Website Heatmaps (Research Paper Sample)

Website Heatmaps
Introduction
Heat maps help to track where different individuals are looking on a website. It tells a person that which part of the website is most viewed by the viewers. The method is mainly with the help of tracking the clicks of the mouse or the cursor position. An expensive model has even been developed by the developers. This model uses the tracking of the eye to achieve the desired outcome. With the help of the click heat map, the analysation of the behavior of clicking is one of the visitor of the website. With the help of eye tracking heat map it can be analyzed where the people actually look on a website or a webpage. Thus as a result it can be said that the owner of the website has a chance to see and look through the eyes of the visitors on his webpage as the visitors or the users navigate on the website.
For example an advertisement can be easily overlooked on a page or a website so the developer needs to make sure to give the advertisement appropriate colors etc. in order to get more attention from the visitor. It is not easy to take full advantage of the heat maps in the case of dynamic content. The behavior of the visitors is analyzed with the help of heat maps. A majority of the companies prefer to use the mouse tracking heat maps since it is cheaper than the eye tracking heat maps system. Both the mouse tracking and eye tracking systems have different results since the mouse tracking system the data from the actual visitors is being recorded. For eye tracking a sample group of people are examined. The accuracy of the eye tracking is much more than the mouse tracking system.
The heat maps make use of color in order to communicate the relationships between the values of data. These data would be very difficult if they were to be presented in a numerical way thus it is easily represented with the help of heat maps. Heat maps can be used for the view of television also.
According to the results of the heat maps the most important content should always be at the top of the page. On other parts of the page, the attention of the visitor is for a shorter span of time. According to the study as the viewer scrolls down a page, the view time of the visitor decreases. The viewing time above the fold was reported to be 80.3% while below the fold the view time dropped down to 19.7%. Thus the study showed that that the further the content is away from the header, the less it will grab the attention of the visitor. Thus if the length of the page is longer then it should be designed in such a way which encourages the visitor to scroll down further on the page.
Moreover it was even found out in the study that that the viewing time also increased at the bottom of the website page which showed that the attention of the visitor also increases at the bottom of the page (Nielson, 2015). Moreover, several studies have been carried out and according to the results of the studies people spend more time by looking at the left side of the page and it grabs the attention of the visitor (Nielson, 2015). Moreover another study also showed that the content was read by the visitors in a pattern that was of F-shape. This meant that the most important content should be included in the first two paragraphs of the web page (Nielson, 2015). The viewers’ attention is even grabbed by the subheadings and bullet points. Furthermore banner blindness also takes place when a visitor visits the website. At times some of the text is ignored by the visitor that gives an impression of advertisement. Visitors usually ignore the advertisements due to being bombarded with hundreds of ads on different websites.
Providers of the Heatmap
The service of the heat mapping is provided by various online websites. These websites include crazy egg. Feng-gui, wordpress plugin #1, click heat, corunet, click density, heat map provided by Patrick wied and Hotjar.
Crazy egg was a free service more than a few months back however user now needs to pay the web site. However, the fee is also nominal i.e. $9 for a month (Olyslager, 2009). Furthermore if someone is not ready to purchase it right away a free 2 months trial of the heat map is also available. A simpler service is provided by Feng-Gui. Feng-Gui does not make use of any mouseclicks. The heatmap in generated with the help of an algorithm. Moreover with the help of the plugin #1 of the word press the click of the mouse are registered. However, this plugin is not much effective since no summaries are generated on a monthly or weekly basis. Thus the testing is a bit difficult due to this. On the other hand clickheat needs to be installed on the server and is an opens source application program. Another tracking system is known as the definite heat map, which has been developed by corunet. With the help of this tracking system a user can build his or her own heatmap (Olyslager, 2009).
Clickdesnity is another system that has to be purchased but however, a free 30-day trial is available in which all of its functions are accessible. A real time heatmap is generated on the website of Patrick wied. The elements used by Patrick wied include javascript and the HTMLCanvas elements. Another useful heatmap is the Hotjar. Heat maps are generated per device through the hotjars i.e. on desktops, tablets and cell phones (Olyslager, 2009). Moreover heat maps are also produced for the clicks, move and scroll which adds to its efficiency.
Benefits
The benefits are there are the people who are making a new website design or are creating an landing page. With the help of heat maps the areas where the eyes of the people linger can be figured out successfully. If the heat map shows that the individuals do not linger on the areas of the website where the developer wants them to focus then the developer is equipped with that information and tries to develop interest of the reader to that specific area.
With the help of a heat map it can be seen that where the users click on an website and the exact location is noted by the heatmap. In this the developer of the website will know that which parts or navigation bars are clicked most by individuals and which areas are totally neglected by the individuals. Furthermore, it can also be seen that how far a user scrolls on a page on a website. With the help of this function an individual will realize that which parts of the website are not seen by the users and how little the users see the content which is on the lower parts of the page. Iframes are used by the heat maps in order to track the clicks. A thorough idea is given to the owner of the website regarding the navigation of an individual. Moreover, with the help of heat mapping distinct colors can also be tested on the website to see which color attracts the most attentions. Moreover, the layout of the buttons can also be tested and tells the developer that what kind of layout is needed for the website to have the most viewership. Users even expect some of the graphic or aspect on a website to be a link and at times it is not a link. For example there might be some kind of logo on the website and the user might try to click on it thinking of it as some kind of link.
The most popular parts of a page can be identified easily with the help of heat maps. Every page of a website has its own goal. With the help of heat maps it can be easily identified that what items or elements on the page distracts the user from the goal of the page. Thus as a result things on a web page can be repositioned or designed accordingly to get the attention of the user. The most effective headlines can also be figured out in this way. It can even be determined that how often different buttons are clicked on a website through heat maps. If any button is being neglected on the page, that button can be replaced with the new button to make it more prominent.
The flaws in a specific design can be easily determined with the help of the heat maps. It can be said that it is a tool through which the effectiveness of the home page is evaluated. The color-coding is done on the basis of the engagement of the user of the web site or web page. These tests are conducted by various website owners in order to get fruitful outcome from their website. Some of the websites conduct these tests on a monthly basis, some conduct these tests on bimonthly basis and some on a weekly basis in order to obtain more detailed observations.
The underused sections in this way are identified. Big companies and specially those websites that are operating as online sales can gain huge advantages from this method and can increase and have a push in their sales based on the results from the heat mapping. Different websites use hat mapping for different kind of purposes and different analyzation. For example epa.gov is also using heat maps and it is trying to understand the alphabetical index with the help of heat maps. Such reports have been obtained by the website which tells them that how many times has an alphabet been clicked. Thus according to the results the alphabet "w" was clicked with a frequency of 200 times while on the other hand the alphabet "H" was clicked only two times. Thus conclusion was drawn based on these frequencies. Valuable feedback is provided by this method and different areas and patterns can be easily analyzed and then the conclusion can be drawn based on the results.
Examples
EyeTrackSHop is a startup that performs heat maps for various marketers. With the help of the heat maps the company determines that where people surf on the social media websites. The social media websites were researched on Mashable by the EyeTrackShop. These social media websites included Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, and linkedin. According to the research most of the time was spent by the people by looking at the profile picture on Facebook and the first two posts on the Facebook page (Eridon, 2011). A high...