One of Google’s most useful products is its location service, Google Maps. Let alone billions of people worldwide using it to get from point A to point B, the operation of businesses like Uber and Lyft completely rely upon Google’s location service. 

Google Maps tracks and stores data on literally every step you take, if the location services or GPS is enabled on the device. This location history data can then be used to visualize the number of location points and pins you visit over a period of time. The heatmap thus generated is referred to as a Google Maps Heatmap. 

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Create your own Google Maps heatmap in 3 simple steps

It is fairly simple to overlay your own Google Maps heatmap as there are many APIs and tools available on the internet that you can use to generate this type of heatmap.

These tools use the location history saved on Google’s cloud from your Google account and help create a heatmap of literally every place and location visited by a user. 

Here is how to create a Google Maps heatmap of your location history data using a tool called Location History Visualizer:

Step 1: Select data to be included

Head to Google Takeout to download your location history data. The Google Takeout page has a list of data that you can choose to export. On the page, deselect all then scroll down and select ‘Location History.’

After selecting ‘Location History,’ scroll to the bottom of the page and click next. After clicking next, you will be taken to the second step.

Step 2: Download data

In the second step, Google Takeout allows you to configure the delivery method, file type & size, and frequency.

After configuring the delivery method, file type & size, and frequency, click on ‘Create Export.’ Google Takeout will then process your Google Maps data and create an export. The time taken to create the export depends on the amount of data involved – it usually takes seconds but can take longer if exporting more data. Google Takeout sends an email to the corresponding Google account as soon as the export creation is completed.

Once the export is created, click on the download button. A zipped file will be downloaded to your device.

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Step 3: Leverage location history visualizer, and voilà!

There are many free heatmap generators online, one of which is Location History Visualizer. Unzip the downloaded zipped file and open the folder named ‘Location History.’ Drag and drop the JSON file in the folder onto Location History Visualizer’s free-to-use heatmap generator. 

Location History Visualizer will take time to create your Google Maps heatmap based on the intensity of data points it has to plot – the higher the intensity, the longer it takes. And without any technical to-and-fro, a heatmap of your entire location history will be on your screen, with all the data points on a map. The heatmap generated looks something like the heatmap below:

Heatmaps: powerful, not just interesting

Heatmaps are a powerful way to visualize data that would otherwise be difficult to interpret or gain insight from. They can be interesting on a personal level as the above Location History example shows and can also be used in a business context to learn from your customers and website traffic. VWO Heatmaps can help your business drive more sales by understanding how website visitors are behaving on your website and optimizing to increase conversion rates.

Watch the video to learn more about heatmaps and heatmap reports:

FAQs on Google Maps Heatmap

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If the bounce on your eCommerce site is above this number, you should go through these 14 best practices to increase engagement by A/B testing most of the elements on the website as discussed below.

1) Pay Attention to the Size of the Search Bar

One reason for the high eCommerce bounce rate is that visitors are not able to find what they are looking for. To combat this problem, you have to make your search bar as prominent as possible. As per UX Planet, an ideal search box should be 27-character wide. However, search bars on average are only 18-character-wide. Though you can type long queries in short boxes, the problem is that only a portion of the query will be visible at a time. This makes editing or reviewing the query difficult.

If you can’t devote so much prime real estate to your search bar, you can try making it dynamic like AllRecipes.com. The search box automatically becomes bigger as one starts typing in the box. Another way to optimize your search bar is to make it persistent (or ‘sticky’) like Shopstyle UK. Fix it at the top of the page so that visitors who scroll down the page never lose sight of it.

2) Have a Strong Site-Search Solution

Having an ideal-length search box will not be enough if it doesn’t show up the right results. If you’ve never really considered how site search might be affecting your site experience, then now is the time to do it.

3) Speed is King

A website that loads at a lethargic pace is what one calls a bounce paradise. For every extra second, your web pages take to load, your conversions can drop.

Decibel Insight’s research on page load time and bounce rate says that slow loaders have a 72% higher bounce rate than fast loaders, and a 38% higher bounce rate than medium loaders. A fast-loading site also scores high on search rankings. Site speed is critical and you should take all possible steps to make yours faster. Here’s a link to Google’s best practices to reduce loading time.

4) Split Test the Timing of Your Modal Box

Imagine you have just entered an apparel store. You are walking at your own unhurried pace when suddenly a burly man runs into you with a feedback form. He asks you what you like in the store, what would make you come back, whether would you recommend the store to a friend, or if would you like to receive their yearly membership card. How would you react? If you possess infinite patience, you might just politely ask him to give you some breathing space — but not before mentally pledging not to enter the store again!

Now think of online shopping and modal boxes. Those theatrical pop-ups are a lot like that burly salesman. However, I won’t completely disregard modal boxes. They can be extremely useful in increasing conversions. The key lies in figuring out how long you should wait before making them pop open. If they pop up too early, you risk strangling the visitor. The time it for a little too late, and the visitor is already off to another tab. Solution? A/B test the popup timing.

