How To Increase App Engagement With Mobile App Heatmaps

Engagement is one of the metrics that the app stores take into account when determining your app's rankings. Therefore, you need to be sure that your users are having the best user experience possible.

One way that you can do this is to use heat map analytics to find out exactly where your users are tapping. This post will show you how to utilize mobile app heatmap analytics and give you some options for services that provide heatmaps.

How Heatmaps Work

Heatmaps show you places in your app where people are tapping the most. Darker colors signify less frequent taps, while lighter colors show areas that are being tapped more often.

Some services also allow you to see where users tap first, second, third, etc. and what gestures they make while using your app. This is great for analyzing their first impressions of your app and can go a long way to making your app more intuitive and user friendly.

Image: Screenshots from Heatmaps.

How Heatmaps Can Increase Engagement

If your app is easy to use, then people are more likely to use it. If it is not intuitive, then people may favor another similar app. For example, let's say that you have an icon that takes people back to the home screen of your app.

However, if you see that people are tapping on other places before they find the right icon, your interface is probably confusing and you need to make your navigation more obvious. If a lot of people are using gestures in certain parts of your app, then that is also a signal that you may want to implement gesture navigation.

Mobile App Heatmap Services

Here are some of companies that currently provide heatmap analytics services. Take some time to find out the benefits of each and choose the one that is the best fit for you. New services come up all the time, so also take some time to research alternatives.

AppSee

Once you integrate the AppSee SDK into your iOS or Android app, you will be able to see several types of data. You can view screen recordings, touch heatmaps and real-time analytics. Screen recording are particularly useful and can help you understand the conditions that lead up to a crash.

HeatData

HeatData gives you heatmap screenshots of each of your apps. You can also view screenshots by device and filter screenshots by specific mobile actions. There is also a date filter, which is especially useful after you have done an update.

Flight Recorder

Flight Recorder works on both iOS and Android and allows you capture all of the data listed above. Their lightweight SDK consists of the installation of just two lines of code. It also logs warnings and detailed device characteristics, which is especially helpful in crash analysis.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps allows you to visualize each user touch, track gestures and see the iPhone orientation during use. They also provide interactive graphs of navigation flows and track the daily engagement rate of your app. The website has a great demo video that shows you how their analytics work.

Hotjar

Finally, there is Hotjar. They are currently in beta and only accepting users by invitation. Their service goes beyond heatmaps and also includes user feedback features such as polls and surveys. These features can further increase engagement and user loyalty.

Conclusion

Implementing heatmap analytics can help you understand how users interact with your app and make their user experience better. This usually leads to more satisfied users and more engagement with your app.

There are a wide range of price points, so find the one that works best for you. You might be surprised at what you find out about how people use your app.