Drive and Convert

Announcer: You're listening to drive and convert a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e commerce growth engine with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan: Well, hello, Jon. Good to connect again. I am. Excited about what we're talking about today. Cause it actually came up last week between us and it happened to coincide with our schedules. This is fun. When real life mirrors podcast life, you put on here that we, you wanted to discuss heat mapping and the software out there and, and what's the best one for people that want to really dig into research and we've always at logical position, like historically, I'll say eight years ago.

We, in the SMB side of the business, we had some clients that were really into data and bogged down our team with lots of questions. And one of their solutions was, well, you'd like data, you need to go look at heat mapping. Because what we found out is once they got a heat map, they became silent. And then all they did was watch their screen and watch people on the site.

And they just were so

Jon: fascinated with it. And hopefully they would learn some stuff in the meantime. Right? So, I mean, it sounds like a win win.

Ryan: That would be the hope. I don't honestly know if these clients actually came away with anything, but they were super distracted and let us do our work. But it was out of that, we actually learned a lot of the value of heat mapping because it's like, wow, there's a lot of things you can solve by just understanding where people are getting lost.

So it's like dipping your toe into conversion rate optimization or DxO. It just comes with understanding of what are people doing on the site. Right. And so I'm excited to actually learn the actual reasons behind heat mapping, not just kind of distracting clients and getting some of that data, but it was, it was fascinating last week to hear some of your answers to our team's questions around heat mapping and understanding some of the traffic patterns and interactions on the site and how you can learn a lot from your, about your customers through it.

So yeah, now that transparently there are probably close to a hundred heat mapping. Systems out there or claim to be like Shopify alone probably has quote unquote, I'm using air quotes here free heat mapping softwares that are like, you know, I don't, I don't even want to get into it probably, but they're, they all say the same thing, but you know, why are we having to talk about the best?

Is it only because there's like over a hundred of them that say they do the same thing?

Jon: Well, look, that's, that's a great observation because there are tons out there. So, we really do need to talk about this in part because there are so many options. They're not all the same. You'll have to trust me on that, but they're not all the same.

But I can see how it looks that way based on someone who doesn't live in these tools on a daily basis. Right? And it's also partly a topic of conversation today because we get asked this question at The Good so often. Much all the time. Like you said, it came up last week. I guarantee you it came up at least last week for our team as well.

So here's the deal. A researcher is only as good as their tools, right? So if you want to make the best decisions, you need to arm yourself with the best information, analytics, data, user interviews, surveys, they're all helpful in their own ways, right? But there is a Powerful insight in observing people using your site or your app, and that's what heat maps are all about, but you need to have quality data that you can trust, and when you have that, this gives you a clear, a really comprehensive and ideally unbiased view of the visitor's experience on your site.

Ryan: All right, so, I mean, conceptually, I understand heat mapping, but I guess, is there a primary value of that other than just seeing where a cursor moves on a site?

Jon: Oh, for sure. I think that's where, if you're just looking to distract somebody, perhaps, right? Then yeah, there's value in just seeing that, right?

And living in that data, I think. is extremely valuable, you know, learning by observing that stuff is great, but there are dozens of little variables that affect how and when your visitors decide to take action, right? For instance, a visitor might read some content, explore some images, the page before finally taking that next step, these footprints, let's call them, right, can provide key insight to help you optimize the experience and drive more convergence and opportunities.

communities. Unfortunately, You can't get that type of data out of the box in things like Google Analytics. That isn't just a bad tool. What can you get

Ryan: out of GA4? Well, I mean. Okay, maybe that is a

Jon: slight ding on GA. I think GA4, step back. We've had a whole show about that. It is a challenge, right? But. Yeah.

Regardless, even when GA was amazing, it wasn't going to provide you everything that you needed. So if you have customer tracking set up, it tells a fuller picture, a fuller story. All you can do is tell what's happening. It won't actually show you what's happening through that tracking. Right? Therefore, you need some more specialty tools, right?

You gotta have the right tool for the job. You gotta see exactly what visitors are doing on your site. And those tools really come down to heat maps, scroll maps, click maps, and session recordings.

Ryan: I got it. So it's these tools don't just track a cursor. They actually, I didn't even know this, they do a lot more than these things.

They do a lot more. What else do these things do that I don't even know about?

