Do you know how to translate all the extreme color of a heatmap into powerful money making action during your website optimizations? These explosions of color narrate visitor usage patterns on your site to help you achieve the highest ROI with your a/b testing and webpage redesigns. BUT, you have to know what to look for.

Some Like It Hot

When a webpage receives abundant red hot attention from visitors, simply put, visitors want and are encouraged to interact with that particular element or section of the page, whether you intended them to or not. Therefore, it is important to know if certain red areas of high engagement are actually helping or hurting your conversion process.

Fact: For many ebusinesses, red hot sections of the page are NOT responsible for increasing website conversion, rather increasing website abandonment.

What should you do?

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Let’s face it; a lot of the content we need to write for our business agenda and marketing campaigns can get boring. It often needs organization and a bit of a pick-me-up to encourage readers to continue reading. During our May Marketing Madness Series, we ran Attention Heatmaps and watched hundreds of Visitor Recordings, just to keep track of exactly what content was engaging visitors. Here is what worked for us to increase visitor engagement times that can work for you too.

Bold, Bulleted Content

I know it’s true. We are always pointing out how bold wording and organized bullet points (as well as images below) can make your written content that much more engaging for users. But now we’ve got the ultimate proof.

What is interesting about the heatmap here below? Most of the attention time is actually not above the fold, but below. There is now no doubt that visitors were really concentrating on the content and drawn to the bold words and bulleted content in this section of the page.

Todd Follansbee's article on The Brain's View of a Website...readers of the blog mainly focus their highest attention times on the middle of the article, even below the fold. Long Engagement Times are mostly on bulleted content and bolded text.

Another interesting discovery. Readers of the attention heatmap below did focus most of their attention at the top and gradually engaged less with the lower sections UNTIL towards the end of the post, when they again heavily engaged with bold, bulleted content.

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About

Freestyle Accounting is an industry leading firm of contractor accountants providing accountancy and tax planning service to UK contractors, freelancers and consultants. Their comprehensive limited company accountancy service includes everything a contractor needs from initial company formation, business bank account setup and PAYE/ VAT registration, right through to quarterly VAT returns and annual accounts preparation, personal tax return, professional indemnity insurance, plus unlimited IR35 contract reviews and tax advice. The service is offered to contractors and freelancers throughout the United Kingdom, with offices based in Coventry and London.

Objective of Website

The main objective of the Freestyle Accounting website is to provide information on the company’s services and to persuade visitors to engage by completing their online enquiry form used as leads for its sales team.

Challenge

Freestyle Accounting was using Google Website Optimizer to run split usability testing on its webpages. However, it was still not able to explain why visitors were abandoning its homepage or failing to complete the enquiry form. It needed to understand what visitors were doing inside the webpages.

Solution

Freestyle decided to use ClickTale to discover why a large number of visitors were abandoning its homepage and its form conversion funnel.

These are the tools Freestyle used and what it discovered using each one.

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As hard as we work to keep our websites perfect and popular amongst our visitors, there is always room for error, mishaps and major mess-ups. Today, being April Fool’s Day, is a great time to simply take it easy, look back and smile at these mistakes that may have occurred throughout the year.  Cheer on upcoming successes for your business, and maybe even play some practical jokes on your coworkers

Happy April Fool's Day!

To avoid many of these bloopers in the future, web analytics tools are here to save you the embarrassment and keep your website up & running, selling and smiling. And they do so quickly, easily, without much effort or $$$ on your part.

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The Inspiration

It is our pleasure to unveil our new and improved Web Analytics & Usability Blog! This redesign was inspired entirely by you, our enthusiastic readers, bloggers, and tweeters, who have been an integral part of our growing community of online users.

Our Goals

Our main goals for this redesign were fourfold.

• Community Building – Increased visitor interaction
• Personalization – Better branding
• Easy Navigation – Improved usability
• Modern Look and Feel

Community building

Since our humble blog beginnings, our previous designs were very one dimensional in that they did not allow for the sharing or discussing of blog topics and themes with our readers. We wanted to encourage readers to initiate dialogue and share their ideas and opinions on blog content, beyond individual post comments.

Personalization

Early on, we realized that we needed to make our blog our own by incorporating our ClickTale colors and giving readers the opportunity to learn more about us and our solution.

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Usability beginners and buffs alike have benefited and continue to cheer on Steve Krug’s popular Don’t Make Me Think , myself included. However, let’s face it; you guys know your business better than anyone else. You know how creating a successful website for a wide range of user types is, well, hard. And, while there’s nothing wrong with thinking big and going for a challenge, it’s not always necessary. Visitors to your site can often tell you everything you need to know…in a heat map.

While some truths in life are obvious, web design is not so straight forward.

