Understanding the Customer Landscape
It’s not easy to get people’s attention. Attention spans are decreasing every year as people gravitate to shorter content. When creating a website it’s key that you get your audiences attention to what they want as quickly as possible.
This may look different for every website depending on who the target audience is. It can be really hard to know what’s working on your website and what’s not if you go by intuition or even just best practices. The best way to know what is working and what is not working is data.
In this article we’ll learn about a few tools available to you to know what is working and not working on your website so you don’t waste space on things that don’t get your audience’s attention.
The Ideal Website
Before jumping into the tools, imagine what it’s like to have a website that quickly grabs people’s attention to what they want quickly. A good example of this is Nike.
Nike’s website is a good example of getting attention quickly to what people want. At the top their navigation menu directs them to their most purchased products that people come on the website to buy.
The remaining space is used to speak their brand messaging to their audience through video content allowing them to connect with their audience and build brand loyalty.
Tools: Embracing Heat Map Technology
It’s nice to look at a website and think they are doing it right. But, assuming can only get you so far. This is where we need to use online tools to see what customers are actually looking for in a website. One tool that helps us see what works and what doesn’t is heat maps. There are several types of heat maps that can give you data on what’s working for your website.
Click Maps
Let’s take a look at this heat map of The Donut Bros website and see what we learn.
Looking at the image above we can see that the navigation bar is used heavily with the most popular button being their “dropby” button. This can show us that their navigation bar is working well and driving traffic to where they want their customers.
We also see that there isn’t much clicking throughout the page besides the navigation bar. This could indicate to The Donut Bros that they may want to test having some clickable content in the middle of the page to get more customer engagement. Cleaning website design with these data points can lead to much more engaging content for website visitors.
Scroll Maps
Scroll maps allow us to see what is on visitors screens and how much of the page on a website they see. Let’s look at The Donut Bros website again.
The red color indicates more users seeing that part of the page while the more green and eventually blue colors indicate less people viewing that part of the page. We can see that the vast majority of visitors don’t scroll down farther than a few inches of the screen.
This can tell us two things. One, that if we want people to see the information farther down this page we need to entice them to do so more because most people are not. Second, this could indicate that your menu options at the top are all the customers need and you don’t need to have as much information below the first part of the page. You may decide to move any important information housed lower on the page to other pages where visitors spend more of their time.
Attention Maps
Attention maps visually look very similar to scroll maps, but they track a different metric. Attention maps track how long a visitor spent looking at each section of the page. Let’s look at The Donut Bros again.
For this heat map we are looking at the bottom of the page. Like the scroll map the top of the page was red then quickly blue. But at the bottom of the page we gain a new insight. The amount of time visitors spend increases at the bottom of the page.
This can indicate that our footer is working well to attract attention to our visitors. You may also want to compare this with a click map to see if people are looking for something and can’t find it, or if they are finding what they need and clicking on it. These insights help you know what you want to include in your footer.
Impact on A/B testing
Think about the impact heat maps can have on A/B testing. Instead of guessing what website changes are needed to increase revenue, you can know what areas of your website are working and not working. This allows you to avoid changing things that are already working really well, saving time and money that would have been spent testing the possibilities.
This also allows you to make informed changes to your website and then test if those changes have the impact you want. Gone are the days of guessing. We have technology that allows us to make decisions based on data. We can make changes knowing that they will have an improved outcome because we have data to back it up.
Conclusion
While attention spans may be decreasing around the globe, we don’t have to lose the attention of our customers as we create websites that get them what they want quickly. Using heat maps is just one way we can know we are achieving that goal of getting our customers’ attention.
Take time today to track your website’s data using softwares like Microsoft Clarity or Heatmaps.com. Enhance your website development through the power of heat map technology. When you know how your customers are interacting with your website you can guide them to become your loyal customers.