Jon: Well, okay, so you talked tracking cursors. That's mainly session recordings, okay? So, session recordings are better known as where the user has moved their cursor. Okay, so you're going to see a composite of the user's path that the cursors are taking, and that can tell you a ton of information about how complicated your user interface is for the visitor.

For example, does the visitor move their mouse all over the page looking for that next step or do they go directly to it, right? So that's where it can be really, really helpful. But there's other things that these do high level. We'll start with heat maps, right? This is where people pay attention. So there's a really famous Nielsen eye tracking study that made pretty big waves when it proved.

Really what we all suspected anyways, but people don't read on the web. We actually scan, right? How often, if you look at an eye tracking heat map, which is another whole tool set in and of itself, you will see a very predictable F shaped pattern. We start at the far left hand side, scan to the right, and then drop down and to the left, and we repeat.

Now, when we scan to the right, often we're not reading to the end of the line. We get what the first few words said, like, I'm not interested, or get to the first few words. I get the idea of moving on. Now, again, this is in Western cultures. There's other directions in other cultures, but they all have the same underlying concern.

Okay. If you're reading right to left, you still don't read the entire way. You follow reverse F pattern. It's very similar. The result is that some spots on the page get the majority of our attention. That's just naturally what happens here. Other spots get ignored, right? And I really think what we can do is use this to learn whether design elements are effective.

And how to optimize the page. And I think that's key. It's a data point. You know, typically this data is shown in areas that receive a lot of attention as warmer colors. This is where heat comes in, right? Heat map. It's typically red, orange areas that receive little attention or cooler, like green and blue.

So that's where the term heat map comes in. Most folks know that, but it's important to call that out because almost every tool is going to show you those same type of colors, but the accuracy of that is going to, is debatable, let's just say.

Ryan: So, like, but I'm, I know that when I'm on a site, it's not accessing my camera and actually watching my eyes.

Right. So they can't, like, zap me and figure that out. So the technology is, Well, it's,

Jon: there are different types, heat maps that we're talking about today. You're correct. It does not use a camera. It uses your mouse movement. Now the key to understand out of all of this is you can get pretty darn close to eye tracking with mouse cursor tracking.

The reason we're able to do that is because whether you know it or not, your eyes are following your cursor around your screen. And so I got to go try that later today. You don't pay attention to it yourself, but yeah, you got to look where your cursor is going to click or where it's pointing. Right. So your eyes are going to naturally go there.

Now, when you're reading, Typically, unless you're, you're my mom, you're not following the cursor along with every word that you read, right? Most of us, you know, give that up when we're seven or eight years old, we start, stop reading with our finger, right? Same thing on a computer, you're not following the cursor while you're reading.

Now, as we get older, that tends to happen again, but I digress. The majority of the population on your site, that's not happening to that's where I tracking can really come in and it requires different tooling than what we're talking about today, but the output could look like a heat map. Okay. So, okay.

There's another data point that's really good out of these tools, and that's called scroll mappings. And scroll map is whether people consume your content or not. That is what you want to understand here. How do you understand that? Well, let's just say you design long, beautiful pages. But you want to know, does anybody read them?

Do they actually make the experience better for your users? Well, scroll maps can help us understand where people scroll on a page and how long they spend at each section of that page. Okay, so these maps use the same hot cold color grading as heat maps. It's probably why they're always lumped together, but it's a different view on that data and provides a different data point.

If users spend a lot of time in one area, the map is going to show it as red or orange. Okay, if they never scrolled that page at all, it's going to go home. Cold like blue. So scroll maps are really powerful tools to help you optimize your pages because like heat maps, they tell you what users care about and offer insight into improving the, those pages.

Ryan: So yeah, it gives you insight on where to put the more important information too. It's parts of the page. You don't want, if you do a thing in F shapes, don't put really important stuff on the right side. There, there's a reason there's a right, right, right. They never get there.

Jon: Exactly. You're hiding information down where people aren't going to scroll.

So maybe you need to change the order of that information so that your most important point is made right up top. Are you sure people are going to see it? There are ways to influence getting people to scroll further down the page, but this can help you to understand where they're not consuming the content.

Let's just say. Now, okay, the last tool that these provide is what's called click maps. And this is whether people are close to converting. That's really what you're looking for here. Okay. The click is one of our most valuable signals because it represents engagement with the content. Some cases, a click indicates that prized conversion, right?

