In short, SquidVison decodes visitors' behavior and provides insight into the most important metric of all, 'revenue.'

Pros:

• Revenue data for every link on a page.
• Conversion tracking is connected to each button and link.
• See how much revenue a CTA generates.
• See if a CTA only attracts lurking users.
• See which blog posts attract buyers.
• Conversion tracking is connected to each button and link.

Cons:

Data retrieval may be somewhat laborious.

Lacks user reviews.

Pricing

Starting at $49/Month, the basic Squidvison package allows unlimited 'Revenue Heat Maps' and all future updates for MRR (recurring revenue growth rate) up to $20k.

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Conclusion

Although SquidVison looks promising, it’s still in a closed beta phase. To truly weigh its effectiveness, we will have to wait until an enterprise-ready version rolls out. Until then you can opt for their 14 day trial day period. Nonetheless, SquidVision is definitely worth the shot as it gives you the most important insights of all - revenue heatmaps which is why .

Every tool mentioned in this list is worth the investment, but we'd suggest you give their free versions a run before you buy one. Especially Sqidvison or Clarity. Clarity is free and by Microsoft - a good enough reason to consider it. 

If you are new to heatmap tools, stick with Hotjar. It is still an excellent tool for people new to heatmap analytics. But if you want to take the guesswork out of the picture and see what is generating revenue and what’s not, SquidVison should be your pick. 

So this is what we think. Hopefully, this information will assist you in making an informed choice when choosing a heatmap tool. Tell us how you feel about our list and which one you think we missed. We'd love to hear from you!