While traditional mobile app analytics provides key metrics and information on demographics, a mobile heatmap is an essential tool that visually displays user behavior in an app. Thus the value of heatmaps in tracking users’ app usage patterns is invaluable.
What’s the magic of a heatmap?
Heatmaps show where users click the most. This kind of information is being displayed by the intensity of the color. Usually, blue/green indicates fewer clicks since it is considered a cold color as compared to red which indicates many clicks and is considered a hot one.
In-app mobile analytics tools like Inapptics allow viewing heatmaps. You can see what exactly users are doing in your app through touch heatmaps. These are aggregated recordings of all user interactions such as swipes, taps on buttons, scrolls, and others.
A heatmap can answer a lot of questions including why your conversion rate has dropped down on a specific page or screen. You might consider this a complicated issue. However, the problem might be that, for example, users don’t understand where the “Purchase” button is and instead they click on something else and get an error message. And then, because of their negative experience with your app, they abandon it.
Users like it when you know what they want and you provide them with it. If you fail to do so, they might end up uninstalling your app and never coming back again. So, to avoid this dreadful scenario, you must stop the guesswork and start analyzing actual user behavior. First of all, through heatmaps.
At Inapptics, we helped one of our customers, PRIMO, to regain 15% of their app users. PRIMO is an e-commerce app and at some point, it was seeing a decrease in user engagement. By using Inapptics heatmaps and user session recordings, people at PRIMO could quickly identify the problem.
There was a confirmation text on one of the screens which the user had to click. However, 90% of PRIMO users were not clicking on that text since most likely they were not sure if it was a text or a clickable link. From there, a lot of app users were not proceeding. So PRIMO replaced this text with an actual button and regained around 15% of its users. Awesome, isn’t it?
The different types of heatmaps
There are different categorizations of heatmaps. The two main known types of them are Click/Touch heatmaps and Scroll heatmaps. Let’s take a look:
Click/Touch heatmap
Image source: Inapptics
These heatmaps show where exactly users are clicking on your app. This data helps you decide whether to reposition buttons, change colors, edit call to actions or not. Click or Touch heatmaps thus provide you with the answers to the following questions:
- Where your users tap the most?
- Which buttons are performing the best and which ones get ignored?
- Which of your CTAs is performing the best?
Scroll heatmap
Image source: Hotjar
These heatmaps show you what percentage of users are scrolling till which position of the screen. But the thing is that scroll heatmaps are more often used for websites rather than mobile apps. They thus help website owners edit the page content and its layout in order to boost engagement. Scroll heatmaps thus provide you with the answers to the following questions:
- Which section of your page are users most engaged with?
- How to redistribute content to make your visitors stay longer?
- Is the call to action placed in the right place so that it is seen by as many website visitors as possible?
So it turns out that a heatmap shows key behaviors in a simple and easy-to-understand format. This makes it possible to find out what works and what doesn’t. As said above, Inapptics helps you analyze how users navigate in your app. It captures every user interaction on the app visualizing it with screenshots. However, rest assured that no privacy issues might arise regarding the screenshots since Inapptics blurs all before showing.
Do you still have questions regarding how a heatmap works? Move to our website and shoot us a line via online chat. Our team will be happy to help.