Using CrazyEgg heatmaps to improve the ecommerce customer experience for The Market Quarter

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

May 28, 2010 [849 views]

I am trying to improve my experimental shop Market Quarter (order fresh foie gras and buy other fine French foods and wine) through a series of experiments to visualise data about my competitors, my products and my customers.

My most recent experiment has been to use the CrazyEgg service to create heatmaps to show where visitors click on my site. CrazyEgg is very easy to set up and requires only a line of javascript to be added to my Shopify template file.

For $9 a month I can track visits to 10 different pages and up to 10,000 visits. I have subscribed to the slightly bigger $19 package as I am using CrazyEgg with a number of different client projects.

In this experiment I took one customer journey and looked at what visitors do on each step of the journey. I therefore set up tracking on my home page, my category landing page, my key product page plus about us, contact us and a particularly relevant content page how to choose foie gras.

I would recommend running a single test for your home page if you are unclear which pages need to be studied and then add the most visited pages after a few days. I had already run a preparatory experiment earlier in the month to reveal my well clicked links.

I then let the experiment run for just over a week to generate sufficient traffic (and sales) to allow the heatmaps to be representative of typical customer behaviour.

CrazyEgg allows the results to be presented using a number of different types of heatmap overlays. I like both confetti (looking at individual points clicked and relating back to traffic sources - example above) and heatmap (see below) that shades the activity around each area of the screen although all the reports are useful.

What do the heatmaps tell me?

1. Visitors explore the whole page even if they need to scroll. This convinces me that I don’t need to worry too much about the “above the fold” issue
2. Contact us and about us both receive quite a lot of attention. This should be expected because we are not a known “brand” and visitors are checking us out to make sure we can be trusted. There is a link lower down on the home page encouraging visitors to find out more about the Market Quarter - this was also clicked by more people than I expected. I need to improve the about us pages.
3. Foie gras does get the most attention in the navigation although I was surprised by how many people clicked the All button. I need to think about whether they are ways of improving my navigation.
4. The main promotion is hardly being clicked on at all and must be considered wasted space. I need to rethink this promotion again perhaps with stronger calls to action.
5. Visitors to the about us page tend to click on the contact us page - I need to remove the need for this journey by combining them into one page I think.
6. The foie gras (category) landing page seems to be working quite well with a wide spread of attention. I wonder however whether I am just giving people too much choice and this seems to be confirmed by the relatively high attention here to “How to choose foie gras”.
7. This “how to choose” page is very interesting as all of the recommended products are explored. I need to try to make this page work more stongly by embedding stronger suggestions into the text.

As I hope can be seen, even a simple CrazyEgg test produces a dazzling array of insights which need some careful intrepretation and will encourage me to perform some A/B testing.

A few tips for doing your own heatmap testing

1. Set up on key pages and then extend to other pages to answer specific questions
2. Look at what is not working (being clicked on), as well as what is
3. Think like a visitor in trying to work out why they have done what is being illustrated
4. Make some changes and then repeat the tracking to see if your hunches are correct

What is this project about?

Read the introduction to this series Site Benchmarking, testing and improvement for the MarketQuarter

I would love to hear from others who have performed similar analysis on their own shops or from anyone with questions. Add your comments below or follow @JonathanBriggs on Twitter

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