Add to cart. Check out whatever that might be. But if people are clicking your call to action, it's a sign that your page is at least decently optimized. If they click elsewhere, well, it might mean that they find something else more valuable or maybe they just need more information, right? So click maps show where somebody clicks on your page and they reveal whether your users are interested in what they're looking at.

That making sense so far?

Ryan: Yeah, I guess so. Click map. You could also in the well because they can click on things that they don't do anything. And I think that's an important delineation because you could put analytics events on every link on a page and technically see where they do that. But I think I've seen you audit a site In real time, where it was like people tried to click on a mirror in a picture, like they weren't selling the mirror.

They were selling a couch. And so those clicks were important because it's like they wanted that. So I was like, you should sell mirrors instead of couches because you have a good mirror.

Jon: I mean, that, that was, I remember that talk. I think it was the talk I gave at an LPX event at Google's headquarters, right?

Announcer: You're listening to drive and convert a podcast focused on e commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon McDonald, founder of the good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers and Ryan Garrow of logical position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization.

Optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan: Yeah, in New York, that was like one of my favorite

Jon: ones too. That was a great talk and it was a great event. I remember that gentleman ended up working with us in the end, but it was, it was interesting because he went home and he emailed me. Within 12 hours, he's like, Jon, I've changed the image. Can you run that heat map again?

It was pretty funny. I was like, sure, let's have people focus on the product you're selling. It makes a lot of sense. But you would have never known that if you just relied on a heat map, click map, you know, if you, if you had not. Um, excuse me, if you had only relied on a heat map, not a click map, right? So it's the combination of these tools that's really important.

So there's also a bonus one that a lot of these tools provide, and that is onsite surveying. Now it's not a heat mapping, but some of these tools also provide onsite surveying. So that can be helpful when you pop up out of the corner of the screen and ask, you know, a couple of really pointed questions, you might get some responses to that.

If I'm saying that right of those is debatable, but it is something that we've used at the good quite a bit as well.

Ryan: And this isn't a pop up for like get 10 percent off for giving me your email pop up. This is a, did you like this image or did you find the information you needed? Like what kind of things would I need to ask in this system?

Jon: Yeah. Oh, I think that's exactly it. You're asking very pointed questions or are you missing any information? here. Yes or no. And if somebody says yes, then you can have a question. Okay. What questions do you have? That's a great way to collect that information. It's a very poor way to offer customer support.

I will caution you that the vast majority of people who are going to answer these surveys are people who are really looking for or need customer support. So that's why I say they're effective when done correctly. The majority of blank brands Ploy these don't do it effectively.

Ryan: Got it. Okay. So, you know, we don't, we are talking about the best, so I assume there is a best of all of these that come together.

Like, are they in one tool or are they like.

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. I guess kind of burying the lead here a little bit. I could have let off with this, but I mean, you know, we generally recommend Hotjar and sometimes new clients ask us to use their preferred tools, but I'll be honest, our team almost always resists and that's how confident we are in Hotjar and providing value there.

But Right now, hands down, it's the best heat mapping software on the market for professional researchers. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't free options out there that, as you said earlier, might distract. The data is not always amazing and not always accurate. And it might be a representative sample that is very, very low quantity.

So take that all for what it is. The investment, if you're going to really actually use this data to use hot jar is super minimal. So it's well worth it. If you're, if you're going to be looking at the data to get the tool, it does it. Right.

Ryan: And I will say we don't take sponsorships here. So hot jar, if you're listening, yeah, Jon got a high five because we're not being paid to do this.

So it actually is a true opinion of what the best product out there is. And that's pretty telling now, you know, they do all these things, but so do competitors. Is there something that makes them stand out more? Like as like the specifics of each one,

Jon: right? Yeah, definitely. As I was saying, there's, there's deeper reasons to use hot jar, right?

Cause there are competitors out there that are free. Here are some of the features I really like out of hot jar. First of all, it gives you separate instances for each map. So I talked about all those different types of heat maps. Right? Click maps, scroll maps, heat maps, generally following the cursor, et cetera.

But having access to all these different types of data is great, but a lot of tools pump them all into that same report. And this really just ends up painting a really muddy picture and makes accurate analysis really difficult to see. Their point of view is, well, when you overlay this data, you can gain more insights, but The reality is it muddies the data in our opinion.

