Mouse tracking: What it is and how to use it to understand user behaviour
Testing any product is always about dynamics. While navigating through a product, people interact with it in a million different ways by concentrating their attention on this or that part of the product, clicking on various references, buttons, pop-up windows, closing and opening different pages, following links, etc.
How insightful would it be if you knew exactly how your audience interacted with your web product? It would answer a lot of questions if you knew where exactly people who landed on your product clicked, what exactly they did during their sessions and just how far down your product they scrolled. It would directly impact the design of your product, the content on your product and very likely, impact just how much the product contributed to your company’s revenue. I discovered the possibilities available with Mouse Tracking so early thanks to my Growth Marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute.
What is Mouse Tracking?
Mouse Tracking refers to the gathering of data from your customer’s mouse movements on your product. It enables you to preview how your customers use your product, understand how they interact with elements on your product, understand how customers react when they run into an issue on your product.
There are also multiple ways to implement mouse tracking into your product.
Mouse Tracking allows you to measure user experiences. It means you will know exactly how users interact with your product. Upon measurement you’ll get valuable data, which will allow you to improve your product to make customers stay longer, research your content as well as buy your products and services.
You can trace how customers navigate on your product with their mouse pointer, where they click, whether they scroll down to the bottom of the page or look for information just at the top of the page. You can also see whether they check several pages of the product or just spend a couple of minutes on one page and leave, how long it takes them to find an action button and how long it takes users to click on it.
What are Mouse Tracking Tools
Mouse tracking tools typically track the mouse and trackpad movements as well as the clicks on the product. After Mouse Tracking is carried out, the result would be used for: –
- identifying where people click and where they don’t (click maps),
- how far down they scroll on any given page (scroll maps)
- Identifying what part of the products people look at the most
- There are also mouse hover heat maps ( sometimes called attention maps)
- Watch the user session recording
User Maps: Click maps, attention heatmaps and scroll maps
Clicks maps
What part of your product are users clicking or not clicking on?
Click maps show you how clicks are distributed — and whether the important stuff (calls to action) gets more clicks than the rest of the page. It’s also useful for identifying where people are clicking — even when there are no links or buttons.
Attention heat maps
What part of your product is grabbing your users attention?
Attention maps are interesting to look at, but I recommend that you always take the results with a grain of salt. They’re always generated by an algorithm — so this is somebody’s interpretation of what they think the user’s mouse cursor movements & clicks say about attention. It’s not based on actual eye gaze data.
Scroll maps
Do people engage with your long pages? Are the pages long enough, or too long?
It’s a fact that the longer the page, the fewer people reach the end (which doesn’t mean that longer pages are bad — it might very well be that the most interested people read the whole thing, and buy). What you want to see here is how far down most of the scroll, which critical parts are not seen by most and is there something in the design that stops people scrolling further down (e.g. a logical end in the design, such as a line or a sudden background colour change).
User session video replays
User recordings are vital for conversion optimizers — you can see actual users interact with your product. They fill in missing links for insight, help you understand how actual users use your forms, check out and the issues they face.
Allocate yourself a day (or at least half a day) to watch these videos where people proceed through the product, it’s well worth it to understand usage patterns and problems they run into. When watching the replays, you can turn on fast-forward, and look at them at 3x or 4x speed to make it faster.
If I have a specific page I’m optimizing that has a serious money leak, and I don’t have enough insights — I typically spend ~3–4 hrs watching videos for that page. It can be boring, but very insightful.
Session replays are extremely useful for observing how people fill out forms on your product. You can set up form analytics, but user session replay videos can provide an extra layer of insight.
Why should you carry out Mouse Tracking?
Tracking the mouse movements of users has the advantage that real user behaviour is analyzed. This means that the data is completely natural and provides accurate information about the user behaviour. This solution can also be implemented very cost-effectively. There is no need to pay test persons or rent a usability laboratory.
The main disadvantage is the time required. With many providers of mouse tracking services, the user can see in videos how the individual user behaves. However, this is time-consuming. Another problem is that the data must always be linked to other tracking data and/or an Eye Tracking examination to produce a truly meaningful overall picture.
How can you use Mouse Tracking?
Mouse tracking is an important tool in online marketing for product operators to optimize their conversion rates. It reveals which areas of the product users see most often, and which important elements of the product are overlooked. As a result, the product operator can find optimization potentials which can then be implemented. Mouse tracking is just as relevant for shop owners as it is for bloggers or affiliates and email marketing. Mouse tracking can also be used to find out the best design for newsletters.
Mouse Tracking For Marketing
A really common use of Mouse Tracking occurs in marketing testing. You can track your user’s mouse movements on your marketing landing pages to analyze how effective these pages are at converting users. Can users easily find the “add to cart” button? What happens if you change the size or colour of the button? Does it now get more or fewer clicks?
Mouse tracking can be used to test other elements such as forms, sliders, video players, etc. Over time, this data can be used to optimize your landing pages to significantly increase conversion rates and revenue generation.
Mouse Tracking for UI/UX Design
The same principle and design can be used in UI/UX design. When developing new web applications or products, Mouse Tracking can provide invaluable feedback on the usability and user experience of said applications.
This can be done as early as in the beta phase, to build a data-based design that can guarantee better usability from users.
Mouse Tracking For Product Testing
Product testing can also benefit from Mouse Tracking. Be it new software products that are still being developed or existing products that might need further improvements.
For example, you could use Mouse Tracking to identify new bugs or errors within your product that might go unreported by users.
Once a fix for the bug has been deployed, you can use Mouse Tracking to verify that the issue has been resolved and users are no longer running into it.
Choosing a Mouse Tracking tool
There are multiple Mouse Tracking tools in the market. Therefore, finding the best tool for your needs might require additional research into their specific features.
However, some of the recommended tools are:
Hotjar (all around winner for SMEs)
SessionCam (enterprise)
Clicktale (great, but expensive)
Inspectlet (I liked it at first, but then started to doubt the accuracy of their data)
CrazyEgg (not good value for money compared to other tools, lacks user session videos)
Tracking your customers’ mouse movements is an insightful and valuable process that can open a completely new avenue of valuable insight. However, this insight is only as powerful as you decide to make it.
The real value comes when the insight is implemented into your business assets (such as your landing pages) to maximize their performance.
Where will you use mouse tracking first?
