CRO hack #04: Hacking a cold heatmap

CRO hack #04: Hacking a cold heatmap



Heatmaps do the talking for themselves. They show you where the visitors are clicking—helping you understand exactly which sections on your website are the most engaging. The heatmap of a well-designed landing page will show you exactly what the page's aim is: Get clicks on the main CTA. And if there are clicks on any other element, the diagnosis is easy—the element looks clickable.
There are a few heatmaps however, that are just plain confusing. Consider a heatmap having equally distributed clicks across the entire page—no clear winning element. Cracking the code of this heatmap is considerably tougher, but only if you don't know where to look.

Here's a gameplan you can use to decode such a heatmap:

Step 1: Scrollmap and Attention Map

With scrollmap, find the point in your website from which the most number of visitors drop-off. With Attention Map, locate the sections on the page where the visitors spend the most time. By combining this information, you can easily identify the portion of your page that has potential for increasing conversions. Stick with this key piece of content and design format and rework the page from there.

Make sure you keep revisiting the heatmap, scrollmap, and attention map of the page to continue this cycle of optimization.

Step 2: Assess Design

If your page is riddled with links and CTAs, your visitor will have a tough time deciding which one to pick. Decide what is the one vital action you want your visitor to perform on this page: For example, it could be subscribe, signup, learn more. Organize your information in such a way that this action becomes the logical conclusion

Step 3: Back to the drawing board

If the other two steps do not provide you a less dispersed heatmap, then it might be time that you revisit your marketing strategy for this page. There might be a high chance that the audience visiting this page is not the appropriately targeted.  

Learn more about the type of audience that visits your page by segmenting the reports. Use this data to inspect the SEO and SEM strategy of serving this page to cross-check if you're bringing in the right visitors.

Here's the hack in short: