Dynamic Heatmaps—The New eCommerce Data Gathering Tool

eCommerce is a pure service business that demands utmost precision, patience, and persistence to survive the industry’s ever-growing competition. The goal is to help shoppers find good products and provide an exceptional customer experience that converts them into repeat buyers.

Visitor behavior on your website serves as a valuable source of insights at every stage of an eCommerce funnel. What makes or breaks the deal for your business depends on insights that you must optimize to improve their shopping experience and conversion rate.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Most marketers suggest using multiple qualitative and quantitative analytical tools to do so. However, not all of them have the prowess to give you the kind of information you would need to study user experience.

This is where heatmaps come into play.

What are heatmaps?

Heatmaps serve as one of the best qualitative tools to collect relevant customer data, especially in terms of understanding their actual behavior across your web platform.

Think of heatmaps as X-Ray films. They show a detailed picture (in the form of graphical representation) of how users interact with your site or store. You can observe how far users scroll, where they click the most, and the products or pages they like or dislike.

Such data is precisely what you need to make your platform more user-friendly, drive more traffic, and improve your conversion optimization strategies.

But, if you think that any heatmap would work wonders for your e-commerce site, you’re absolutely wrong!

eCommerce websites are highly dynamic. They have more interactive elements and “behind login page” elements like orders, cart page, etc., than any other site. Such pages shed visitor interaction and information, which typically serves as the primary data for businesses to use to draw page performance conclusions, find elemental distractions, and improve overall customer experience. 

This is where Dynamic Heatmaps save the day!

What are dynamic heatmaps?

Unlike static heatmaps, which can only be plotted on static web pages such as the Home Page, Product Pages, Landing Pages, Category Pages, etc., dynamic heatmaps give you the leverage of studying real-time customer behavior on pages that are beyond the scope of static heatmaps. 

In other words, dynamic heatmaps can be easily plotted on live websites with dynamic URLs such as My Profile, Orders, Cart, Account Settings, etc., to gather in-depth customer activity data.

A typical dynamic heatmap offers four primary features: click maps, scroll maps, click areas, and element lists. Each of these allows you to look at a web page’s hot spot areas in a detailed manner.

Let’s now understand the scope of dynamic heatmaps for eCommerce using some examples!

Example of dynamic heatmaps on different eCommerce pages

Studying cart page insights using dynamic heatmaps

The image below gives us an insight into a dynamic heatmap plotted on an eCommerce site’s cart page. It shows that in general, most people, after adding products to their cart, click on the product image, cancel button, postcode section, ‘Go To Checkout’ icon, and discount codes.

Such information helps you draw multiple conclusions. Some of which are as follows:

• Customers might want to see the product images once more before proceeding to the final payment gateway.
• They may not like their chosen product(s) and remove the item(s) from the cart. Or, since they cannot view the product image (in zoom) on the cart page, they abandon their cart.
• They’re most interested in availing discounts. Therefore, the area is hotter than other page elements.

Furthermore, such information also serves as helpful in drawing hypotheses on how to improve the performance of various page elements with dynamic URLs, meanwhile finding the proper means and ways to enhance customer experience and increase your conversions.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Studying order page insights using dynamic heatmaps

The “My Orders” page of an eCommerce site is an important page that is less explored in terms of gathering customer behavior data.

The page allows users to look at their current and previous orders, check delivery status, seek assistance, and even browse through their history. As an eCommerce company, plotting heatmaps on such pages and mapping the number of clicks can significantly help you study which page elements are fetching you maximum customer attention. 

For example, the above-plotted heatmap shows that most clicks are observed on the “Track” icon followed by “Need Help” and product images. They’re hardly clicking on the “Rate & Review Product” icon, which, according to your platform, can be an important form page to seek product reviews and other essential information. You can further use such qualitative data to make necessary amendments and compel customers to fill the form, like adding product review pop-ups or call-to-action buttons on the Order page, making the section omnipresent, giving rewards for adding reviews, and so forth.

Watch this video if you’d like to understand more about VWO heatmaps and heatmap reports.

Dynamic heatmaps can give you much more qualitative, in-page data, which typically other analytical tools fail to match. Every page, every click tells a story, and there’s something to learn from every story if you listen carefully!

So now that you know what your static heatmap tools are lacking, it’s time to upgrade your eCommerce platform with VWO’s dynamic heatmaps and make the most of them.

FAQs on Dynamic Heatmaps