What Is a Heatmap?

Web heatmaps are color, visual representations of your webpages that display where and how visitors interact with your webpages. Depending on the type of heat map you are using, you can discover exactly what your visitors are fishing for, clicking on, hovering over or scrolling towards.

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Guest Article by Billy Attar

Professional blogging is an integral part of many businesses’ marketing agendas. Successful blogs can bring visitors to your site, spark interest in your products, and attract a larger fan base. However, as seen with many of our own ClickTale clients, getting good readership to your blog is often not a reflection of the quality or quantity of content you are creating – it is a function of the way the blog is presented.

By using an In-Page Analytics tool, such as ClickTale, you can easily evaluate your visitors’ engagement with your content and improve the effectiveness of your blog design. Mouse Move and Mouse Click Heatmaps reveal where on the page your visitors move, hover, and click their mouse. Attention Heatmaps can tell you how long they spend on each section of your content. Scroll-Reach Heatmaps show you how far down the page visitors are willing to scroll.

Use Mouse Move Heatmaps to see how visitors are interacting with your content.

If after evaluating your Heatmaps, you find that your visitors are not interacting with your blog as expected, do not be discouraged, as even minor fixes can have a major impact on your readership!
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Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer and internet icon, had no trouble amassing an impressive $24.5 billion in annual revenue just last year. However, navigating “the Amazon” can still be quite a feat. While Amazon visitors are indeed converting, it would be extremely advantageous to know how and why. In this post, we run through the potential “ah ha” moments Amazon might experience if they were to use the ClickTale solution.

How far down the page are Amazon visitors scrolling?

Scroll-Reach and Attention Heatmaps

Amazon’s product pages are largely characterized by their lengthy and varied content, and depend largely on visitors’ capacity to scroll. However, it is never wise to make assumptions regarding your visitors’ scrolling behavior. Different webpage elements motivate visitors to either scroll down farther on a webpage or stay above the fold. A Scroll-Reach Heatmap can visually show just how far down Amazon visitors are actually willing to scroll. The Attention Heatmaps can reveal exactly how much attention specific webpage content gets from Amazon visitors, what they read and what they skip over. Read More »

Global usability testing is a vital business process for any website looking to market to an international community of internet users. If the web design and content of a website are not sensitive to the lingual and cultural subtleties of a global audience, its mass appeal and ability to sell internationally becomes limited. After a recent usability study concluded the strong correlation between cultural trends and web design, we decided to use our own ClickTale Mouse Move Heatmaps from our In-Page Analytics Suite to substantiate the results of the study.

The Results

The usability study deduced that high-context cultures, such as Japan, China and Korea, where communication is indirect and abundant in gestures, boasted homepages containing more graphic elements and indirect messages. In contrast, low-context cultures such as Germany, Norway and the US, where communication is more direct, featured more static homepages displaying direct messages.

Interestingly enough, using the same user groups as stipulated by the study, ClickTale identified the identical online behavioral patterns within our own webpages.

Both the study and ClickTale’s experiment confirm how global usability testing enables online businesses to optimize their site according to the browsing behavior of international user groups.

The Experiment

We used ClickTale Segmented Heatmaps of our webpages to compare the online behavior of the two user groups as defined by the study.

We first generated a Segmented Heatmap of our Product Tour Page, segmenting by first time visitors from the US, Germany, and Norway, ie, low-context cultures.

High-Context Vs. Low-context

High-context cultures, China, Japan, and Korea vs. Low-context cultures US, Germany, and Norway

We then compared this Heatmap to one segmenting by first time visitors from China, Japan and Korea to the same ClickTale Product Tour page, i.e. high-context cultures. Read More »

Usability studies have been and continue to be a key method for testing and optimizing website usability.  Both laboratory eye tracking and remote mouse tracking studies offer businesses accurate and actionable results. Eye tracking, as used by top enterprises such as Google, uses cameras and specialist software to track where the eyes of internet users land on a webpage. Mouse tracking follows the mouse movements of an internet user to simulate eye movement on a webpage.  Over the last few years, mouse tracking has greatly matured, developing features and achieving accuracy that make it a credible alternative to eye tracking.

Heatmaps created using traditional eye tracking (left) and mouse tracking (right)

Research has shown that when both methods of testing are conducted simultaneously, there is an 84%-88% correlation in the results¹. In addition, both the eye and mouse move to relatively the same rhythm and focus in on the same page content². Both eye and mouse tracking deliver valuable information about how your visitors are engaging with your website. This is vital to work out what changes you need to make in order to benefit your visitors’ experience and your ROI.

Example of the mouse following the eye in the vertical direction on a Google search page, plotting the Y coordinate against time. ©Google, 2008