Boosting your social media conversion rate can be a challenging task. After all, there’s no magic formula that works for every page and audience. However, though it can be quite difficult to track how your audience is interacting with your social media page and posts, it’s not impossible.
If you’re thinking of a way to improve user experience and increase the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, there is one tool that can help you optimize your efforts—a heatmap. But how to use heatmaps? Let’s find out.
A heatmap is a visual representation of data that uses colors to identify and understand complex data sets. In simpler terms, a heatmap is a visual representation of the activity on your social media page and posts.
The best heatmap tools allow you to determine the exact sections that get the least and most attention from users—for instance, where users spend the most time on your social media page and which call-to-action (CTA) they are ignoring or paying the most attention to.
Using the information from a heatmap, you can make more informed decisions when tweaking your social media campaigns. This can be done because you will have a better idea of what your audience likes and what kind of content will make them scroll further down or click through to the next page.
In general, there are four types of heat maps.
This type of heatmap essentially presents the scrolling habits or behaviors of users on your social media page, and it has all the scroll data plotted so that it’s easy to understand.
It indicates the number of visitors who scrolled to certain sections of your page, the specific sections where the percentage of users scrolling drastically increases or falls, and more.
Click maps display and track click data on your social media pages to help you understand visitor behavior. They show you the number of clicks on each post, link, image, CTA, and other content on your page.
This type of heatmap shows data on the mouse movement of each user, as well as the combined data of individual reports, to better aid you in identifying and understanding patterns in user behavior.
In general, mouse-tracking heatmaps allow you to see where users’ cursors hover the most, which section of the page the cursor keeps returning to, and other similar behaviors.
Eye-tracking heatmaps allow you to visualize the viewing patterns of users, which is just as valuable as cursor data. Data gathered from eye-tracking heatmaps include how frequently an image is looked at, which elements or areas of the image attract the most attention, and more.
Heatmaps are one of the most underrated digital marketing analysis methods, yet they significantly benefit the marketing industry. As some people may be visual learners, heatmaps provide an easier way to analyze and understand user behavior.
With a heatmap, you can single out the various elements on your social media page that people spend the most time on, or that incite the most actions. You’re also given a better insight into what users do after they land on your page.
In terms of measuring your social media campaign’s effectiveness, heatmaps can help you understand why a specific campaign is not doing very well in producing conversions.
This will help you be smarter in posting to social media and allow you to optimize your content to suit the exact needs and wants of your users, as well as focus on key elements in your page that need immediate attention.
In addition, heatmaps can help improve the overall structure of your social media page, allowing you to determine and clear out the dead zones that serve little to no benefit.
Here are some of the ways you can use heatmaps to improve your social media campaign.
A heatmap can help provide marketers and social media managers with a unique way to understand their audience’s browsing behavior. As mentioned above, a heatmap will be able to show the parts of your page that get the most attention.
With it, you can see what content users immediately go for upon landing on your page. This allows you to understand what aspects of the campaign they care about most and which ones they scroll past. It also shows you how far users scroll or click through before they decide to exit the page.
Your social media analytics provide you with relevant data about the performance of your page and individual posts. However, they don’t necessarily tell you about the specifics of user interaction—something that heatmaps can easily do.
These specifics are important, as they allow you to make the necessary changes or adjustments to improve your social media content.
For instance, if you notice that most users tend to stop scrolling at a certain section that comes before your CTA, this could indicate that you’ve placed your CTA too far down the page or that the preceding content wasn’t enough to sustain users’ interest.
You could either move the CTA higher up or plan for content that interests people.
In some cases, the content of your social media might be perfect, but the way you present it might miss the mark. If you’re not using enough SEO elements, such as white space, images, and header tags on your posts, then you won’t be able to deliver an optimal user experience.
With heatmaps, you can test out different versions of your posts or pages to see what layout works best. You can identify the elements where friction occurs, such as images or CTA buttons, and then address them accordingly for better results.
Heatmaps can help you determine friction points, content issues, and other problems that your audience may be unable to express in a survey or feedback form. When you collect data from several sources, you can create a more comprehensive picture of how users interact with your content.
If you’re looking to improve the layout or content of your social media page, use polls or surveys to ask users about their experience with it. Also, find out what they would like to see changed or added. Then, supplement this with data from a heatmap to better identify content and layout issues.
When you combine heatmap tracking and A/B testing, you can determine the effectiveness of the various images you use on your social media page. You can see how these images impact users’ interaction with your content and CTAs.
Using eye-tracking heatmaps allows you to determine the fixation length and how frequently individual users view an image. It also shows which posts have better-performing images and elements and which ones are irrelevant or tend to distract users from the CTA.
To move your potential buyers through the conversion tunnel, you must test if your content marketing strategy, UX, and usability are working properly.
For instance, if some of your visitors are reading the entire content piece and signing up for a free guide, then you are improving the sales lead, and the content is also successful.
However, it can also happen that people visit your page, but no one is getting the free guide or joining the email list. Go through the heatmap and check where they are actually clicking and whether they are clicking at all.
They might want to click but are unable to click on the right element, or it is not clear where they should click. Or something might have broken on the page. Track and record the weak spots that you identify on the pages. Then, work on those and check if the bounce rate has decreased and whether you are getting better conversions.
Your major focus should be on fixing the issues that are stopping the visitors from converting. It could be the images that look like buttons, a confusing checkout experience, or poor web copy.
The anchor texts you use to link different pages on the website provide context to what a page is about or how the search engines view it. Internal links help you establish a content hierarchy where the important pages are seen as most valuable. It helps you distribute link equity among different pages.
If you wish to grow your site with the help of content, internal linking is one of the best ways to increase your authority on certain topics. You can make piller content or try cornerstone content.
Heatmaps provide detailed information about the clicks of your visitors. This gives you a deep insight into the performance of the internal links. The information you get can help you get more traffic to these pages by optimizing the link placement.
It might seem like giving outbound links would drive the users away from your website, but it is not like it sounds. Including outbound links is good. It shows Google and users that you want to provide helpful information.
Research conducted by Stanford University tells search engines and readers a lot about the quality of your content. A heat map can tell you which outbound links get the most clicks. It tells you what your audience prefers most.
A scroll map can help you improve the outbound links. Readers may find one of the links spammy and irrelevant and drop it off. Then, you have to link to a better website for outbound linking.
Heatmaps are valuable tools for improving user experience on social media, and they also positively impact how you construct and handle your social media campaign.
So, knowing how to use heatmaps can help you in ways you never thought it would. Ensure to add it to your marketing arsenal to help you resolve some of the challenges you may face in the campaign process.
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Mashum Mollah is an entrepreneur, founder and CEO at Viacon, a digital marketing agency that drive visibility, engagement, and proven results. He blogs at BloggerOutreach.io.
