Heatmap

What the colors are showing

A heatmap is not a picture of one visit. It is many visits stacked on top of each other, with warmer color where more people did the same thing in the same place.

Three kinds turn up most often. A click map shows where people tapped, including the spots that are not links, which is how you learn that visitors keep tapping a photo expecting it to open. A scroll map shows how far down the page people got before they left. An attention map estimates where people lingered, based on cursor movement or scroll pauses rather than on eyes, which is worth remembering before anyone calls it an eye-tracking study.

Here is the everyday version. A tree service has one long service page, and the phone number sits at the bottom under the photo gallery. The scroll map shows most phone visitors stopping somewhere around the third photo. Nobody is refusing to call. They are never reaching the part of the page where calling is possible.

Why a small local site should read them carefully

Heatmaps carry two limits that rarely make it into the sales pitch.

The first is volume. The picture is only as trustworthy as the number of visits behind it, and on a page getting a handful of visits a day one curious visitor moves the colors. Read a busy page over a stretch of weeks rather than a quiet page over a weekend, and treat what you see as a question to check instead of an answer to act on.

The second is that a heatmap shows what, never why. People stopped scrolling at the third photo. Whether that is because the page runs too long, because the photos load slowly on a phone, or because the section above already answered their question is not in the image. That part is a judgment call, and it is where the actual work sits: take the map as a question, then go looking for the answer somewhere else. In the analytics for that page. In what people say when they do call. In what the page looks like on a three-year-old phone held in one hand. Reading the picture and then checking it against something harder is how our analytics and conversion work uses these, and it is deliberately unglamorous.

One more thing to settle before anything gets installed. Tools that record what visitors do on a page can capture what visitors type, which on a contact form means a name and a phone number. Masking belongs on from the first recording, not after somebody notices.

Where it fits with the neighboring terms

Conversion rate is the number a heatmap is meant to help move. Above the fold is the old print idea it keeps testing, meaning whatever is visible before anyone scrolls. Call to action is usually what you are checking for, since a page with one obvious next step reads very differently on a click map than a page with five buttons competing for the same tap.

User experience is the wider subject. A heatmap is one instrument inside it, good at producing a hypothesis and poor at settling an argument.