How to use a Click heatmap tool to optimize your CTA performance?
Click heatmaps are the fabulous approach to comprehend your visitors’ behavior and use that understanding for conversion rate optimization. Call-to-action buttons are very important and non-replaceable element of a web page. Especially, the landing page becomes useless when its CTA button does not function as it is expected to. Today, we will understand how we can read and analyze a click heatmap report to find out various ways to make a CTA button perform well according to our expectations. Understanding a Click heatmap dataA click heatmap data is a statistically calculated information about the clicks that your webpages get from different visitors when they are on your website. A click heatmap tool is utilized to track the click behavior of the visitors and do some precise calculations which are then represented as a color variation according to the intensity of the clicks that a web-page gets. A typical click heatmap is shown to the analyst as something like the below screenshot.
Different click heatmap tools have different ways to represent a click heatmap result to the user. However, the basic approach of mark the areas with different color variations remains constant in any heatmap tool you want to use for your website. The color variations represent the intensity of attention particular elements gets from the visitors. The variations range from Blue to Red in color where Blue means the least attention and Red means most attention. The other colors which come between this range are marked as per the level of intensity of clicks they receive. Using the click heatmap data for CTA conversionsIdentifying escape routes- Every CTA button deployed on a website has its own conversion goal. You might have a CTA for Micro conversions like Free PDF download, Newsletter subscription, Sign-up, etc. You would definitely have the CTAs for macro conversions like Add to cart, Proceed to checkout, Pay Now etc. It is very important to notice that each CTA button is receiving the attention and is working as they are expected. If you are receiving some conversions unexpectedly, it might be a matter of great concern for you. By unexpected conversion, we mean that you should make
sure that visitors are doing what you expect from them through the CTA button you have deployed and not checking-out the About Us, Blog, Services or any other page. These are called distractions and they act as an escape route from the pages where useful CTA button are deployed.
You should use the Click heatmap data to find out where people are clicking most apart from the CTA button on that page. Several times you will need to check such distractions and remove them to eliminate the escape routes. If not remove, you need to make your CTA more attention friendly so that it stands out and serve it’s purpose perfectly. Eliminating escape routes- While any heatmap tracking, what really matter is to discover what your visitors want. When you add a click heatmap to your web-page you can learn all you need to know about your visitors’ desires on your website. In the previous example, we found out how visitors were more interested in knowing about your services or business rather than clicking on the CTA button on that page. It tells us two very important facts here: It is now understood that visitors on that CTA page were hardly aware of the business. So, they needed more information. The information on the page was not enough to provide sufficient idea about the business before anyone could actually sing up for it. Now, the situation can be dealt with two basic approaches here. Either we treat the other elements as distraction and remove them from the particular page so that whole attention can now be shifted to the CTA button.
Or we can see the other side of the coin. It might be possible that even if you remove those distractions the CTA button won’t start performing. The reason is, visitors on this needs more information about the business and they will not click on the CTA button unless they have the information. So, Alternatively instead of removing the distractions alone, if we perform a combination of both the approaches that would be probably the best idea here. That is, we remove the unnecessary distractions first and then the sufficient overview of the business on the same page. Thus eliminating the escape routes, not the other elements. Concluding, Whether it is a micro conversion or macro conversion, a CTA button is always there to facilitates the path. You have to just make sure that a CTA button is guiding conversions as per their conversion goals. A deviation from conversion goal is not desirable in any case. Utilizing a Click heatmap tool can help you keep a track of the CTA buttons and their conversion goals. So, get a heatmap tool now before you start to strangle among various false positives and bogus conversions. A free heatmap tool like MockingFish would be a great tool for start. It provides one-year free trial period and later you can choose to extend to paid subscription if you wish to.