Why Most Brisbane Business Owners Are Flying Blind
You’ve spent thousands on a website. You might even be spending a few hundred or a few thousand dollars every month on Google or Facebook ads to get people to look at it.
But here is the frustrating reality: Most people who visit your site leave without calling you, emailing you, or buying a thing.
If you’re like most of the business owners I talk to in Brisbane—from landscapers in Samford to law firms in the CBD—you probably look at your basic numbers once a month. You see how many people visited the site, and you see how many enquiries you got. If the enquiries are low, you assume the website is 'broken' or the ads are 'rubbish'.
But you don't actually know why they didn't call.
Did they get stuck on a form? Did they try to click a picture that wasn't a link? Did they scroll right past your phone number because the font was too small on their mobile?
Standard data tells you what happened (100 people visited, 2 called). 'Behavioural data'—which is just a fancy way of saying 'watching what people actually do'—tells you why it happened.
In this guide, I’m going to compare the two best ways to look over your customers' shoulders: Heatmaps and Session Recordings. I’ll show you which one makes you money faster, which one is a waste of your time, and how to use both to stop losing customers.
The Two Ways to See What’s Happening
When we want to understand why a website isn't making money, we use two primary tools. Think of it like owning a physical shop in Chermside.
1. Heatmaps: This is like looking at your floor tiles at the end of the week to see where the carpet is most worn down. It shows you the 'hot spots' where everyone walks and where nobody goes. 2. Session Recordings: This is like sitting in the back room and watching your CCTV footage. You see exactly how one specific person walked through the aisles, what they picked up, what they put back, and exactly when they walked out the door without buying.
Approach 1: Heatmaps (The 'Bird's Eye View')
A heatmap takes all the clicks and scrolls from hundreds of visitors and overlays them on your website using colours. Red means lots of activity; blue means it’s a ghost town.
What this tells you for your business: Are they seeing your 'Call Now' button? If your main button is blue and a random photo of your truck is bright red, people are clicking the wrong thing. How far are they scrolling? If you put your best testimonials or your pricing at the bottom of the page, but the heatmap shows 80% of people stop scrolling halfway down, you are losing sales because of bad placement. Mobile vs. Desktop: Often, a site looks great on a computer but is a mess on a phone. Heatmaps show you if people on iPhones are struggling to click your menu.
The Reality Check: Heatmaps are great for quick wins. Recently, we worked with a plumber in Morningside. He had a 'Get a Quote' button at the very bottom of his homepage. The heatmap showed that only 15% of visitors ever saw that button. We moved it to the top, and his phone started ringing 30% more within a week. No extra ad spend, just moving a button.
Approach 2: Session Recordings (The 'Deep Dive')
This is where it gets interesting—and a bit addictive. You can actually play back a video of a user’s visit. You see their mouse move, you see them struggle to fill out a field on your contact form, and you see the exact moment they get frustrated and 'rage click' (clicking the same spot over and over because it’s not working).
What this tells you for your business: Form Friction: You might have 10 fields on your contact form. Watching a recording might show you that everyone stops when you ask for their home address. Deleting that one box could double your leads. Confusion: You might see a customer hovering their mouse over a technical term they don't understand. Broken Links: You’ll see if a button simply doesn't work on certain phones, causing people to leave.
The Reality Check: Watching recordings takes time. If you have 500 visitors a week, you cannot watch 500 videos. It’s a waste of your life. This approach is best used when you know you have a problem (like people adding items to a cart but not paying) and you need to stop losing customers by finding the specific 'glitch' in their journey.
Head-to-Head: Which Should You Use First?
