Use Click Tracking Heatmaps to Improve Conversion Rates

Heatmaps are no longer a mysterious term used mostly in scenes from action movies. They have become an integral part of most studies conducted by UX experts, having taken the form of a visualization, which displays the results of tracking clicks. They are the answer to the all important question: “Can I track the movements of my users?”, and they provide people with tangible data, which outperforms the highly unstable method of following nothing else but your hunch.

We at UsabilityTools have abandoned our wild guesses altogether – we keep our heads high looking out for the data that our users and customers provide. Click tracking heatmaps are one of our tools that we use to help us and our clients. One of them, OptimalEnergy, a Polish price comparison system for energy distributors, managed to increase their conversion rates by 122% as a result of conducting a click tracking study – a quite impressive feat. Read on find out more about their success and to learn about efficient studies using click tracking heatmaps.

The Essence of Click Tracking Heatmaps

Click tracking heatmaps focus on the idea that you choose a session on a certain webpage and you see the density of the clicks in a given area. In that way, you can determine what areas are most interesting, where people click the most in order to find, for example, the pricing details and so on. The wide array of issues you can cover results in data that is related directly to you and to your website. With that data, you gain insight into your users’ world, and you can start optimizing your design and website right away.

The benefit of using a click tracking heatmaps study is that it is rather inexpensive, as it does not require a large amount of participants that need to be paid. Also, you can measure clicks either with your users’ knowledge (by directly asking them) or you can simply track their movements and see their journey on the website (useful if there is an element that blocks all movement and there is no indication what might cause that).

Determining the pain points of your visitors and customers is pivotal to improving your website. You can do that with click tracking heatmaps, and in result, it will lead to a higher conversion rate. This could be best shown by a real life example of one of our clients, OptimalEnergy.

Click Tracking Heatmaps used to optimize OptimalEnergy

OptimalEnergy is a website offering a price comparison system for energy distributors in Poland. It is one of the largest and most extensive services where users are able to see what options are the best for them.

However, they faced an issue regarding bad conversion rates and decided to study the conversion funnel within the website in order to determine what the problems could be. UsabilityTools came to the rescue with our click tracking heatmaps. OptimalEnergy started a study using this tool and quickly came to a conclusion about possible reasons for bad conversion.

The main page of the website featured a box with images. These images were unclickable, but featured elements that looked like real and clickable elements of the page, and even contained CTAs such as “Start”. Because of that confusing feature, the click tracking heatmaps tool showed that even up to 24% clicks on the website were wasted, as they were placed on the fake CTAs and elements that were simply unclickable and led to nowhere.

Even though they looked real, they provided no value for the visitor.

Click tracking heatmaps can be visualized either as single points or as a cloud

In the picture above, the click tracking shows how many clicks were placed in an area where no element is actually clickable, despite its deceptive design. As it is shown, the aforementioned 24% clicks are in vain.

The actual CTAs that bring the clients to the payment form attract 31% of clicks. The fact that both areas receive almost the same attention signals that there is a problem, as almost the same amount of clicks goes to waste because of an unintuitive design.

OptimalEnergy used the click tracking heatmaps to further determine the movement of their visitors on the website in order to find out where exactly they focus their attention. First, they studied their menu bar to see how it is being utilized.

Respectively: Main Page, About us, Info about energy, Reports, and Contact

The results showed that the visitors use the menu bar mostly to check the “About Us” subpage (the second part), and it attracted about 5% of all clicks. Users wanted to see the information about the company, but didn’t spend a lot of time there (estimated 1 to 5 seconds). With reversed click tracking heatmaps, OptimalEnergy saw how visitors operate on the “About Us” subpage, and determined that people simply scan the content.

People mostly focus on the beginning and if they do not find anything compelling, they abandon the page.

The conclusion is as follows: the website is designed in a way that attracts attention to unclickable elements, but doesn’t do anything to actually promote the value of the company. Therefore, it needs to be redesigned in order to actually focus people’s attention on the elements that lead to converting.

In order to do that, OptimalEnergy used arrows to direct the movement of visitor’s eyes to elements that are important, and made all of the unclickable elements actually clickable.

Choose start – a call to action for people who want to start calculating the most efficient energy tariff. The arrow immediately points to the area which launches the whole process.

As a result, the effectiveness of CTAs increased by 66.2%, and the conversion rate increased by 122.6%, all thanks to a successful click tracking heatmaps study.

Conclusion

Click tracking heatmaps are an incredibly useful tool when it comes to collecting data about your customers or visitors. It is best used for diagnosing problems that might be present within the website. The biggest advantage is that it is a very easy study to conduct and it doesn’t require a lot of investment either in time or money.

Data is important, and the website visitors provide the best data available. Thanks to it you can improve your service and increase your conversion rates – a result that everyone is striving for.