If I want to overlap it, let me overlap it. Don't do it for me. So hot, hot jar will separate all these different types of maps and data, and it helps our team focus on the information we're looking for. So there's really no misunderstandings there.

Ryan: Got it. So if I have a session of scroll map from, let's say, Bob over there, I can also see, Oh, I'd rather, I'd really love to see like the heat map on in addition to that scroll map from that person and overlay them if I want to.

Jon: Well, not down necessarily to a person level, right? None of these will do personally identifiable information. Oh yeah, PII,

Ryan: can't do that.

Jon: Right. So this will do it in aggregate. Get it. Okay, so it will do all of your viewers between a certain timeframe, right? Now you also do have to have enough traffic to your site to write.

So if you only have 10 visitors coming to your site, it's probably going to withhold that data because it doesn't want you to see what only 10 people can do. It's kind of like Facebook and ads where they won't let you run an ad to a group that is too small because you're clearly targeting one or two people and you might get 10 in there.

But. They don't want you to be able to identify individuals. I get

Ryan: that. Okay, that is an important note then. So even these free tools, like if I've just started and I have three people to come to my site a day, can I get free heatmaps and some of these things?

Jon: You can install the snippet. The data most likely won't be there.

But let's be honest, if you don't have enough traffic to do, to get heatmap data, You've got bigger issues on your hands. You should probably give Ryan a call and just get traffic going.

Ryan: There's a decent amount of you living. Yeah. Heat maps are valuable, but what would be your horrible ballpark back of napkin?

If you don't have this much traffic, heat maps are worthless or, or these tools.

Jon: If you don't have 5, 000 visitors a month sessions, not just visitor sessions. So if you can get 5, 000, then. Okay, it might make sense to start looking at your heat maps, but in all honesty, you really want 000 before this data is really going to be something you're going to have the resources to even act on unless you're independently funded.

Maybe you're wealthy. I don't know, but most brands I talked to, that's not the case.

Ryan: Okay,

Jon: good to know.

Ryan: Even the free ones like. There's very little value, less than 5, 000.

Jon: Yeah, I would say that's accurate.

Ryan: Okay,

Jon: so Hotjar also does filters for session recordings. So not only can you see session recordings individually, meaning as its own data set, right?

Not individual users, just to be clear again. But session recordings can take a while to sort through, especially if you have many of them, you can watch them at speeds faster than real time, which is great, but they still take a while to watch. All right, this means we end up spending a lot of time at the good watching dozens of irrelevant recordings for each page, often without learning anything valuable.

It's a major time suck. So highly recommend filtering. What this means is Hotjar, fortunately, well, it lets us filter our recordings to reduce the number of sessions that we end up having to watch. We can quickly drill down to the sessions that have the most impact on whatever we're trying to learn. So again, if you have enough data, you have enough sessions, now we can slice that data to just get close to what we want to see, as opposed to having to watch everything.

Ryan: Okay, we want this certain page and the people that spent at least 30 seconds on this page with activity, not like they went to the page for two minutes and didn't do anything. Exactly.

Jon: Exactly. Okay, also keyboard shortcuts are available within Hotjar. So this provides quick navigation. Now, maybe you're just a nerd like me, or maybe you love keyboard navigation.

I'm the guy who's in Gmail all day using the keyboard. If I can not touch my mouse, I would love to. The idea here is when you're watching these session recordings, Hotjar really enables you to stop and play and go forward and backwards using keyboard. Now, this is just a huge time saver, letting you bounce around a quickly between recordings and find the information that you need.

However, some competitors allow for these kinds of actions, but you have to click their buttons, which takes huge attention away from the video. Because now, instead of watching the video, what happens? You have to look over, find the button and then click it and go back. Just takes forever, right? When you really get into the research and you're watching a lot of these.

Yeah, you want keyboard navigation. Let's be honest. You're you're, if you're going to be a pro, you're not using your mouse for this. It's just unfortunate, right? Have you ever seen a really good CPA use Excel? They never touch the mouse, right? It's a similar type of thing. So as far as we know, I think that

Ryan: I don't have to watch my CPA.

That would for sure

Jon: put me to sleep. See, it would be the same thing here. But I'm promising you that eventually that payoff is here. If you start watching enough of these, right? But they're the only tool that provides this. Which is shocking to me. Right. So there's a free tip for all the hotjar competitors out there.