If you are a busy business owner, you don't have time to play data scientist. You need to know where to put your energy to get the biggest return on your time.
| Feature | Heatmaps | Session Recordings |
|---|---|---|
| Time Required | 5 minutes to spot a trend | Hours to watch videos |
| Best For | Big picture layout changes | Fixing specific 'broken' steps |
| Speed of Results | Fast - move a button, see a change | Slower - requires careful analysis |
| Cost | Low (many free versions) | Low, but high 'time cost' |
| Clarity | Very clear 'Yes/No' data | Can be confusing/subjective |
Once you’ve fixed the obvious stuff, then you move to recordings to track the path your customers take before they finally decide to call you. This helps you understand the 'why' behind the 'what'.
The Three Biggest Mistakes Brisbane Businesses Make
I’ve looked at the backend of hundreds of local business websites. Most people are making at least one of these three mistakes that are actively costing them money.
1. The 'Invisible' Phone Number
Many local service businesses (tradies, doctors, accountants) hide their phone number in the 'Contact' page. When we look at heatmaps for these businesses, we see people clicking all over the top right corner of the screen—because that’s where they expect the phone number to be. If it’s not there, they go back to Google and click your competitor.The Fix: Put your phone number in big text at the top of every page. Make sure it's a 'click-to-call' link so people on mobile can just tap it.
2. Information Overload
We worked with a boutique gym in Newstead that had a massive wall of text on their 'Memberships' page. The heatmap showed that people would land on the page, scroll down 20%, see the wall of text, and immediately bounce back to the previous page. They didn't read a word of it.The Fix: We replaced the text with three simple price boxes. Enquiries went up overnight because people could actually find the information they wanted.
3. Ignoring the 'Rage Click'
This is a specific insight from session recordings. A 'rage click' is when a user clicks a button 5 or 10 times in a row very quickly. It usually means your site is slow or a button is broken. If you see this in a recording, you are literally watching money disappear.How Much Does This Cost?
You might be thinking this sounds like expensive 'big company' technology. It isn't.
Tools like Microsoft Clarity are completely free. Others like Hotjar have very generous free versions that are more than enough for a local Brisbane business.
Setup Cost: Usually $0 if you do it yourself, or a couple of hundred dollars if you have an agency set it up and report on it for you. Time Commitment: You should spend about 30 minutes once a month looking at these reports.
- Expected Return: If you find one broken button or move one phone number, it can pay for itself 100x over in extra sales.
What Should You Do First?
Don't get bogged down in the technical side. Here is your 3-step plan to get more customers using this data:
1. Install a tool: Get Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar on your site today. It takes 5 minutes. If you can't do it, ask your web person. It's a tiny job. 2. Wait for 100 visitors: You need enough data to see a pattern. Don't look at it after 2 people have visited. 3. Look for the 'Dead Zones': Open your heatmap. Look for the areas where you want people to click (like your 'Book Now' button). Is it red? If it's blue or green, you have a problem. Change the colour of the button, make it bigger, or move it higher up the page.
Most of what you read online about 'optimising' websites is rubbish. It's usually people trying to sell you a $10,000 redesign. Most of the time, you don't need a new website; you just need to fix the one you have by watching how people use it.
By looking at future data and seeing how people behave today, you can make changes that ensure you aren't wasting your hard-earned cash on ads that send people to a broken experience.
Summary: Will This Make You Money?
Yes. Absolutely.
In the Brisbane market, competition is getting tougher. Whether you’re a roofer in Ipswich or a dentist in Ascot, your customers are impatient. They want to find your number, see your price, or book a quote in under 30 seconds.
Heatmaps and recordings are the only way to see if your website is helping them do that or getting in their way. Stop guessing. Start watching.
If you want to grow your business without just 'throwing more money at Facebook', this is the most analytical and effective way to do it. You’ll see exactly where your sales are coming from and, more importantly, where they are being lost.
Want someone to do the heavy lifting for you? At Local Marketing Group, we don't just give you pretty pictures. We look at your heatmaps and recordings to find exactly why your visitors aren't turning into paying customers. We fix the leaks so your marketing actually works.
Ready to get more leads from your website? Contact Local Marketing Group today.