A website heat map is a tool that allows you to see what parts of your pages are most frequently scanned by your visitors. Numerous vendors provide software that allows you to make use of this tool and other web analytics.
The tools help internet marketers and website publishers judge the performance of their websites. You must be able to accept constructive criticism in order to use these tools.
Computer programs cannot take your feelings into consideration. They can only give you the facts. You might be disappointed sometimes.
Of course, webmasters that feel their sites are perfect don’t make use of these tools anyway. They are confident that what they have built is the best performing site on the internet.
The rest of us would like an unbiased “eye” (so to speak) to tell us how we are doing. A website heat map could tell us if people are looking at the portion of our websites where the ads are located. That could be important.
The maps can also help us decide where to place ads. After publishing a site and attracting some visitors, the maps direct us to locations where our visitors spend the most time.
It’s not exact of course. No web analytics are exact. It’s not a good idea to rely on any tool too heavily or even to worry about them too much. They are just good to have around.
Other web analytics can be used to gauge where your traffic is coming from. 80% of your traffic might come directly from the search engines. 10% might come from referrals. 3% might come from an email marketing campaign.
These are very important considerations, because it tells you where your advertising dollars are best spent. Knowing that the majority of your traffic comes from the search engines might make you decide to become one of the “sponsored results”.
On the other hand, it could make you even more determined to improve your referral rate or try other marketing campaigns. You might find out that most of your traffic comes from the search engines, but that most of your buyers come from other sources.
Web analytics can also tell you where your visitors are located, based on the location of their IP address. This is not a street address, of course. You can see the cities or countries that your visitors reside in. This would help you decide if you need to add a second language, among other things.
What’s the bottom line? It’s worth your time to take a look at a website heat map, as well as the other analytical tools available today.