These days, it is pretty much essential that a business maintain a healthy website. The problem, however, is trying to keep the traffic coming and then keeping them interested in what they see so that they come back for more. But, doing so requires keeping track of your website statistics, preferably via real time analytics, and even more preferably with heat maps.
As far as web analytics are concerned, heat maps are relatively new to the scene, but they do have a lot of valuable information to offer the webmasters. What they do is pinpoint the “hot spots” on the web pages, or rather pinpoint where the site visitors tend to click. To put it simply, it is a method for seeing what works on a website and what does not.
The results of heat maps are displayed through real time analytics. When looking at the screen, it is like viewing a screen shot of your website overlaid with what you might expect a heat map to look like. It is as if you are looking at a webpage through infrared goggles—the so called hot spots light up brighter than the less popular areas of the page.
In this way, business owners and webmasters can create a website of better quality than the completion. It makes the decision process of what to keep on a website and what to remove much more targeted than an educated guess would be. Obviously, anything that visitors tend to ignore is probably not worth keeping on the site and other elements that better engage users can be added instead.
Therefore, the information gathered from a heat map can help propel a business forward. It is sure to become one of the more popular tools used in real time analytics, and will likely do so fairly quickly.