Heat Maps for Insurance Websites to Optimize Conversion
How do your visitors engage with your website? What path do they take on each of your pages? Are they reading your content? If one of your website’s objectives is to convert prospects into clients and sell insurance, these are important questions to answer. But don’t be concerned, you are not required to analyze metrics and put together charts and tables that need to be understood. On the contrary, heat map software is an intuitive and self-explanatory tool that you can purchase to reveal user behavior on your site. In this week’s post, we share how to use heat maps for insurance websites to optimize your conversion rate.
What are heat maps for insurance websites?
If you haven’t heard about heat map software for your website, at the very least, you are familiar with its application in weather prediction or traffic congestion. Heat maps are a method to visualize data, but until you understand what data you are visualizing, heat maps are going to look like a red, yellow, and green stain over a geographic map, roads, or your website.
When using heat maps for insurance websites, think of them as a visual method to analyze which sections are attracting your visitors? attention and which ones are going unnoticed. The result you receive from running a heat map on your website is a representation of users? engagement that will help you understand their behavior.
Heat maps will quickly show you which headlines, images, or calls to action draw visitors? attention, what elements are distracting them from your core content, and whether they are reading all your information or can locate options easily. By compiling all this data, you will be able to make informed decisions about, for example, where to place your most important content or how to use images more effectively depending on how users are interacting with them.
How does a heat map work?
Heat map software collects data from your website and displays that data over the web page itself. Data values are represented as colors to differentiate the areas of interest. Using a warm to cool color spectrum, heat maps will show what parts of your page are the most engaging. Therefore, when using heat maps for insurance websites, the hot sections of your website, represented in red, are the areas visitors are engaging the most with, and the cold sections, represented in blue, attract the least amount of attention.
Types Of Heat Maps for Insurance Websites
It is important to notice that heat maps are not data, they represent data. For this reason, when thinking about heat maps for insurance websites, consider the different types you can run depending on the information you want to collect.
Click Maps
Click maps determine the sections of your website that visitors click the most, even those that people try to click but aren’t buttons. If they are using a phone or a tablet, tapping will be tracked. The hottest section of your page is the area most frequently being clicked on. This type of heat map is useful to help you evaluate the efficacy of your calls to action or any other buttons that allow your visitors to take the desired action.
Scroll Maps
Scroll maps answer the question of how far down your visitors scroll. The result of running a scroll map is a percentage of how many visitors scrolled through each section of your page. The hotter the section, the more users have viewed it. This type of heat map helps you recognize where you are losing visitors and where to place your most important content.
Move Maps
Move maps show where visitors move their mouse on the screen while reading your site. The hotter the section, the longer visitors placed their mouse over it. Move maps are useful to evaluate where your users are directing their attention and assess if there are elements that are distracting them from the important information.
How should you use a heat map for insurance websites?
As we said before, you understand heat maps when you understand the data they represent. For this reason, before running heat maps for insurance websites, it is important to determine what are you trying to accomplish. Generally speaking, heat maps help you improve conversion and user experience. To narrow it down for you, below we have selected three elements you could apply heat map data to when optimizing your insurance agency website:
Content Marketing
Are your users reading the content you are writing? Using a scroll map will show you how far your readers are scrolling down, which will allow you to determine if they are reading all of your content. After running heat maps for insurance websites, you could answer questions such as what sections they are most interested in, where they stop scrolling, or what the most attractive content is.
A/B Testing
A/B tests are key to optimizing conversions, but combining them with heat maps results in a powerful match. Using heat maps while A/B testing will give you instant insights into what your visitors do differently on different versions of your homepage, landing pages, or blog posts. Heat maps will help you identify where your users are getting confused and reveal low-performing sections of your website, while A/B testing will help you find the solution.
Website Redesign
There are basic rules for designing a website, but audiences behavior is different depending on the site. Heat maps will help you understand users relation with your graphic elements. Running a heat map before redesigning your website can save you from mistakes like creating a modern and minimalist website that is too hard to navigate and doesn’t convert.
Example: Running Heat Maps On Your Blog
Imagine this scenario: You create a blog post about the best benefit plans to offer groups under 100 lives and, at the end of it, you insert a call to action that takes the readers to your services page. You wrote an in-depth blog post explaining each benefit and the reasons why they are appropriate for these types of companies. Let’s say it gets a decent amount of traffic and, two weeks after publishing it, you check out the heatmaps.
The scroll map shows that only 1 in 10 readers reach the end of the post. Perhaps, you start thinking that the content is too long and that you should make it shorter so readers scroll down to your call to action. But if you check the click map, all of the people who read to the end of the post, clicked the CTA. From this data, you can extract that this blog post is not an underperforming piece of content. It is true that 9 out of 10 people are bouncing, but this piece of content is generating leads, disqualifying unsuitable visitors along the way, and converting prospects that will actually hire your services.
Options to Start Using Heat Maps for Insurance Websites
The first step to start running heat maps on your website is to acquire the software. As with any other product, there are multiple options in the market. But, to narrow it down for you, below we share three heat map software companies you could start your website optimization journey with.
Hotjar
Hotjar describes itself as the way to get instant visual feedback about visitors’ behavior. Hotjar’s complete focus is on heat maps, providing a simple interface and clear data. They offer a free version and a paying subscription for $29.99 a month.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg focuses its product on three attributes: heat maps, user recordings, and A/B testing. Supplementing the results of these three features could provide richer data about your users’ behavior. Crazy Egg also offers a free version and a paying subscription for $29.99 a month.
Tableau
Tableau is a full analytics platform in which you can connect almost any data source. Heat maps are one of their many options. If you don’t have a strong analytics background, Tableau can be overwhelming when using for the first time. They offer a time-limited full-free trial after which you can start a paying subscription.
Final Thoughts About Heat Maps for Insurance Websites
Top reasons to consider using heat maps for insurance websites are that they help you move prospective customers down the funnel, increase your conversions, and sky-rocket your effectiveness. Keep in mind that quality is better than quantity. If you are generating low traffic on your website but your visitors end up accomplishing the goal you want them to, you will be improving the quality of your leads. On the contrary, if you have a lot of traffic, but users are not converting, run different types of heat maps on your website and identify where are you losing your prospects.
