A heatmap is a graphical way to visualize visitor interactions on your website. It’s a great way to see which pages on your site, and which sections on those pages receive the most engagement.

The colors on a heatmap signify the intensity of the engagement from visitors. It moves from blue to green to yellow, then to finally red; red being the highest level of engagement.

Heatmaps are most usually bundled with conversion optimizing tools. Some examples include Mouseflow, Hotjar and Inspectlet.

There are 4 different types of heatmaps:

Click tracking – these record data on what and where your visitors click on your site’s landing page. The red spots showcase the areas where the visitor clicked the most, the number of concentrated clicks goes down as the color becomes lighter.

Scroll maps – These record visitors’ scrolling behavior, helping you see the exact point where visitors scrolled on the page. This type of heatmap indicates whether the length of your page is ideal for user experience.

Mouse tracking – These type of heatmaps track the user’s mouse movements while visitors engage with the particular page.

Eye tracking – These record eye movements that visitors tend to exhibit while on your site.

Heatmaps can be even more effective if paired with an analytics tool should as Google Analytics. This is because Analytics can get you information about the behavior of visitors to your site. There’s also the ability to set up goals and funnels to determine what’s working with your site in term’s of its conversion rate, and revamp what isn’t. An excellent tie-in to using heatmaps.

Heatmaps provide you with a visual guide of visitor behavior, allowing you to see the post-click landing page through the visitors’ eyes – helping you make any changes needed to improve post-click landing page optimization and increase conversions. They also allow for making UX decisions, based on how visitors interact with current pages.

In this case, you would have to create multiple heatmaps in that case. Within your pages HTML code, you can specify various commands to allow your heatmaps tool to capture multiple screenshots for download.

The first section of your heatmaps that you should be taking a close look at would be your calls-to-action (CTAs). With your heatmap, you can see just how often visitors are interacting with your CTAs and thus, how effective they are.

It’s been shown that the higher up on the webpage that CTAs are, the more likely that they will be interacted with. In addition, it’s also a good idea to include relevant links and testimonials about your product to garner visitor interest so that they will interact with them and be easier to convert.

A/B Testing refers to the practice of creating a variant of an existing webpage and making slight changes to it – whether they’re functionality or design based – and then running the variant alongside the original for a period of time to determine which page is more likely to convert visitors.

Some knowledge of HTML and/or CSS would be required in order to generate the heatmaps, but not necessarily to read and understand them.

It’s a sound idea to have a heatmaps expert generate the required images in order to aid in your overall website revamp.