Heatmapping: What It Is, How to Use It, and Top Expert Tips

Heatmapping is a tool that illustrates how people interact on your website. It uses color gradients to show where users scroll, hover, and click. Learn how to use heatmaps to identify patterns and optimize webpages for a better user experience.

You’ve built a high-quality website, implemented on-page and technical SEO tactics, designed excellent calls to action (CTAs), and posted valuable content.

But if, after all that, you’re still not seeing your desired results? One of the ways to find out why is to use heatmapping.

Below, HawkSEM Paid Media Manager Amy Owings shares her favorite heatmap software, best use cases, and how to turn data visualization into website optimizations that drive results.

A heatmap example from Wikipedia. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

What is a heatmap?

A heatmap is a color-coded map of your website that demonstrates which elements or sections your visitors interact with and which areas they ignore.

Heatmapping data can help you better identify problem areas and fix them, improving conversion and retention.

Heatmaps save time by providing a visual snapshot of user behavior — something that could take hours to understand with raw data. (Image: Rawpixel)

How heatmaps work

Heatmaps work by tracking the movements and actions of a user on a webpage and showing that data with a color gradient overlay.

Warmer colors are a visual representation of high engagement, while cooler colors show less interaction. Different types of heatmaps represent different behaviors.

Types of heatmaps

Different types of heatmaps include:

• Click heatmaps: The most popular heatmap type, click maps show where visitors click.
• Scroll heatmaps: Scroll maps demonstrate your visitors’ scrolling behavior on each web page.
• Mouse-tracking heatmaps: These maps track general mouse movement. Erratic mouse movement may demonstrate frustration. Meanwhile, hovering could mean areas of interest.
• Dead-click heatmaps: These identify areas that look clickable (like buttons or links) but aren’t, causing user confusion or frustration.
• Device heatmaps: These maps can help you compare the activity of your visitors on different devices. For example, they could be scrolling down the entire page on desktops but stop in the middle on mobile devices.
• Attention heatmaps: Attention heatmaps predict where users will likely spend the most time on your webpage, often generated by AI with eye-tracking data.

Benefits of heatmapping

Heatmapping benefits your entire team by offering actionable data for more effective optimizations, from UX designers to social media marketers.

When combined with other strategies like customer surveys and session replays, heatmapping is an especially powerful tool for behavioral research.

Here are some ways heatmaps can benefit you:

1. Identify problem areas

While you can get valuable info about user activity with traditional analytics tools such as Google Analytics, heatmapping can help you analyze user behavior on your website and identify possible problem areas, including:

• Poorly designed or placed CTAs that users never click
• Content on your website that visitors never see
• Non-clickable elements that distract users or cause rage clicks
• False bottoms (visitors think they’ve reached the bottom of the page, but they haven’t)
• Areas that cause user friction

2. Identify what works

Besides problems, heatmapping can also help you identify which parts of your website are doing a great job attracting and converting visitors.

You can use this information to design other areas of your website, understand what visitors want to see, and improve personalization.

3. Time efficiency

Heatmaps save time by providing a visual snapshot of user behavior — something that could take hours to understand with raw aggregated data. Just one glance at a heatmap can provide valuable insight that dozens of graphs and tables can’t.

These maps are also great for demonstrating marketing efforts and achievements to someone who may have trouble reading raw data. Marketing teams could use heatmaps for reports to management.

Best use cases for heatmapping

Any business with a website can benefit from heatmapping, but here are some specific ways that heatmaps can positively impact your online efforts:

• General website optimizations
• Landing page testing
• Content marketing
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• A/B testing

“I like to use heatmaps to gauge user engagement on new websites, redesigned websites, new product pages — anything that is ‘new’ and we want to see how users interact with it versus the existing pages on the site,” says Owings.

“It’s also beneficial to use if you’re seeing unusually low conversion rates on a particular page.”

Here, heatmaps can tell you if users aren’t interacting with certain page elements or if they’re looking for information that isn’t there.

