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How To Interpret Heatmaps for a B2B Website

Join Alistair Fairweather, Conversion Rate Optimization Expert at Airfleet, as he provides valuable insights on interpreting heatmaps and clickmaps for your B2B website.

Alistair Fairweather
21 January 2025
Videos

Join Alistair Fairweather, Conversion Rate Optimization Expert at Airfleet, as he provides valuable insights on interpreting heatmaps and clickmaps for your B2B website. This how-to video calls out practical tips specific to B2B technology marketers. Alistair also highlights the role of click patterns and how to balance clickable elements to enhance user experience and drive conversions.

Topics

Scrollmaps

Clickmaps

Balancing Engagement and User Experience

The Transcript

[00:00:00]

Hi, I’m Alistair from Airfleet and I am in charge of conversion rate optimization for Airfleet. And I’d like to give you some pointers on how to interpret the heatmaps and clickmaps for your site. So, this can be a very useful tool, but sometimes for busy marketers that can be a pain. What’s good, what’s bad.

So here are a few things that we look out for when trying to figure out what the data is showing us.

So the first thing to do is just to check that you’ve got enough a large enough sample. Two weeks, 30 days, usually not enough for a B2B website. Most B2B websites with some exceptions don’t have hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.

Typically 10x less than that. So give yourself enough time. This can be slightly difficult if you’re, you know, you recently relaunched. You’re going to need to wait for yourself to get usable data, but I’ve gone for the last six months here.

[00:01:00]

I’m testing our beautiful website or at least using it as a reference.

And you know, some things about the scroll map are self-explanatory.

So the fold is where most people the is, is the bottom of most people’s initial screen height. And that percentage you see is, is how far down most people have scrolled. I’m looking on desk. I’m looking at desktop, but you can do a similar thing on on mobile.

I’m going to focus on desktop for this. Now we can see that although there is quite a bit of drop off that we The space here is, is because screenshots are hard for this thing to do dynamically, but we can see that one third of the people scroll down as far as here. And that we still had one in four people.

All the way down to here which is two thirds of the way down the page.

[00:02:00]

Now, bear in mind when we’re looking at how far down people scroll, if people click on things, they, by definition, don’t scroll any further.

So, just having a large number of people scroll to the bottom of a page isn’t necessarily a helpful metric.

If you have a homepage and most people are scrolling all the way down at the bottom, that could in and of itself be a bad thing because they’re looking for something to click on and they find nothing. So as a rule of thumb, we stick with if by 50 percent of the physical height in pixels of the screen, you’ve lost more than 75 percent of people, your page is either too long or it’s not holding people’s attention.

So we are at about 50 percent here. And we still have three out of 10 people. So we, we’re okay. I’ve seen better. I’ve also seen much worse. So if we look now, just by comparison, say, okay, well, is this good? Is this bad? Pages behave differently depending on their, their objective.

[00:03:00]

Of course, that might go without saying, but if we look at a blog, we will see a very different.

And this is true of any piece of content, readable content, which which is actually working. So we see that we’re all the way at the bottom here, for example. We’re still more than a third of people are still reading. And there’s a much longer page, even than the homepage. And we are still at one in four people still reading all the way down here.

So that is a typical of a piece of content and it’s exactly as you would like it. The point is to scroll. So you would want this deeper scrolled depth here as you can, as you can manage. Now, if we were to look at another yet another page just to compare, always a good idea to compare whether an important landing page of any kind is like the homepage, how much it contrasts to another important page, landing page on your, or use case page, et cetera, on your, on your site.

[00:04:00]

And if we look here, we see that this is going to be a this is a shorter page, but we can see that the scroll depth for this platform page is actually on average deeper than our homepage. Which is really good. As important as our homepage is to us this essentially product page is is telling people about one of our most important offerings our platform.

So it’s wonderful that the scroll depth is so high that, you know, sort of three out of ten, nearly three out of ten people are all the way at the bottom here. So, so much for for scroll maps. In and of themselves, it can be useful, especially if you’re getting absolutely no scroll or, or a very low, a very high amount of scroll.

But really we need to see them in the context of other measures. In particular, we want to look at ClickMaps. So ClickMaps, also for a given value, fairly self explanatory. So some things to look out for again, just to remind you we’re on six months worth of of data here.

[00:05:00]

So, We can see that our navigation is the top, is the most clicked thing on the homepage.

