Four Ways to Use Heatmaps to Optimize Your Landing Page

Landing page optimization is one of the most challenging tasks, simply because there are no rights or wrongs. What works for some websites may not work so well for you.

There are too many variables: colors, images, different kinds of calls-to-action (CTAs), etc. You can never be sure what distracts your visitors and what draws their attention.

There are all kinds of software helping you better understand how people engage with your page and how you can improve it to convert those visitors into buyers and subscribers.

Heatmaps can be helpful landing page optimization tools helping you eliminate distracting elements and position your CTAs more effectively.

Here’s how to use heat-mapping tools to analyze how visitors are navigating your landing pages:

First Things First: What Are Heatmaps?

A heatmap is a graphical representation of how visitors navigate your landing page. It uses color coding to visualize areas of your page that attract the most attention (clicks or views).

In other words, heatmaps help you distinguish what works and what fails to work on your landing page to help you make informed decisions.

There are different types of heatmaps, including:

• Click heatmaps (more clicked areas are color-coded as red and orange). This is the most popular type of user behavior analytics heatmaps.
• Scroll maps allow you to see how deeply people scroll down to your page—areas where people seldom scroll down to are marked in green and blue.
• Move maps aggregate mouse pathways to visualize where users are moving across the screen
• Eye-tracking heatmaps show where people tend to look when landing on your page. This technology typically involves specialized equipment like eye trackers or software that uses computer vision algorithms to estimate eye positions. Therefore, to generate eye-tracking heatmaps, visitors need access to the necessary hardware or software unavailable to every visitor.

Heatmaps: Tools

Microsoft Clarity is a handy tool that offers heatmaps and free session recordings for you to better understand how users are engaging with your landing pages. Clarity supports click heatmaps, scroll maps, and session recordings.

Other well-known heatmap tools include Crazy Egg, Mouse Flow, and HotJar.

Here’s what you can determine using heatmaps:

1. Which of Your CTAs Attract More Attention?

Depending on your page’s purpose, different types of CTAs can drive people to perform some action.

Based on your business model, you can invite users to contact you, buy your product or schedule an appointment. Try using AI-driven CTAs, which include chatbots and interactive voice response-driven (IVR) phone lines. Both of these methods can use workflows to collect your prospect’s info and funnel them in the right direction (e.g., provide links to start a buying journey or connect them to the right department within your organization).

Social media is also important to have on the page, but in strategic placement. For example, a Tweet quote is probably very valuable to have within or after the first two or three paragraphs. If someone is interested and excited about this content, they will likely click that tweet button and share your message. If you want to share links to your social media, those are irrelevant to be at the very top but can settle for the bottom of the content.

It is important to understand which of those CTAs attract attention and which distract your page visitors from performing the main action (e.g. buy or subscribe). Heatmaps are ideal for that as they will clearly show you which of your CTAs are in red (i.e. they draw an eye first) and which ones attract more clicks (if you are also using click maps).

2. Are Your Landing Page Images/Videos Stealing Too Much Attention?

Images and videos are great for engaging people and increasing overall time users spend because they easily attract an eye. But are they distracting your site visitors from your main CTAs?

Here’s an example of a heatmap showing that a video does generate clicks but the CTA remains the most prominent part of the page. This is your goal!

3. Is Your Copy Engaging Enough?

The headline, subheadings and your first two paragraphs must be the most important thing you say in the content. You can use ChatGPT to create attention-grabbing headlines, but use it for inspiration rather than creating your copy. You almost always need to edit what the tool creates to produce something great finally.

Use heatmaps to identify whether people are paying attention to your headlines and subheadings or scrolling right past them. If you find the latter, consider rewording your subheadings as questions and testing again. Questions are usually best at engaging readers because we have that natural impulse to pause and think of an answer when confronted with them.

Text Optimizer is a cool tool that allows you to find semantically relevant questions for any keyword you input.

The tool also uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you create an optimized copy to answer each question but, again, make sure to review and edit it before using.

4. Are People Seeing Your Social Proof?

Testimonials should always be on any landing page. This is undeniable. They can be text, image, or video testimonials. All of these are your brand’s greatest assets because you worked hard to earn positive customer reviews.

But are people even seeing those testimonials?

The testimonial placement on the page is also very important, so make sure you use heatmaps to see if people are paying attention to your business’s social proof.

There are quite a few landing page builders which make it easier to change the look and feel of your testimonials and move them around the page. Try different placements and run heatmap tests for each one to compare.

Start Heatmapping Today!

Heatmaps are a great way to create a more engaging copy or a better-converting landing page. With free tools like Microsoft Clarity, you can use heatmaps to test just about any page of your site, so go ahead and set up your free tests right now!

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