What is a heatmap?
Heatmaps are a visual method of data representation in which values are displayed graphically using color variations to depict each different value. The color indicates the size of the value.
Although heatmaps have been used for a variety of applications since their invention in the late 1800s, modern heatmaps are most commonly employed to understand what is and isn’t working well on a website page.
Heatmaps show which on-page elements users have clicked on or how far they’ve scrolled down a page. This tells marketers and website designers what users do on their page, if visitors are ignoring important site elements, or if any design flaws are preventing a prospect from converting.
While heatmaps can be created by hand, most digital versions turn to specialist heatmap tools that can be integrated into a website content management system or added via HTML to track user behavior on a site in real time.
Types of heatmaps
Not every kind of heatmap is appropriate for every situation. For use on websites and in user experience (UX) design, our main types of heatmaps are used most often.
- Click-and-tap heatmaps are the most common heatmaps in UX and web design. They record information about where site visitors click on a landing page, using color variations to show the least to most popular areas.
- Scroll maps show how far down website visitors scroll on a single page, highlighting the points at which users leave. While the heatmap can’t show why a visitor abandons a page, knowing where they exit can inform design decisions meant to encourage visitors to stay on the page longer or follow a call to action.
- Mouse tracking or hover heatmaps record data that indicates where a user’s cursor moves around on a landing page or if it stays in a particular place for any length of time.
- Eye-tracking maps are a more accurate representation of user behavior than mouse maps. Hover heatmaps are helpful, but they don’t show where a user is actually looking on their screen. In some cases, mouse and eye placement may align, but eye-tracking maps follow the user’s eyes as they look at a page. As specialist technology is needed to track this data, eye-tracking heatmaps are generally used in lab-based settings or via webcams for marketing experiments or surveys.
Basic elements of heatmaps
Most heatmaps either use a grayscale or rainbow color scheme to highlight value ranges, with a warm-to-cool spectrum demonstrating the most-to-least popular on-page elements. Rainbows are often preferred as they give more shade variation that’s easier to perceive than levels of white to black on a grayscale.
No matter what color scale is used, heatmaps show:
- The actions users take on a page. Buttons, links, or form fields that are frequently clicked are highlighted in the warmest colors on a click-or-tap heatmap – red on a rainbow scale. On a scroll map, colors typically fade from red to blue further down the page as users drop off at various points.
- The information users engage with. Areas of warmth on a heatmap demonstrate places on a landing page that are getting the most attention from visitors, whether that’s clicks, scrolls, or even eye-tracked movements. If a landing page’s important information is coming up as “cool” on a heatmap, that means users aren’t spending enough time interacting where the designer wants them to. An edit or revamp may be necessary to direct visitors to the right place.
Benefits of using heatmaps
Other tools can determine metrics about what pages users visit, but they don’t always generate much useful or accurate information about what a user is doing once they get to the page. Heatmaps are one of the best ways for marketers and website designers to:
- Better grasp how users behave on a landing page. Having access to data about what website visitors are doing on particular pages gives context for other important website metrics like conversion rate and time on page.
- Identify patterns of user behavior over time. With data being gathered in real time and over long periods, heatmaps mean that designers can see trends with visitor behavior, both desirable and undesirable.
- Decide on current and future web design. Making important choices about a page’s layout and design without user information can be a costly and time-consuming mistake. Heatmaps help businesses avoid some of these issues by providing hard data to support decisions about placement of content, buttons, links, or page length. This makes experimentation such as A/B testing likely to be successful.
- Understand high quantities of user data in an easy-to-visualize format. Large amounts of numerical data can be difficult to comprehend. The color scales used in heatmaps are more easily perceived by the brain than text, making it more straightforward to analyze and understand.
Best practices for using heatmaps
While heatmaps are beneficial in marketing and UX design, it’s easy to misinterpret data if key best practices aren’t followed from the start. They include:
- Deciding which pages are the most important to track. It can be tempting to install heatmap software on every page of a site, but this isn’t usually necessary. Instead, focus should be on the most business-critical, like key sales landing pages or prime conversion pages.
- Choosing the right type of heatmap. The kind of data and metrics that need to be assessed drive the decision about what kind of heatmap to place on a page.
- Tracking a minimum number of page visits before using the data. Heatmaps aren’t a magic tool that can conjure meaningful data in the blink of an eye. It’s vital that tracking is allowed to gather information on a large number of site visitors to ensure credible data.
- Verifying heatmap data with other sources. Data means nothing without context. Cross-referencing heatmap data with other metrics from analytics tools or user feedback makes the information gathered in the heatmap more valuable.
Track user behavior across a website and make data-driven marketing decisions with digital analytics software.
Holly Landis
Holly Landis is a freelance writer for G2. She also specializes in being a digital marketing consultant, focusing in on-page SEO, copy, and content writing. She works with SMEs and creative businesses that want to be more intentional with their digital strategies and grow organically on channels they own. As a Brit now living in the USA, you'll usually find her drinking copious amounts of tea in her cherished Anne Boleyn mug while watching endless reruns of Parks and Rec.
