Jul
16
I’ve been helping out a few friends work on growing their businesses recently and I’ve seen something that is worth a quick memo. In case it’s new to you, there are companies like CrazyEgg and Clickdensity that offer great (and inexpensive) tools to gain insight into what people are clicking when visiting your website.
The problem I’m seeing is that by and large people are misunderstanding the point of these heatmaps.
A heatmap tells you WHAT someone is doing but not WHY they are doing it. In one example, someone showed me a heatmap that indicated that almost all the people on the site clicked on the product tour button on the top right and nobody clicked on the pricing text link on the bottom left. The person showing me the heatmap concluded that people care more about seeing the product before they consider pricing. He may be right, but it’s also equally possible that people were simply missing the link to the pricing information.
I’ve got more to say on this subject, and the larger issue of people understanding why people do the things they do on a website, but that will be covered in future memos.
For now, I’ll leave you with this story: An enterprise software company with a product in the six-figure price range was having a hard time qualifying leads on their website. They did the typical marketing stuff like putting a “Tell us about you” form in front of their whitepapers. But of the 100s of downloads they had per week, there was no way to qualify the leads. They realized that if they tracked people who first went to the careers page on their Website and then later downloaded a whitepaper the person was probably more interested in a job with the company than buying the product. If the person checked out the customers and success stories section of the site before downloading the whitepaper, it was a probably red-hot lead.
This is the science and thinking that has to go into analytics, and it something a heatmap would never tell you.