• By Marketing Team
Marketing Team
Every now and then a piece of technology changes the way we work by helping us achieve our goals in a more efficient way. This month, we’d like to write about one such piece of software: Decibel Insight.

A little while ago we wrote about the website visitor tracking software called Lead Forensics! Similar to Lead Forensics, Decibel Insight’s software also tracks website visitors, but it serves a different purpose: It helps you make informed decisions on how to improve your website UX in order to generate more leads.

Nothing beats eye-tracking technology when it comes to performing a thorough UX test for your website.  We work with our design partners to provide eye-tracking services whenever a client requests it, and it often leads to impressive discoveries. However, eye-tracking technology clearly doesn't provide a feasible solution for testing your website UX on a continuous basis. It would be impossible to hook every visitor up to an eye tracking machine before they visit your site, and even if you could, the costs would be astronomical! For this reason, we think eye-tracking technology is much more appropriately used as a one-off service every time major design changes occur on your website.  

However, if you would like to track the UX of each new page or component area on a continuous basis, the best option available is mouse tracking, and that's where Decibel Insight comes in.

Have you ever noticed yourself moving the mouse over the areas of the screen your eyes are focussing on? You might even unconsciously highlight text whilst reading it. The fact is that the mouse usually gives a good indication of roughly where the website visitor is looking.

Decibel Insight’s software offers heat maps which illustrate common mouse movements over a set period of time. It will show heat maps for clicks, as well as the aforementioned mouse-hover heat maps. If you’re sceptical about the heat maps, you can also watch each website visitor’s exact movements back in real-time (video) just for good measure!

Essentially the software analyses every website visit and produces a screenshot with a semi-transparent colour-coded heat map overlay. Green blobs indicate some level of mouse action on that part of the page, yellow indicates even more hover activity, and the red blobs shows the most popular spots of your page. Here's a hover heat map for the 3chillies home page.

3chillies homepage heatmapLet’s bite the bullet and be critical of ourselves with the information learned from this heat map:

There is a heavy reliance on the navigation bar

If your visitors are having to head over to the navigation bar, it probably means that either you haven’t provided an adequate number of on-page links, or you’ve put them in the wrong position on the page. As marketers, we should all be trying to make our website information as accessible as possible. The more hurdles each customer has to jump, the more likely they are to bounce out of a site (the hurdle in this case is the navigation bar).

Above the fold content is unpopular

Screen real-estate is like gold dust. We need to get the most relevant information in front of the visitors’ eyes as quickly as possible, so above-the-fold content is vitally important. Clearly this carousel slider just isn’t cutting it for us. It takes up a lot of screen space and it isn’t getting much of the action, so changes are needed here.

It’s hard to measure the negative effects of poor UX until you change and record the differences you see in conversion rates, but these two findings play a part in the reason we’re working with UX experts on a new 3chillies website design.  

Isn’t this software essentially spying on your customers?

Spying is a strong word. We prefer to use the term “monitoring the user experience so that we can continue to improve our website for the benefit of our customers”, and that is true. After watching a few videos of our users’ journeys, 3chillies also found that a high number of customers were trying to click on one particular component that simply wasn’t clickable! As a result, we made the necessary changes to match our visitors expectations. Whilst this is a small example of how Decibel Insight’s software might be able to help you improve your UX, a combination of UX fixes like this should lead to a much better user experience, and therefore lead to more time being spent on your site, increased sales, and lower frustration exits.

It’s worth mentioning that as it stands, visitors in Decibel Insight’s system are currently completely anonymous, but if you’re desperate for more precise information you could always tie up the visits with the data from the Lead Forensics portal.

So there you have it. Visitor tracking software which will help you turbo-boost your user experience.

If you're interested in speaking to us about any services mentioned in this post, including Decibel Insights, eye-tracking services, or Lead Forensics, please call 01189 314196 today. 
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