Some marketers still believe that the more traffic you generate from various advertising channels to your website, the more users will convert. However, in reality a customer‘s journey tends to be way more complex and involves many other aspects such as website design, placement of special offers and call-to-action buttons, as well as an overall business infrastructure to consider.
According to Bain&Company, 80% of companies are under the impression they deliver great customer journeys. Nevertheless, in reality, only 8% of their customers think that a company‘s service is exceptional.
Traditionally customer service was considered as a soft skill usually provided by company‘s staff members via phone, email or message on social media. However, today it is viewed more like a full customer journey that involves all service touch points, where a customer interacts with its branding or marketing materials, operational process or company‘s representative.
Heatmaps – essential tool to evaluate customer journey effectiveness
To evaluate online customer journey effectiveness heatmaps become a handful tool. Heatmap is a powerful tool to get insights on what is really happening on the web from consumer end. It allows you to get a visual representation of the places where the highest density of people have been over the period of time.
Furthermore, there are different types of heatmaps in the market based on what you want to accomplish. For example, if you want to find out which links or buttons peform best on your website or to spot possible usability flaws, then mouse-tracking heatmaps are the most useful in this case.
However, if you want to gather deeper insights on how users interact with all elements of your web page, not just links, at which areas they tend to linger and understand a full customer journey before an end action (click) took place, then eye-tracking heatmaps is a way to go.
Based on your business objectives here are the insights that heatmaps can provide:
- What elements get the most attention on your website
- See what visitors see, and what they do on your site
- How customers fill in your site’s forms
- What visitors like and don’t like
Common mistakes website designers do and how to avoid them with heatmap analytics
#1
Move click-to-action buttons, special offers, lead forms or other objects into the area that gets the most of users‘ attention to trigger desired customer action.
If after conducting a heatmap analysis you realize that users‘ attention is focused on particular area or an image in your website, move your most important click-to-action buttons or lead forms into that particular area to trigger wanted consumer actions. After this change, you should soon be able to notice an increased conversion rate in your desired consumer action.
#2
A/B test previous and edited page design with heatmap analytics
If you have a banner of special offer or call-to-action button that doesn‘t generate your desired conversion rate, you can move it to a slightly different page location where you think that it will receive more users‘ attention and test these two versions using eye-tracking heatmap analytics tool. The advantage of using eye-tracking heatmap over the mouse-tracking heatmap tool is that you don‘t need completely built sites before a test can be performed. You can use prototypes or images of potential design that can be put to the test immediately.
After completing analysis you should be able to observe a difference in increased/decreased users‘ attention rate for the chosen special offer/CTA button and implement design changes. Once you implemented changes you should run a further A/B testing campaign for both landing pages to evaluate the impact of the changes to conversion rate.
#3
Test different images for landing page optimization and increased sales performance
If you can find that an image of a special offer used on your landing page receives quite a lot of attention, however the traffic and conversion rate are still not sky-rocketing. In this case, you can try testing different images to find out if a change of an image triggers better results. For instance, a study conducted on landing page optimization tests showed that real-life pictures and images with human conveying specific emotions tend to convert better.
To conclude, placing an object, which supposed to be visible and drive desired customer action on your website, is very important. In order to define the right placement for it or website‘s elements that get the most of users’ attention, heatmaps can help. Even though there are different types of heatmaps in the market offering various features to understand your users‘ behavior, it is undoubtedly that heatmaps are an essential tool in increasing conversions on your site and achieving your business objectives.
