Of course, you know what PR is! But why do you need it in the era of the Internet? It’s simple: the same laws that work in everyday life apply to the vast online universe. Just like you care about how people perceive you on the individual level, you need to create a positive image of your brand in the eyes of your partners and the target audience. You need to work with the opinions and beliefs of people who interact with the company, its products, and services. And you also have to respond promptly to criticism and act appropriately in times of crisis. 

What is the most versatile tool for generating leads, getting feedback from customers, and conducting market research? You must have already guessed — forms! 

As consumers, we hardly pay much attention to such seemingly insignificant things as online forms. That is, at least until we run into very annoying ones or forms that are too long or badly composed. In that case, it is hard to stay indifferent! 

Promoting your brand on social media can be a real time sink. At the end of the day, managing multiple social accounts, creating original posts, and engaging with the audience online is a lot of work. And let’s face it, social media marketing isn’t cheap too, especially if your strategy is based on paid advertising.

But do you know for sure how effective your social media efforts are? Do they bring you the desired results? And most importantly, what kind of results do you expect to achieve? Measuring your social media ROI can answer all of these questions and help you systemize and optimize your social media marketing. 

If there’s anything on social media that captivates people more than images, it is video. Just think how many times you have stumbled across another funny piece that sucked you in for at least a couple of minutes. It’s because videos are super engaging. Either entertaining or educative, they are easy to consume and can deliver tons of useful information while you just sit back and relax.

With the rise of social media and online communication in general, the need to express our emotions on the internet has grown, as much as our desire to share fun content with others. This is why GIFs have become so tremendously popular these days, especially with younger generations.
There’s no shortage of ready-to-use GIFs available on the web. The entire GIF stock libraries are there so you can just pick any piece you like, download it, and share with your friends. But what if you’ve got an idea for an awesome GIF that doesn’t exist yet? How to create a GIF from scratch? The easiest solution is to make a GIF from a YouTube video, and we’re going to teach you how to do it further in this article.

What is a GIF and what makes them so popular?

A GIF is a looped animated image. It can be viewed as a form of visual content that occupies the slot right between static images and videos, having the benefits of both. On the one hand, GIFs look like short video snippets. On the other hand, their file size is almost as small as that of images. What not to like?

There’s no shortage of ways to analyze the effectiveness of your online presence. You’ve got plenty of analytics tools capable of retrieving loads of data to help you optimize your business website and achieve higher conversion rates.

One of the widely-used methods of analyzing your on-page engagement and visitor behavior is heat mapping. What a heat map is and what kind of information it can provide you with, we will find out further in this article.

What is a heat map?

A heat map is a visual representation of how page visitors read through its content and interact with it. Its goal is to give you an idea of how much engagement different areas of your website pages generate. Thus, you can easily see which page sections draw the most of visitors’ attention and which are generally left out.

Figuratively speaking, analyzing a heat map is like looking at your website page through heat vision goggles. The “hot” areas of a page are highlighted with warmer colors like yellow and red, while the “cold” areas are green and blue.

The “temperature” is determined by how often and how long people look at or interact with specific parts of a page. The hottest areas indicate where exactly your visitors focus their attention and what actions they perform (or attempt to perform).

A heat map can be made using various tools widely available throughout the web. However, not all heat maps are alike.

Heat map types

There are multiple types of heat maps based on different signals and used for various purposes. The most common and widely used are scroll maps, click maps, and hover maps.

Scroll maps

These heat maps show how far your visitors scroll your page down before leaving. Scroll maps also allow you to see how much attention people pay to different sections of a page and how much time they spend focusing on each of them. Thus, the most engaging parts will be marked as the hottest, while those that get the least attention will be cold.

The greatest advantage of scroll maps is that they give you an insight into how long your audience is kept engaged throughout the entire page and where exactly they start to lose interest. Apparently, this heat map type is especially useful for analyzing long pages with a lot of content on them, for instance, blog pages or landing pages.

Depending on data obtained from a scroll map, you can organize your page better by putting the most important information in the hottest sections while leaving the rest of the content on the periphery. Following the same logic, you can place your converting elements (like CTAs, links or specific navigation cues) more strategically.

Furthermore, a scroll map can not only help you arrange your content more efficiently but also optimize your website design. For example, if a heat map suggests that visitors leave your page too early, perhaps there’s a strong disconnection in the design of its sections. In this case, it makes sense to unify the page design, use the colors that would make the entire user experience more seamless, etc.

Click maps

A click map allows you to see where exactly on your page visitors click and how frequently. The areas which get most of the clicks are considered the hottest. Thus, for example, you can immediately find out whether your CTAs are effective enough. If it turns out that your calls-to-action receive fewer clicks than expected, consider changing its location on the page or eliminating any distracting elements that are of less importance.

The same goes for links. A click map can show you which links on the page perform best and which are left unnoticed or generate no interest whatsoever. At the same time, you can see whether people click on the elements they think should be links but which are not (e.g., an image, unlinked logo in a header, highlighted text, etc.). In this case, you should consider placing links where visitors suppose they should be. This can facilitate your conversion rate and improve the overall user experience.

Hover maps

A hover map indicates where page visitors hover their cursor while reading through its content. The areas where a cursor hovers the longest are the hottest. Ideally, this type of heat map should represent how visitors’ attention is distributed across the page. It bases on the assumption that people point a cursor at the screen areas they are looking at.

However, this assumption doesn’t always justify itself. The research shows that 80% of people don’t actually show any correlation between eye tracking and mouse tracking. This finding questions the whole idea of using hover maps, leaving their accuracy and credibility under serious doubt.

But this doesn’t mean that hover maps are useless. While they often fail to explain how visitors scan through a page, these heat maps can give a basic insight into how people navigate a website. In this case, cursor positioning and mouse movements play the decisive role.

Key findings

To know how your specific website pages perform, you have to make your own heat maps and analyze them. This is the only way to figure out what works for your site and what needs improvement. But there are some general findings that heat maps allowed to unearth. And they can point you in the right direction when designing your website and creating content:

• The most important information should be presented “above the fold”: Heat maps show that people rarely scroll down to the very end of a page. Usually, they do no more than a few scrolls before leaving.
• People “scan” pages rather than read them entirely: Visitors don’t want to spend a lot of time on one single page. So the faster they can make it to the end, the likelier it is that they won’t abandon the page too early. To make your pages more scannable, use lists (bulleted or numbered), clear fonts and text formatting, distinct headings and subheadings, etc.
• Images hold visitors’ attention: People’s attention span is very short. Therefore, you need to find ways to keep them engaged throughout the entire page. Eye-catching images generate a lot of engagement, so using them can keep visitors focused on your content for a longer time.

Conclusion

A heat map can help you understand the behavior of your website visitors and optimize pages better in terms of content and web design. However, relying solely on heat mapping is hardly a good way of analyzing your website performance.

Visualization is a very convenient but extremely subjective method. Therefore, most heat maps are open to different interpretations. Accurate and credible data can only be obtained when combining the heat map analysis with the use of advanced analytics tools.