Mouseflow Blog

Heatmaps are 2D data visualizations that use color to represent values in a matrix. Used by everyone from social scientists to financial analysts and biologists, heatmaps have been around in one way or another for over 100 years.

In this blog, Morten Hornbaek, Head of Customer Success at Mouseflow, explains why heatmaps are such a powerful diagnostic tool when it comes to understanding how users interact with websites.

1. Heatmaps give an instant overview of key web performance parameters

While other kinds of analytics have their strengths, heatmaps draw instant attention to major issues on your website.

We’ve written about the different types of web diagnostic heatmaps before. Click heatmaps reveal the clicking patterns of your users. Scroll heatmaps expose the average visibility of your pages. Attention heatmaps show which parts of your site are most engaging to users. Movement heatmaps track mouse movements. Finally, geo heatmaps reveal user locations in an anonymized fashion.

Taken together, web diagnostic heatmaps add significant speed to the problem-solver’s journey. For example, cold spots (areas that don’t get much attention) and folds in the scroll heatmaps quickly identify problem areas. Geo heatmaps instantly reveal the territories or countries where conversions are good and where they are not. In short, heatmaps tell you at a glance what’s working and what needs to be addressed.

Over the last several years, visual analytics tools have been picking up steam. Tools that provide raw data about your website’s statistics (like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, etc) are valuable for measuring success, identifying weaknesses, and optimizing marketing budgets. If you aren’t familiar with Google Analytics, check out this helpful tutorial for beginners:

What is a heatmap?

A website heatmap is a visual representation of aggregate data points. Website heatmaps utilize a color coding system to indicate increased and decreased levels of activity. In the past decade, website heatmaps have exploded in popularity. Analytics positions, UX analysts, product managers, digital marketers, and many others professions are beginning to utilize website heatmaps on a day to day basis.

One of Mouseflow’s most powerful features is the ability to track, identify, and filter for users who are frustrated on your website. If you’re not in the loop already, Mouseflow automatically tags incoming recordings on your account, based on specific types of behaviors or events. Common use cases we see with custom tags include order ID numbers, campaign IDs, error codes, or something similar.

One of our most popular, automatic tags is called “click rage”.

Baked in Mouseflow’s form feature is the unique ability to filter for JavaScript errors and visitor frustration. This makes it easy to find recordings of painful visitor experiences -- and then send these (recordings) to developers for fixing. If you aren’t familiar with our forms feature, these analytics allow you to track visitor interaction within forms on your website. Common examples include sign-up, checkout, and contact forms.  

The feature measures drop-off, refills, blank submissions, errors, and more - for each relevant form field - and can be filtered in real time. This helps you uncover issues, improve usability, and increase conversions among different segments of visitors.

Editors Note: this article is written by Marcus Wollenberg, one of the members on our support team. 

Ever wondered how we use Mouseflow to improve our internal workflow?

Well….it’s time. We’re peeling back the curtains to give you some insight into our own Mouseflow operations. As you might have guessed, we use Mouseflow on our own website. In an effort to make life a bit easier for our support staff, we utilize a neat little trick to further integrate Mouseflow with our support platform, Groove.

Maximizing conversions is critical for sales and the overall growth of your company. If you’re trying to acquire as many clients as possible, ensuring that your sign-up process is smooth and bug free is necessary. If you aren’t reaching your conversion goals, maybe there’s a website bug you’re unaware of. Maybe your product information isn’t readily available and simple to understand. Maybe your site’s organization is confusing to the user. Identifying any roadblocks in the user experience is absolutely crucial.

Identifying the referral sources of your clientele (and regular visitors) can skyrocket the effectiveness of your product marketing campaigns. Who is your ideal client? Where do they come from? How are they referred to your product or website? How did they hear about you? Is it a friend telling them about you? Is it a Facebook or Twitter ad? Receiving this type of feedback allows your team to evaluate what’s working, what’s not, and make decisions to scale the proper campaigns.

Being able to acquire valuable, actionable information directly from your website’s visitors can be a game changer for your online business, personal blog, or corporate brand. Creating a Feedback Campaign in Mouseflow is easy! Sign into your Mouseflow account at https://app.mouseflow.com/sign-in. Select the website you’d like to work on. From the main dashboard, click on “Feedback”.

For many ecommerce sites, personal blogs, and corporate groups using Mouseflow, requesting the exclusion of certain internal visitors from showing up in their recordings is fairly common. Maybe you want to exclude the IP of the website owner, a developer, or another employee. This will conserve your credit limit, ensuring you don’t track users you don’t need to track. In Mouseflow, it’s simple to do this.

Once logged in, from the main dashboard, click on settings.