A click heatmap is a colored overlay on your page that shows where visitors clicked. Hot colors mean lots of clicks; cool colors mean almost none. It's the fastest way to see what users are paying attention to — and what they're ignoring.
How to read one
Open Heatmaps in the dashboard, pick a page, and the overlay loads. Three things to look for:
- Where the heat is — these are the most-clicked elements. Are they actually clickable? If users are clicking your hero image, maybe they expect it to be a link.
- Where the heat isn't — your CTA should be hot. If it's cool, something's wrong: it's not visible enough, the copy isn't compelling, or visitors don't trust it.
- Surprises — clicks on non-clickable elements (a label, a logo, a static icon) signal user expectations your design isn't meeting. These are the cheapest A/B test ideas you can find.
Filtering
Use the device filter to see desktop vs mobile separately. Mobile click patterns are usually very different from desktop — a CTA that's hot on desktop can be invisible on mobile because it falls below the fold.
You can also filter by date range. Compare last week's heatmap to this week's to see if a recent change moved attention.
What to do with what you find
Heatmaps tell you where users click, not why. If something is surprisingly hot or cold, follow up with a session recording to see the full context — what was the user trying to do, did they hesitate, what came next?
Limitations
- Heatmaps need traffic. With fewer than ~500 page views, the colors are too noisy to be meaningful.
- Click heatmaps don't show hover behavior. For desktop hover patterns you need a mouse-move heatmap (we don't currently capture mousemove — too noisy and big).
- Dynamic pages (where the layout changes per visitor) average out. The heat lands on whatever was rendered most often.