Plerdy’s Heatmap vs Traditional Heatmap
Introduction
This is an excerpt of the full Plerdy review.
Plerdy’s heatmapping tool is pretty unique.
Most if not all of the heatmapping software shows the heatmap on a screenshot.
Plerdy on the other hand shows it directly on your live site.
HotJar Heatmap, Pros, and Cons
Pros of Heatmap in screenshot:
👉 Able to understand data intuitively (elements that are clicked more than others are darker in color).
👉 Shows exactly where each visitor is clicking
Cons
👉 If the page is too heavy and takes a longer time to load, the screenshot may be partially cut off.
👉 In the screenshot example below, you can see that the screenshot was taken before the page finish loading, and there’s some white spaces making the data in that area useless.
👉 Click data might be blocked by your popup.
👉 Wrong data may be shown if there are misalignment issues.
Heatmap screenshots work by first taking a screenshot and then overlaying the click data on top of it.
When an alignment issue happens, the screenshot is not properly positioned causing wrong click data to be shown.
This seldom happens with more established tools like Hotjar or Crazyegg as they have a lot of data to fine-tune the system.
Plerdy Heatmap, Pros, and Cons
Plerdy on the other hand shows the heatmap data right on your live site instead of a screenshot.
Pros of Plerdy’s heatmap on live site:
👉 No problems with misalignment issues causing wrong data to be shown.
👉 No popups to block click data from being shown.
👉 No problems that commonly occur with heatmap screenshots.
👉 Cleaner look on the site as Plerdy will group all the clicks for a particular element and display the number of clicks instead of showing the actual clicks.
👉 For example, if there are 100 clicks, it’ll show a tooltip with the number 100 instead of 100 actual clicks.
Cons
👉 The data presented is not as intuitive to understand as compared to a heatmap screenshot.
👉 Odd clicks on empty spaces may not be recorded by Plerdy.
There is a color scale and sorting feature to help you discover any correlation or outlier.
In the example below, I might want to investigate why I have 12 H1 tags on my thank you page.
And since there are 172 clicks, what are people clicking on? Can I better optimize the customer journey here to get more sign ups?
If I want to investigate further, I can click on the page URL to see the heatmap on the live site.
A sidebar will appear on the right and I can toggle and narrow down on the data I’m interested in.
Based on what I’ve selected, Plerdy will show the data on my live site.
Here are all the data that is available on the sidebar: (Unique ones are in green)
👉 Filter by direct traffic/ organic traffic/ referral traffic/ social traffic.
👉 Shows the percentage of their traffic source.
👉 Filter by desktop/ tablet /mobile.
👉 Filter by month (strangely, you can’t show data across a number of months, only 1 month at a time).
👉 Filter by UTM and Ads.
Heatmap.
👉 Clicks in %.
👉 Scroll depth – knows how many percentage of visitors reach the end of your page.
👉 Staying a mouse – Spot places where visitors are stopping to read.
👉 Text selection – Could a paragraph be confusing?
👉 Sales performance – Track elements that is responsible for a sale.
👉 Quantity of sales – Which elements results in the most or least sale?.
In comparison, data from Hotjar is much simpler. (Though they do show the most important ones).
👉 Filter by Desktop/ tablet/ mobile.
👉 Heatmap records how mouse moves (not available in Plerdy).
👉 Scroll depth.
If you are a marketer that prefers to have more data to work with, you’ll probably find Plerdy’s heatmapping tool much more useful.
So far, I’m impressed with what it can do.
They are on par or more advanced than major heatmapping tools out there.
But Plerdy doesn’t just do heatmapping, let’s see their pop up maker.
