With all of the focus on digital analytics platforms—Google’s impending end-of-life for Universal Analytics, privacy regulations, forced cookie expiration, and the like—it’s easy to forget that there is a world of data beyond platforms that do (or don’t…but then do again) report bounce rates and conversions. For our May event, Lindsay Peck, Conversion Optimization Director at Adept, explored two such types of data: heatmaps and session recordings.

Lindsay started by making the point that any self-respecting analyst, CRO, or marketer takes a fairly broad view of their data ecosystem and recognizes that different tools are useful for different types of data work:

She then elaborated on where these two specific types of tools fit in such an ecosystem: what they are, what they’re good for, and what their limitations are.

For heatmaps, well…we know what heatmaps are, right? In a digital context, they’re most often used to visualize where users are clicking (or tapping), how far down pages/screens they are scrolling, and, when working in a mouse world (desktops/laptops), where they’re actually moving the cursor before they click.

While heatmaps visually aggregate all of the users’ activities on a web page, session recordings capture individual users’ experiences on the site in a video format. Typically, these recordings are only captured for a (~random) sample of visitors to the site, and the analysis can be more time consuming. Lindsay recommended setting aside 2-4 hours for an initial review of session recordings—it’s got a lot of brain work involved to actually observe and process what is happening and “see” patterns across multiple recordings, so she recommended not trying to just fit the work into a series of 15-30 minute slots. It’s too deep work-y type work to do that!

There are lots of vendors that provide these engagement analysis features, with Microsoft Clarity being the option that is the most free and unlimited (although it’s functionality has some limitations) and hotjar being the most popular free/low cost (but you may need to be selective about which pages you capture data on). They are all typically pretty easy to implement—they can be deployed through a tag manager—but need to be considered through a privacy lens just like a digital analytics tool would be.

Some common uses for these engagement analysis tools are:

• Visualizing the most popular (hot) and unpopular (cold) elements of a web page
• Understanding what content users are seeing and engaging with (and sometimes, more importantly, what they’re not seeing or engaging with)
• Seeing where users are experiencing friction, hesitation, or possible frustration
• Understanding how users are scrolling and moving their mouse, and if they are interacting with your page’s main links, buttons, CTAs, etc.
• Supplying data and insights to inform a hypothesis around critical business and marketing questions like, why aren’t users converting, or why isn’t the CTA getting clicks?
• Uncovering and prioritizing bugs or display issues across devices.
• Putting yourself in your visitor’s shoes.

There was a lot of discussion throughout her presentation, which was fun! But, she also provided the slides if you weren’t able to attend and are content with reviewing those as the loosest approximation of having actually been there. If you’d been there, the gallery below shows some pictures of what you would’ve seen!