Heat maps with Visual Website Optimizer

I love heat maps I really do! These are tools that map where people click and sometimes scroll on a web page, traditionally reflecting a higher heat intensity by colour etc. Trouble is, in the past the tools I've had access to have fallen short of user expectation. Either they simply haven't worked on our content or have been hugely misleading in terms of what they have captured and finally the time lag in gathering data and reporting back.

But no more. When we procured Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) from Wingify as a testing platform back in March of this year, not only did we get a very competent testing platform  it also had a whole set of very useful kit including heatmaps.

So running a split test or MVT test will tell you which experience is best for achieving your online goals but it might not tell you exactly how people are interacting with your test experience. Below is an example of a recent test I've been running on our basket checkout. This personalization test added promo code copy, wrapped around the promo code field entry for people looking for specific holiday dates. As you can see the promo code box and call to action is heavily used at this point in the journey but it also shows people scanning and interacting with the appropriate copy. Conversely heatmaps can obviously show you when people are not interacting with your beloved copy.

Using heat maps in conjunction with testing and conventional analytics really gives you a three dimensional view of exactly what behavior you may or may not be driving.

Heatmap

Heatmap showing fertile and fallow areas of our product pages. People tend to click on only one image within an image set. In this case the 360 degree call to action is an outright winner.