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A heatmap is a visual overlay on your product that shows aggregate user behaviour - where people click, how far they scroll, where their cursor moves. The warmer the colour, the more activity. It’s one of the fastest ways to understand how users are actually interacting with a page or screen 🌡️

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Types of heatmaps

Click maps - show where users click (or tap on mobile). The most common type. Immediately reveals whether users are clicking on things that aren’t links, missing important CTAs, or clicking on elements in unexpected ways. Scroll maps - show how far down a page users scroll. Essential for long-form pages - if 80% of users never reach your pricing section, moving it up the page is a very easy win. Move maps - track cursor movement as a proxy for visual attention. Less precise than eye-tracking but much cheaper and scalable. Where the cursor lingers is often where the eye is looking. Session recordings - not strictly a heatmap but usually bundled with the same tools. Individual recordings of real user sessions. The difference between heatmaps and recordings is aggregate vs. individual - heatmaps show patterns, recordings show specific journeys 💡

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What heatmaps are good for

  • Spotting rage clicks - users repeatedly clicking on something that isn’t responding
  • Finding dead zones - important content nobody is engaging with
  • Validating layout decisions - is the primary CTA getting the attention it deserves?
  • Diagnosing funnel drop-off - if funnel analysis tells you where users are leaving, heatmaps can show you what they were doing immediately before

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The limits

Heatmaps show behaviour, not intent. A click on an unlinked element might be frustration or accidental. Low scroll depth might mean the page is too long, or it might mean users found what they needed immediately. The data needs interpretation 🙌 They’re also a snapshot in time. Heatmaps reflect the users who visited during the recording period - which may not be representative if you’ve recently changed your acquisition mix or run a campaign.

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Tools

Hotjar is the most widely used. Microsoft Clarity is free and surprisingly capable. FullStory and LogRocket are more powerful for complex products and include session replay, error tracking, and product analytics. Lesson learned: the most useful heatmap session I’ve been in took twenty minutes. We looked at the homepage click map together as a team, spotted that half the clicks were going to a secondary link nobody had thought about, and redesigned the page in a week. Sometimes the data is right there.