5) Display the Top Deals/Discounts/Limited Time Offers

Play the urgency card to get the visitors hooked. Scarcity has been identified as one of the six persuasion principles by Robert Cialdini in his epic book on influence. One way to engage visitors on the homepage is by displaying your best deals and discounts in the banner. See how eBags prominently displays its limited-time offer in the top banner.

Limited-time discounts catch eyeballs and you will be doing yourself a great injustice if you don’t utilize them to hook the visitors.

6) Eliminate Distractions

Too many choices often confuse people and impair action. Let there be no bombardment of information on your homepage. Simplify your design and work towards reducing distractions. Inside Buzz, a VWO customer used A/B testing to create a homepage with reduced options. The simplified version increased site engagement by 17.8%.

7) Offer a Live Chat Help

While enhanced product findability and an exhaustive help section will resolve a lot of customer queries, having a 24-hour live chat feature is an even bigger boost. Visitors might get stuck at places you didn’t take into account or they might have questions you never thought existed.

Installing a live chat widget can go a long way in taking care of bounce. A well-trained customer executive not only resolves the query of the prospect but engages them till they get convinced about making the purchase. There are a few smart chat widgets that intuitively pop open when they figure out that a customer might be lost — depending on how they are behaving on a page. The next 3 best practices are specifically for product pages:

8) Let the CTA Stand Out

If the visitors are landing directly on your product pages, it’s important that they easily identify a call to action (CTA) button to get to the next stage of the funnel. Without a prominent CTA, the visitor will feel stranded and may want to leave. RIPT Apparel, a VWO customer, saw a 6.3% increase in sales after it made its CTA stand out against the backdrop.

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9) Give them the option to Engage Further

It might be the case that the prospect is not yet ready to make a purchase and needs more convincing. In that case, having just a prominent CTA on the product page won’t cut. You have to feed them with extra information by providing links to product manuals, guides, and customer reviews. But make sure there’s a ‘Buy Now’ CTA on all these new links you are making open. The idea is to keep the visitor on the site long enough to make the sale.

10) Turn off Auto-Play

So you have got product videos made and uploaded them on all the product pages to grab a pie of the rich online video market? Great. After all, videos have proven to increase conversions for Zappos and many other companies. But beware my friend. In your jest to increase conversions, don’t annoy the prospects by thrusting a video on their face. Don’t auto-play the videos. Please. Just count how many tabs are open in your browser right now. I bet it’s more than 10. (And if it’s any less, I feel you live a truly blessed life). So coming back to auto-play, it can often be annoying when a robotic voice starts reading a script from a tab you can’t identify (actually now you can — Thanks Google).  But seriously, auto-play is one of the easiest ways to make someone run away.

The next 4 best practices are design related:

11) Navigation should be a Cakewalk

Good navigation requires intuitively finding out how a visitor will search for a particular product. Create a sitemap and provide its link in bold on the homepage. Design a clear navigation menu and place it where visitors automatically look for them — horizontally on top or vertically on left. One position might work better for you than the other. So you should test the placement. The left menu worked better for one of our eCommerce clients when they ran a split test. You could also think about testing bottom navigation for mobile devices.

12) Make Sure the Ads are Not Intrusive

If you have ads running on your website, try and place them in the least intrusive position. Nothing makes visitors want to run away from your website more than when an ad pops over a piece they are trying to read or some product they are checking out. Make sure you are NOT placing the ads where visitors automatically look for information – menu bar, search box or content area. Here’s an excellent post on poorly placed internal ads.

13) Good Design Instills Credibility

The design here is not exactly pleasing to the eyes

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover might be the popular adage. But when it comes to websites, visitors do judge them by their design. Design plays a big role in influencing people’s perception of a website’s credibility. A good design automatically makes sure you are taken seriously while a bad design breeds distrust. Try to invest in a neat and uncluttered design. Consistency in terms of fonts, colors, and layout is extremely important.

14) Invest in a Responsive Design

Your visitors will be accessing your site either from a laptop, tablet, or smartphone or sometimes use all three devices at different stages of the funnel. Responsive web design provides an optimal viewing experience across different browsers and devices. It ensures the layout is resized so that the text and images don’t break.

Go to Google Analytics and check how much of your traffic comes from tablets and mobile. You should invest in a responsive design even if it’s a nominal percentage compared to your total visitors. Why you ask? Because mobile is the way to go. eCommerce sales from mobiles have been growing at 15% year on year.

The Bounce Arsenal

I would like to create a little list of weapons to combat bounce. Help me with a few suggestions. Tell me what has worked for you in your fight against bounce or what you think might work. I will be glad and all that. Note: We originally had the screenshot of LingsCars.com as an example of a bad design under Point Number 13. Though we still feel there’s scope for improvement on that front, we took the image down since they are widely successful and the design is probably working for them. 

