One of the biggest challenges of “truly” understanding your website, is how your visitors experience and interact with it.
The point of building a website, whether it being for business, ecommerce, designers / photographers, or even just as a hobby, is to share what you have to say with your visitors.
But how do you know what your visitors actually find interesting on your website? How do you know where they actually click? Or how far they actually scroll down your pages?
It’s not like you can stand there and observe what your visitors actually do on your website.
Without these insights, it’s pretty darn challenging to adjust your website to make it more helpful to your visitors.
WHAT ABOUT GOOGLE ANALYTICS?
Google Analytics is awesome. We use it all the time to see where our visitors go on our website, how long they stay on each page, if they are repeated visitors, etc.
All sorts of data can be accessible at the tip of your fingers though Google Analytics.
But what Google Analytics doesn’t show you with accuracy, is where your visitors actually click on your pages. Or how far they scroll down your pages.
All these are very revealing as to how “engaged” your visitors are when they visit your website.
At the end of the day, if nobody is clicking on the links that you placed on your website, or if they don’t scroll past the top of your page, then it’s telling you that your visitors are probably not too interested in what you have to say.
The truth can hurt – but it’s an opportunity for you to improve your webpages.
CRAZY EGG HEATMAPS CAN HELP YOU IMPROVE YOUR VISITORS’ EXPERIENCES
If you haven’t heard of heatmaps, it’s pretty awesome in showing you how your visitors are actually behaving on your webpages.
They highlight where people are clicking the most, which will tell you what they are actually interested in. Just as importantly, heatmaps can tell you what your visitors are not interested in by showing you what they are not clicking on.
For stores that sell products, people vote with their wallets. For webpages, people vote with clicks and how far they scroll down to consume the information on the page.
Crazy Egg (aside from having an interesting name) is a really good tool that we use all the time to show us how interested people are on our webpages, and what they’re interested in.
In this heatmap on one of our pages, it shows us where our visitors are clicking, indicating a higher level of interest.
On the flipside, it shows us what our visitors are not interested in (no clicks).
How this become really helpful to you, is if you think that a visitor “should” be interested in certain parts of the website, and you don’t see any clicks (or “heat”) there, then that suggests that your visitors might not really be interested in that. Or, maybe the placement of that specific content is not optimal, and you should move it elsewhere.
You can move the content higher up on the page, or changing the image, or modifying the style of the fonts to draw attention to the content. Then run another heatmap, and compare how people react with the previous heatmap.
This will show you how people are actually responding to your changes. We found these sort of “experiments” helpful in improving our visitors’ experiences.
In addition to showing you heatmaps, Crazy Egg also shows you a “confetti” map, which will show you exactly where each click takes place.
It’s just another way of showing similar data as a heatmap, but at a much more detailed, insightful level.
With the Confetti map, you can segment clicks based on new or returning visitors, visitors from different search engines, countries, by website browers, time of the day, etc.
This can highlight if visitors using different website browser, from different countries, etc, are interested in different parts of your pages. This can give you some really deep insights about your visitors’ behavior.
HOW CRAZY EGG’S SCROLLMAP HELPS YOU GAUGE YOUR VISITORS’ INTEREST LEVEL
Understanding how far your visitors scroll down your webpages will give you an idea of where they start to find your content not very engaging (or more bluntly, boring).
If your visitors are very interested in what they’re reading, they’ll most likely scroll down the majority of your page. If they don’t find the material helpful, they’ll leave.
So it’s quite important for you to understand where your visitors start to “drift off” on your pages.
So what can you do when you see your scrollmap? A few things you can consider:
- Improve your content to keep your visitors engaged
- Move more valuable content higher on your page if you don’t see people scrolling down far enough
- Remove any distractions where people may have clicked on that led them away from the page (this should be analyzed together with the data you see from your heatmap and confetti map)
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