Demystifying Heatmapping: A Guide to Visualizing Data With Heat Maps

A heatmap is a copy of a webpage overlaid with colors that represent how users have engaged with that page – for example, red over the buttons and links that users click on the most.

Heatmaps show you how users behave on your website, giving you in-depth information about how visitors use your website, what’s working well, and what could be improved.

Typically, the heatmap color scale shows the most popular areas of a web page with warmer hues, such as red, and the least popular areas with cooler tones, such as blue. By using color, heatmaps make it easy to visualize huge amounts of data relating to your website.

There are multiple types of heatmaps that provide insights into the following areas:

• Interaction – where a user clicks, scrolls, or moves their cursor
• Attention – which parts of a webpage are stayed on for the longest time

The visualization quickly shows you whether users are interacting with the right parts of your webpages, or whether other areas are distracting them. While a heatmap won’t show the intention behind user interactions, it can be used in conjunction with other data to drive you to make stylistic and navigational changes to your website that improve user experience and conversion rate.

So, now that you understand what heatmapping is, how do you get started?

Luckily, there are plenty of tools online that are dedicated to creating heatmaps. Before you choose a tool, you’ll need to determine which one is right for you. You need to think about the types of heatmaps you want to create, and how much budget you have to spend.

Here are my most highly recommended heatmapping tools:

Once you’ve chosen the right tool for your heatmap, you then need to:

• Decide your goals: What do you want the heatmap to track? This could be anything from how many clicks your CTAs are receiving to identifying problem areas
• Choose specific web pages or areas to test: We recommend picking a key landing page, like your homepage, product pages, and checkout pages
• Generate your heatmaps to visualize your website data: Your chosen heatmap tool will prompt you to install a tracking code on your website, which will start collecting data
• Monitor and analyze the data from your heatmap: Analyzing your website’s heatmap data properly will help you understand what placement, stylistic, and formatting changes will better your user experience and boost conversions

Is It Possible to Use a Heatmap for Free?

There are free SEO tools that include heatmaps. For example, Hotjar, Mouseflow, and Full Story all have free plans, and each of the other tools mentioned above include a free trial of at least two weeks. These are a great way to test out the different types of heatmaps and learn how to analyze and action the results you see.

That said, free plans usually restrict the number of user sessions you can track (they’re usually capped at around 500). The smaller your sample size, the more likely your data will be unrepresentative of your site visitors’ experience, which can lead to misguided decisions.

Because of this, free trials and plans are best for sites with minimal traffic, and for beginners who are getting to grips with the tools. After this, upgrading to a paid plan will unlock more comprehensive analysis tools and larger sample sizes to enhance the accuracy of your results.

Once you’ve created your heatmap, you need to know how to interpret it to use the data effectively. Each heatmap is presented differently, but in most cases:

• No color – No interaction occurs in areas without color.
• Blue – These areas don’t have much activity going on.
• Green – There is a small amount of activity in these areas.
• Yellow – There is a considerable amount of activity in this section.
• Red – These areas have the most attention.

Below, I’ve broken down what you should be looking for when it comes to different types of heatmaps.

Click Heatmaps

You can use click heatmaps to identify the areas of your webpages that users click on. Take a look and see which areas, buttons, links, and CTAs have the most engagement and which ones are being ignored by users.

If there are buttons and links that aren’t getting as many clicks as you expected them to, you should trial new formatting or design choices for them. On the flip side, if a non-clickable element is garnering unexpected attention, its design may be misleading site visitors.

Click heatmaps also provide you with an understanding of the navigational journey users are taking on your website, allowing you to see how they’re reaching certain pages. This can be useful when you’re analyzing your customer lifecycle and journey.

Cursor Tracking Heatmaps

Cursor movement heatmaps allow you to see where users are moving their cursors and what is catching their attention the most. 

From this, you can see what content is resulting in high user attention – I recommend using this information to help shape your long-term content strategy.

You can also use the data from these types of heatmaps to begin to understand how users consume and read your content. Once you understand this, you can determine whether you need to change the format of your web pages for better readability.

Attention Heatmaps

An attention heatmap shows the specific parts of a webpage which attract the most visual attention. What separates it from a click or cursor tracking heatmap is that it follows eye movement rather than on-screen actions.