Go put keyboard shortcuts in there and at least maybe you might have some, you know, maybe some crossover at that point. The last thing I really like about hotjar, and now you mentioned this with the mirror and the couch, right? And this was a company that sold interior furnishings and they were selling a couch that was an image on a product detail page for a sofa and they had a mirror.

It was basically just the sofa in the mirror in the background and I don't know why they put the mirror there, but for some reason they did. And people were just rage clicking on the mirror cause they're like, give me this mirror. Give me this mirror. Right? So they just kept clicking and they were getting frustrated.

Hot door allows you to identify these moments of rage, right? Where users can become so frustrated. The way they click repeatedly. thinking, well, this will make the site work. I don't ask me, I don't get it, but I've definitely been in that rage before. So it, this often really can get confused by slow page speed or broken elements or confusion around what's clickable, what's not.

Okay, so often we'll see rage clicking when a page isn't done loading, even though someone's clicking on a button, right? Where a slow page load and the button's not active yet, but it's displaying, people start clicking on it because they know what they want to do. That's a great telltale sign. There's an error there.

And I would classify page speed as being an error at that point.

Ryan: So for sure, rage clicked.

Jon: Well, that doesn't surprise me, right? These are really serious moments of frustration. I think they were a must avoid. So hot jars, click map, show you where users rage click and helps focus on that frustration point.

Ryan: Dang. Okay. So insightful. Like, I think if you have more than 5, 000 sessions a month, you, you know, likely should be paying attention to these things. Like it makes sense if you're going to take the next step in the brand and continue to grow. If you're less than 5, 000, it's focused on traffic. Don't get distracted.

There's better things to be doing with your time than really analyzing. You know, a few hundred sessions a month, it just doesn't make any sense at that point to understand, especially, I think, you know, a lot of these tools came out pre like Shopify taking off to like Shopify from a conversion standpoint.

And like, just simply like the templates, if you don't mess them up, they're going to function well enough to get you to that 5, 000. Yeah. You really don't probably have to worry about this yet. And so those, those free versions. Who cares? I mean, you've said it multiple times and I have to like, you get what you pay for.

If you want something free, guess what? You are the product or their, their products inferior at the free level. And it's just not going to make any sense.

Jon: If you don't trust me, just go sign up for a free trial of, of hot jar and give it a shot for a little bit and see what happens. Right. There's nothing to lose in doing that.

Ryan: And if you've got lots of sessions and you're trying to figure out how to use these keyboard keys to try to navigate stuff, you probably should just be talking to Jon and let him push the buttons for you. Like, like I do with my CPA. Like, I don't want to know how my CPA navigates Excel because that's just really boring to me.

So get an expert.

Jon: I need to get, you know, what makes that interesting is a little offshoot here. There's some great Instagram accounts. of people doing Excel hacks that I think will blow your mind. You

Ryan: would, I won't watch my CPA do Excel, but we have, we have real Excel nerds at our company that I constantly have to ping, like, okay, I need to figure out how to do this V lookup or I'm trying to put these two things together.

Like, Gero, how long have you been in digital marketing and you don't know how to do Excel things? Like, it's, it's surprising how much digital marketing is Excel. Like it, it's crazy. Crunching data, right? Yeah, it hasn't updated in what, 20 years, really? And it's still one of the most valuable business tools in existence.

Jon: I would agree with that. That is, is a big reason that Microsoft is where they are.

Ryan: Yeah, I love Excel. Like if they had no other product, I would be a Microsoft customer.

Jon: Well, next time one of those digital marketers on your team give you help for saying, asking them a question, say, well, that's why you're part of the team, right?

You got all this great experience that I don't have.

Ryan: You know how to do Excel and I don't. I mean, I know it's dangerous, but not that some of the levels of complexity with Excel. Our formulas is and astounds me. Yeah. But Jon, thanks for the education. We now know which company is best for heat mapping and all of the things that fall under the large broad stroke statement of heat mapping.

Jon: There are more than most people think. So thanks for interviewing me on this today. I appreciate it.

Ryan: Yeah. Thanks for the information and we'll continue to keep. Pushing people over to Hot Chart to grow their business.

Jon: Love it.

Ryan: Thanks Ryan. Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe@driveandconvert.com.