It is a number that tells what percentage of visitors leave your site after browsing just one page or within the first 10 seconds (the exact definition depends on the web analytics tool you use). The higher the bounce rate, the higher the number of potential customers you lose because bounced visitors think your website has nothing to offer them and leave without any further interaction. With ever-reducing attention spans and ever-expanding options online, your visitors have very little motivation to actively explore your website for what you offer and how it benefits their day-to-day lives. So, it becomes the responsibility of the first page a visitor lands on to convince him that spending time here is worth it.

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Optimizing (reducing) bounce rate is thus tremendously important to your business. There are multiple reasons why visitors leave immediately after arriving; the most prominent amongst them being:

1. Expectation mismatch: Your visitors are expecting to see something on your website while your page talks about something else. This happens often, especially when you have paid advertising for a specific offer and you link that advertisement to a generic page such as your homepage. Matching the expectation of your visitor is very important. Your site might be talking about multiple different things, but a visitor arrives on it to learn more about what the source said you offer.
2. Organic search irrelevance: Search engines are getting incrementally better at finding relevant content for a user search query, but they are still not perfect. I’m sure while reviewing your web analytics reports, you must be regularly surprised by: ‘how come this search query found this page on my website? Your visitors too feel the same. Try comparing your bounce rate for organic visitors (those who came via search engines) versus non-organic visitors (those who came via other sources); you would see that the former metric is higher than the latter.
3. Your website sucks: Your visitors expect a visually appealing, easy-on-the-eyes website upon arrival. They are already sick of advertisement-loaded, poorly made websites all over the Internet and if yours is no better, they won’t be very happy about it. Give your visitors a pleasant surprise by having a website with the right contrast, the right typography, the right layout, and the right color scheme. Hire a top-notch designer and pay them whatever you can but please make sure your website looks good.
4. Lack of call to action: Well-designed and drafted Call-To-Action (CTA) banners can make a huge difference in conversion rate. Missing or badly designed CTAs perhaps be the single biggest reason why visitors bounce from your website. Once visitors have gone through the page they landed on, don’t let them struggle with what they should be doing next. Guide them to the actions that you think are optimal for that page. If it is a blog, you want them to subscribe to blog updates. You may want them to go through relevant case studies and whitepapers if it is a corporate site. In a nutshell, don’t let them think too hard about what their expected next action is on this website. Guide them gently using calls to action placed prominently at the right places on the website. Mostly, these right places are the ones where a visitor has just completed their original purpose (for which they landed on the site) and is wondering what to do next.
5. Too many options: Having too many options for a visitor can also lead to a higher bounce rate. This is partly the reason why you will observe that the bounce rate on your homepage is probably higher than on your inner website pages. Having too many links/calls to action competing for visitor attention can increase anxiety and lead to visitors leaving the website in search of a better alternative. This is where experienced conversion optimization firms (such as Wingify ) and good web designers help you in creating a proper layout with different calls to action appealing to different kinds of visitors, hence reducing bounce rate.

How to fix the high bounce rate?

Reducing the high bounce rate significantly is possible. As different websites serve different goals and cater to different audiences, there is no sure-shot way of fixing the bounce rate. For instance, LA Tourism successfully reduced its bounce rate by 43%. 

Though there are several general methodologies you can try for reducing the bounce rate:

• Segment bounce rate by landing/entry page: your website’s overall bounce rate conveys absolutely no actionable information; it is vague and imprecise. The best way to get a true picture of your website’s bounce rate is to see the bounce rate for each landing/entry page. Using your web analytics tool, see which are the top 20 landing pages on your website and what their bounce rates are. You will be surprised to know that there is a dramatic difference in bounce rate across different landing pages. Your top priority should be to fix or optimize pages/categories which are most trafficked and have the highest bounce rates.
• Surveys: there are many tools on the web which allow you to survey visitors who are about to bounce, just before they leave the website. Though I particularly don’t like such methodologies because they frustrate an already unsatisfied visitor, you may find them useful for your website and audience type.
• Visitor moves and heatmaps: products such as VWO Insights help you to record mouse movements, clicks, scroll activity, and keypresses of your visitors to find out what exactly they do once they arrive on your landing pages. It can be a great way to find out that, for example, most of your visitors don’t notice your ‘SIGNUP NOW’ button in the sidebar (And you thought people aren’t interested in the offering). Similarly, you can see heatmaps to find out where exactly on the page visitors are clicking/engaging and if it is optimal.
• Testing: The only way to find out what works is to test it. You should set up a split test to try multiple different website designs, layouts, styling, calls to action, etc. Hire a testing agency, if you wish, but make sure you are doing testing on your website continuously to always reduce the bounce rate.

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What are your strategies for reducing bounce rates? Do you think you are doing a good job on your website (as far as optimizing bounce rate is concerned)? Are you satisfied with your existing bounce rate? 

The answers to these questions can only be found through systematic and continuous testing on your website. Once you have the test results in your hand, make sure you focus your website optimization efforts first on the bounce rate and then on other metrics.