Now, while we would like people to scroll down the page a bit more because we worked hard on it, it’s also absolutely fine if they’re clicking through to pages which are of equal or higher value than the homepage. So we don’t have any, we don’t have a preference as long as, as the site as a whole is working together and doing its job.

It’s possible that many people coming here to the site, given the nature of our business are coming on, on sort of referral and people have told them how great we are. And so they, they want something specific from us on our specific services. So they click on a specific service to go and look at, you know, the details on that.

We’re seeing over 2 percent of clicks on our on our primary CTA, which is let’s talk. It’s fantastic. And then we are seeing, so this is the area which is a bit difficult to see because Hotjar struggles to take a screenshot of dynamic content.

[00:06:00]

But if we get down here, it’s very interesting how much, how many clicks there are on this social proof element, right?

So this is quotes by our customers, our clients, about how much we help them. And it’s one of the most clicked things on the pages as people want, want to see mark other marketers want to see what other marketers have said about us. Given the nature of, of the, of the industry, it’s often other marketers that they know.

So we also see there’s a high number of clicks on these, which is fantastic which is switching between our different offerings. And so looking like an obvious thing is just look for what’s being clicked on and what’s not been clicked on. If we look at. If we think back to, see clicks there, if, if we think back to there’s even some clicks here, right near the bottom.

In the context of the scroll map that we were looking at earlier, worth bearing in mind, as I said, if people are clicking on elements which take them off to another page, for example, maximize your website, then they’re not going to scroll. It’s not a bad thing. We want them to find the thing they’re looking for, and visit that thing.

[00:07:00]

And normally the homepages By its very nature, quite general and non specific. And you’re trying to direct people to find out more about a much more specific query. So if more of them click than scroll and they end up converting or even remembering you and coming back later, then that is a result.

Then you’re, then you should be pleased.

So, another, other things to look at on Click maps is, it’s fine to see what’s being clicked the most, nice and obvious, but where are there lots of clicks on elements which aren’t actually clickable? Now people click, especially if you study, look at recordings, some people click on everything.

I don’t do that, so it seems bizarre to me, but many people just click everywhere. But if you see there are patterns where there’s a lot of clicking happening where there aren’t actually, so this, these are clickable.

[00:08:00]

But you see here the patches where there’s, where people are clicking on things.

If you see, if more than 50 percent of clicks, in fact more than 30 percent of clicks on your, on a homepage are on elements which aren’t actually linked, you know, they’re just clicking on, repeatedly on text that they think should be linked, then Either you don’t have enough clickable elements, especially in that part of the viewport, in other words they scroll down to two thirds of the way down the page, for example, and there should be a clickable element there, but there isn’t, so there’s a sort of desert of no clicks but they’re trying to click on things because they want to find out more about those things.

So lots of clicks on things which aren’t clickable says that either you’re making non clickable elements look clickable, or you need more clickable elements, or some combination thereof. So 50 percent of clicks on unlinked elements, very bad.

[00:09:00]

Even one third, you should look at what’s been clicked on and actually, and make the decision, cut the item, make the item clickable or add another item which is clickable.

Because as much as people, some people click randomly, if you see patterns for example here, now we’re not going to change the fact that this, this thing isn’t clickable, this line here. But it is definitely a pattern and those patterns can tell you whether an element is doing the job it needs to do, or whether it’s merely a distraction, or an annoyance even worse.

So, yeah, those are the, those are the most important things in terms of interpreting these things. Again, if you want to cross reference, try to look at an important page and see where the highest number of clicks are. There are pages not on our site, but on, I’ve seen on many clients where the the, the thing with the highest number of clicks is two or three scrolls below the below the bottom of the page.

So there’s lots of try, try us now on our platform page, which is great. And here’s the most clicked element, right?

[00:10:00]

Something we should look at and say, is that appropriate? There’s lots of clicks there lots of clicks on these guys. So if I look at this now, I’ve actually, you know, we should consider making some more of these elements clickable if they’re not already.

For the very reason that people feel they should be clickable. So again, great example of how You want a balance between having enough links that you send people to pages that they’re interested in and they’re looking for, and not having so many links that everything on the page, especially in a mobile view, is linked, because then it becomes like navigating a minefield or booby traps, where anywhere you touch or click by mistake, you suddenly go off to another page.

So you want to have a balance between those two things. But many beautiful B2B websites, otherwise beautiful B2B websites, you want I’m pretty supposed to have like page after page of beautiful looking information, but no CTAs and no clicks and you want to try and draw a balance between those two.

[00:11:00]

Okay, great. I hope that’s been helpful.

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