Getting users to a website is highly important which is why we adopt marketing strategies such as SEO, Organic and Paid Social and PPC. With a good strategy behind a website, you will see results over time. As traffic rises, we think things are working well, especially when Google Analytics displays positive graphs like this one:
Great! Things are on the up. We might be driving more traffic to the site but there are other things we must consider. When users land on the site, are we satisfying their needs? Gaining a high volume traffic on a monthly basis is great, but how exactly are your users interacting with your site?
As business owners what you want to see are numbers. For example, out of 5,000 visitors visiting your site, 3,000 will land on your homepage. The homepage contains a phone number, a video and a contact form, however do you know how many of those users are interacting with those contact options?
Out of the 3,000 visitors:
- How many users calls your business?
- How many users watch your video?
- How many users use the contact form on the homepage?
You may know your numbers or you may not, but there are tools available that will give you the exact figures. Let’s run through three great tools for tracking user experience (UX).
Heat Maps
Heat maps is a great visual tool for seeing exactly how users interact with your website. They will display “heat” which shows which part of the page gets the most interactions (clicks).
From a heat map like this, we can see how many users have clicked to contact the business or watched the video placed on the page. With stats included in the tracking, this can inform your decision on what works best for users in relation to the layout and elements on the page.
When running analysis for clients, we have found that there have been instances when users have tried to interact with elements on a page that aren’t clickable. For example, when we set up a heat map for one particular website, we found that most users were trying to navigate through clicking an image found on the page. This was despite the fact the element led users nowhere.
With the analysis gathered, a heat map can inform us of what users are expecting to see and be able to do on your site.
Scroll Tracking
Scroll tracking or scroll depth measures how far users are scrolling down your pages. This can be tracked in various ways including through Google Analytics which monitors the 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% scroll points and sends a Google Analytics Event for each spot – more on this later.
Another method is to use Hotjar.
As we can see from the screenshot above, Hotjar can display exactly where users spend most of their time. The red area indicates where most users scroll to while blue areas will highlight areas users barely see.
Scroll tracking is useful for providing insights into whether certain elements of a page are being seen by your users, such as the contact form. Perhaps the contact form lies in a blue area or just below it. This would indicate that users aren’t seeing it and may not interact with it as much as you would like.
Whichever element you want to receive the most attention, it would be better placed in a yellow area or above the fold into a red section. This would increase the likelihood of users interacting with the element and in-turn a higher conversion rate and more leads.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager helps webmasters and marketers implement code onto a website without the need for a developer. With the snippet of code added to the website, there are various ways to track extra data such as “events” which can be added to Google Analytics.
Events are interactions by users across your website. As we’ve already mentioned, one such event you can track is scroll depth. Other examples of events include when a user clicks on the submit button after filling in a contact form. This event then pops up in Google Analytics for you to analyse.
By using the three tools mentioned, this will give you the numbers you need in understanding how users are interacting with your website. If your homepage gets around 3000 searches per month but the contact form only gets 10 submissions that a conversion rate of just 0.33%! By using the above tools, you can perform Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) on your site. Rather than spending more money trying to achieve higher traffic, it’s good to work on converting the users you already have. Not only will you improve user experience but it will also generate more value for the business in the future.
For help with improving your user experience and conversion rate optimisation, get in touch with the experts at Ricemedia.
