To encourage your customer to click a link, you need to add it where they notice it most easily. Ok, but where is the location on a website? Heatmaps will give you the answer. They show where your readers focus their attention. Continue reading and find out how heatmaps can help you.

Expert studies have shown that the human eye follows 84-88% of the places where you guide your mouse on the website. A heatmap therefore maps the movements of a mouse and calculates where your visitors were looking most. When you add the tracking code to your website, you’ll see, in graphical form, what your visitors pay the most attention to, what they click on, and what is not interesting for them.

The brighter colored areas show what the readers were interested in, while the colorless what they didn’t focus on. (source: www.tobii.com) 

How to Add a Heatmap to Your Website

You can find many different heatmaps online: both free and paid. For example, a trial of the program Clickdensity is available for free for 30 days. Simply register on their website and add a link to the website you want to follow and get your heatmap. Download a template of your website (Beforehand, save the picture you have in the header. After re-uploading into the system the original header will be shown and you will need to change it again). Clickdensity will generate a code for you, which you can insert in the html code of your template, right before the tag </body>. Upload the template again and from that moment on you can follow changes on your heatmap. To achieve true success you must understand how your visitor thinks, and optimize your website accordingly. Remember to use Google Analytics! Together with heatmaps on your website, they can help you achieve great success.

Will heatmaps be more useful than Google Analytics? Tell us what you think.