“For ecommerce businesses, it’s also great to use in your checkout process if abandoned cart rates are high,” she adds.

Best heatmap tools

Several providers offer heatmapping tools, including:

• HotJar
• Microsoft Clarity
• Crazy Egg
• Mouseflow

Most tools offer free versions so you can explore how heatmapping works before committing.

“I like to use Microsoft Clarity because it’s free to use and provides comprehensive heatmapping across devices (mobile, desktop, tablet),” says Owings.

“It also features session recordings, broken link information, and a metric called rage clicks that I will never not think is funny (when users repeatedly smash a button or point on the screen).”

How to add a heatmap to your website

Setup will vary depending on the platform you choose. After selecting your heatmapping tool:

• Create an account: Enter your website URL and follow the tool’s setup instructions.
• Install a tracking code: Copy the unique JavaScript snippet provided by the tool and paste it into your site’s <head> tag. If you use a CMS like WordPress, there’s typically a plugin to help do this easily. For platforms like Shopify or Wix, you can use their custom code settings or app integrations.
• Verify installation: Most tools will confirm if the script is working correctly and begin tracking.
• Capture your data: Choose which pages to track and what kind of heatmaps you want to generate.
• View and analyze: Log in to the tool’s dashboard for data analysis as it is collected over time.

Best practices for website heatmaps

Ready to get started with heatmaps? Here are a few best practices to follow:

1. Identify your goal

Before analyzing a heatmap, figure out which problems you need to identify. If you don’t have a clear question for the heatmap, you may get too much unnecessary information that could hinder or muddle your tactics.

2. Start small

Using heatmaps on all of your webpages isn’t necessary. Check Google Analytics to figure out which pages need your attention. Keep in mind that heatmaps may slow down your website.

3. Make sure you have enough data

Heatmaps can give you valuable insight only after a sufficient number of visitors come to your website. Analyzing minimal data points with a heatmap could lead to wrong conclusions.

How to use heatmap data for website optimizations

Heatmapping offers valuable data — but it can be a bit overwhelming to interpret. Owings offers her tips to turn heatmap data into effective website optimizations:

Identify high and low-engagement sections and rearrange accordingly

“When analyzing heatmapping reports, I typically first look for page sections that are receiving low engagement and could be moved down on the page or removed entirely,” says Owings.

“Conversely, there are often sections like FAQs or customer reviews that receive high engagement and could be moved up on the page for quicker access.”

Turn non-clickable elements into hyperlinks

Sometimes, there are page elements, like icons and pictures, that aren’t clickable — but the heatmap data shows users click. “In these cases, it’s easy to make the elements clickable and link to relevant pages,” Owings says.

List products from highest to lowest engagement

Another quick win, according to Owings? “On shop-all or category pages, use heatmaps to order products from high to low engagement.”

Use footer clicks as an indication to add more information

“If heatmaps show that users are often clicking on Contact Us, Customer Service, or Shipping Policies in the page footer, that could be a sign that they’re not finding the information they need on the page itself, and the info there should be revised,” says Owings.

Heatmapping mistakes to avoid

It’s important to understand that, while useful, heatmapping can’t be the main tactic you base your web analytics on. It’s easy to misinterpret some of the heatmaps.

For example, you could mistake rage clicks for positive attention. That’s why they should be analyzed in combination with other data.

“The only significant mistake I think you can make with heatmapping is to make decisions when the data is too small,” says Owings.

“If your heatmap report shows less than 1,000 page views over the date range you’re analyzing, that’s typically not enough user data to warrant big decisions on page structure.”

Look at a longer window of time or wait until your webpage gathers more page views.

The takeaway

From usability testing to identifying user behavior, heatmapping is a valuable website analytics solution that can help you optimize your website.

While this method can be highly useful for marketers, it shouldn’t be used in a silo. To make decisions, it’s best to leverage them in tandem with other analytics and data-gathering tools.

Need a little help along the way? The team at HawkSEM is here to help. Reach out today.

This article has been updated and was originally published in July 2022.