This type of heatmap is a good way to test the visual appeal of your website pages, and it can help you spot whether certain images or visuals are distracting users from more important areas.

Website builder Hostinger even has an AI attention heatmap within its builder, which you can set up to see the predicted impact of your design choices as you edit.

Scroll Heatmaps

Scroll heatmaps tell you how far down a page your users are scrolling. This data allows you to pinpoint attention-grabbing content and understand whether or not users are finding your content useful.

If they aren’t making it to the end of the page, it suggests that either they have already found what they’re looking for, or your content isn’t engaging.

You can also see if there are particular areas of the page that are frequently the “endpoint” for a user’s scroll. If so, this suggests that the content in this area is causing premature exits from your site and may need to be switched up.

Mobile and Desktop Heatmaps

Your content will appear differently depending on your site visitors’ devices of choice. 63.38% of internet traffic comes from mobile, so it’s important to compare both mobile and desktop heatmaps to ensure your website is mobile friendly and that user experience is positive across all touchpoints.

Mobile devices are more restrictive due to their smaller screen size and the vertical scroll direction, which will often change the way users see and interact with your website’s pages.

When used correctly, heatmaps can offer valuable insights into your website’s performance. However, there are some common mistakes you should try to avoid:

• Interpreting all high engagement as positive: It’s impossible to know that each interaction on your web page is positive – it’s equally possible that a CTA had a lot of clicks because its anchor text was misleading. Analyzing heatmaps alongside additional data, such as session duration, will help you get a fuller understanding of the intentions behind your site visitors’ actions.
• Looking at each interaction in isolation: Again, heatmap data doesn’t represent the full story. It’s important to follow the entire user journey across multiple pages to understand why certain areas are popular or neglected. If you’re trying to analyze the effectiveness of a sign up form or a survey, heatmapping each page of the form will show you where users lose interest or get stuck.
• Making large changes based solely on heatmap data: This can be tempting with a visual portrayal of data, but you can easily make changes that are too extreme. Instead, use A/B testing to make subtle changes and find out what works best.

Heatmaps allow you to work through masses of data and easily spot any trends or issues. You can use the data and insights from a heatmap to optimize your website, ensuring you’re offering the very best user experience.

So just how can heatmaps help your website optimization?

• Heatmap insights allow you to enhance the user experience by altering your website to meet the behaviors and actions of users
• Heatmap data allows you to edit and optimize the layout and design of a web page, ensuring the right elements are in the right place to generate ultimate user engagement
• Heatmap data will highlight areas of your website where users get stuck or are frustrated, which, when fixed, reduces bounce rate
• Click heatmaps enable you to improve your CTA placement, boosting their effectiveness and increasing your conversions

More Information

Want to delve deeper into how to optimize your web pages? Take a look at our expert guides to optimizing your product pages and checkout page optimization. 

Now that you’re ready to create your own heatmaps, make sure you follow the heatmapping best practices I’ve listed below:

• Ensure your data is accurate and that you are using an appropriate sample size for your heatmap. In all honesty, a heatmap that tracks the activity of just two users won’t be very helpful.
• Consider your user demographics and audience segments. Some tools allow you to break your heatmap down via key demographics, such as location and customer type (for example, return visitors).
• For the best insights into your website’s performance, combine the data from your heatmaps with other analytics tools, such as Google Analytics.
• Remember that handling large amounts of data also comes with privacy and ethical considerations. You need to make sure your visitors are aware that you’re tracking and monitoring their behavior on your website. This can be done by adding a subtle notification to your homepage or by acknowledging it in your privacy policy.

Heatmaps are a useful tool to have in your online toolbox. When analyzed correctly, they allow you to gain in-depth insights into how users are behaving on and engaging with your website.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that heatmaps tell the story of individual clicks, movements, scrolls, and attention on isolated web pages, not the reasoning behind these behaviors – high engagement for the wrong reason is a bad thing. Before taking action on heatmap findings, you’ll need to find out whether there was a positive or negative intention by looking at contextual information on the user journey, such as how they landed on that specific page and how long they stayed it.