Learn How To Track Visitor Interaction Through A Heat Map!
What is a Heat Map?
A heat map can change your existing traffic by showing you where consumers are bottle necking and dropping off. It is a crucial step in learning what your current traffic is doing once they get to your website. It is NOT analytics and it is! It is a recording of what consumers interact with as they travel through your website.
Heat maps come in several formats and are growing as more people fund this technology. It shows first hand what visitors do as they scroll and click on the information contained in your site. It also shows you the averages of what you general traffic does. This data help you or me discover what customers are clocking on or actually seeing at all.
Every business will be different. My home repair and handyman service had a slew of content that was never being seen. I learned that if it’s not directly linked to from the main home page it never was seen. I also learned how far the average person scrolled when they got to that first page.
More important than all that is I discovered that the fall out rate on mobile was 99%!!! Holy shit, my template had no clickable phone number function and so I lost every customer. A plugin fixed this instantly and my phone rang twice as much!
How Does A Heat Map Work?
There are several reputable companies and several free options for your sites heat map. The free heat map services are limited but will still show you and me a lot of data. There are several ways to make it work and you may need a plugin. Remember every plugin added will slow your site down and speed of your site is crucial especially with mobile searches.
After you choose a company, level of service and tick some options, they will give you a code. That code needs to be inserted into your website. This is done manually or through a plugin. I use a plugin called insert headers and footers which lets me insert code from multiple sources. These sources include codes from the BBB, Google Analytics and my heat map.
Once this code is inserted a selection or every visitor will be tracked as they discover pages and posts you have written. This is even better than Google Analytics or Search Console in that it shows each visitors struggles, actions and decisions as they navigate the site in real and collective time.
What’s The Cost Of Installing & Reading The Heat Map?
There are several way that this works. Each client (you) will be different in their own level of involvement. The first involves me doing all the work. I need to get paid for every hour I put into serving you or have some kind of long term interest or ownership in your company for payment.
The way most internet marketing companies do this is by taking control of your website or making a new one that they own. If you leave that company you lose your site! So you need to be loyal to me long term if you only pay a few hundred a month.
The second option is to share the work in that you do a lot of things that help produce our desired end result. Don’t think you can just do heat maps! There is content to create, site fixes to be had and tracking to be done.
After that comes more work because there are internet phone books to be listed in, link building and emails to be collected and sent. Did I mention supplementing all this with paid ads and re-targeting campaigns! Those also need to be set up and populated with content in the form of text, picture or video.
Why Do All This Again?
For a river of leads and year round business stability. I promise you that a bunch of new traffic is worthless if your sites bounce rate is 100%. A slow site or a broken function on mobile that causes a display issue can rob you of all your marketing efforts.
I didn’t know that all the traffic (bought and generic) on mobile was a complete loss. I couldn’t see that by looking at Google Analytics or Search Console. Only a heat map and several hours of staring at it revealed the issue.
Honestly I needed to see the client searching for a way to contact me. I watched as mobile visitors scrolled frantically top to bottom and then to my contact page. I even had a caller say they couldn’t call and it didn’t make any sense in my head what they meant. Once I saw people click my number 3 or 4 times in the video recording it was clear why there was poor conversion!
Honestly there was a combined total of more than 25 hours spent in the discovery of this one issue. Over night the correction got my phone ringing! All my mobile traffic returned with a simple plugin that shows a giant “call now” button hovering over the screen of all mobile devices.
I will work harder for you!
It’s simple truth that I will work harder for you. No agency can give your company the personal attention that I can directly.
I do all this personally and no employee out there could ever beat my entrepreneurial spirit!
Give me a call or send me a note to get started!
