The following is a guest post written by James Spittal. James is the founder of Conversion Rate Optimization and A/B testing obsessed digital marketing agency, Web Marketing ROI. They help brands with high-traffic websites optimize their conversion rate using A/B testing and personalization.

When you're managing an online business or service, we all know how important it is to convert visitors into customers. After all, this is the only way we're going to generate sales. However, it's going to be difficult assessing just what audiences are into when we're not exposing ourselves to efficient tactics. Heat mapping can be a great way of measuring audience activity within your website, and it can even be used to increase your website’s conversion rate.

Of course, this isn't to say that heat mapping is a sure-fire way to get new customers for your e-business or service. However, it is a handy way to get an idea just how your audiences work and how they can become customers. Utilizing heat mapping with your overall marketing strategy can immensely improve your profit generation.

How Useful Is Heat Mapping?

Analytics via heat maps can be of great help, especially when trying to track audience and customer behavior. Heat map applications offer a wide variety of options and categories, that can provide metrics on things that you can use to improve your relationships with consumers and customers. Here are some of these:

• Use a Hover Map. A hover map is a heat map that tracks the mouse movement of your visitors. For this reason, this is also known as “mouse mapping”. This tool allows you to see what areas in your website actually have more "traffic" so to speak. Areas with higher mouse movement are represented with warmer tones, while there are no marks in areas without activities. This can give you a good idea of the areas in which visitors are most interested on your website, which gives you the opportunity to improve these areas for a higher chance of conversion.
   
• Use a Scroll Map. A scroll map on the other hand displays the scrolling activity your visitors make on your site. It provides you with metrics such as just how far down your page people are viewing. They provide insights into what depth is most acceptable and most likely to work best for your website. They also tell you where your visitors generally stop scrolling, and can therefore help you tweak your content from there.
   
• Use a Click Map. Meanwhile, click maps show the kind of activities performed by visitors to your site. The difference between click maps and other maps is that they only tell you which part of your website is being clicked most often by your visitors. This means you can see which parts and which buttons of your website are most "attractive" for them. This is significant if you're expecting certain call to action (CTAs) to be clicked.

Other Strategies

Now that you know the kinds of heat maps that can be utilized by you and your company, it’s time to optimize your strategy based on the metrics these heat maps provide. Heat mapping can provide a lot of opportunities for you, as well as room for improvement to adjust your website's appearance and content.

• Identify the flow through heat mapping. This will help effectively streamline the sale funnel process on your end. You will want to make sure that someone is encouraged to buy your product or service. Heat mapping can help see how well you are actually doing this for your potential customers. You can remove or modify problem navigation areas, as well as see areas of interest. Are banners, advertisements, and images on the right page? Are your customers being led in the right direction?
   
• Make sure your clickable elements matter. This is important if you want your customers to know that your services are available, or that they can access features on your site easily. Heat mapping can show which elements of your page should be clickable or not. These include company logos, headlines and even images. Mixing and matching these elements can create more useful and relevant content for your viewers.

Conclusion

Heat mapping is no simple "tool," and it takes a lot of time and understanding to make sure you are effectively using its metrics for business or service profits. However, it does present an excellent opportunity for us to assess and get to know our audiences better. Understanding where audiences are navigating and what kind of content they want to see is a great way to initiate and improve your engagement with them. This allows us to potentially increase our conversation rate to levels that can help generate more profit and improve Web Marketing ROI.