Heatmap

A heatmap is a picture of what visitors really did on one page of your site. The tool records where people clicked, how far down they scrolled and where the mouse travelled. It then paints all of that over a screenshot of the page, so warm colours mean many people and cold colours mean almost nobody.

Three kinds turn up in nearly every tool, and each answers a different question. The click map shows what people pressed, including things never meant to be pressed, like a photo or a price that looks tappable. The scroll map then draws the line where readers give up, and on many pages half the visitors never reach the middle. Last comes the movement map, which follows the mouse and hints at what someone was reading, and it is the weakest of the three.

The real value is in seeing where people give up. If the scroll map goes cold just above your order form, the form is not the problem, and whatever sits above it is. In the same way, a click map glowing on a picture that does nothing tells you visitors think it is a link. Every one of those clicks is a small disappointment that nobody ever reports to you. Always read the phone map and the desktop map separately, because they are usually two different stories and mixing them hides both.

A heatmap never tells you why something happened, only where, and that limit matters. It also melts everyone into one image, so a first-timer and a regular customer end up the same colour. If the page changes from person to person, or a test is running, the picture blends two pages into one and means little. Twenty recorded visits prove nothing either, so it is worth waiting for a few hundred.

Session recordings, the replay of one person's visit, sit beside heatmaps in most tools and carry a real risk. They can capture typed addresses, phone numbers and card fields. Serious tools hide those fields, but the setting is not always switched on after you install one. A recording of a customer typing is personal data you answer for, wherever the tool keeps it. That is why Linkysoft asks three questions first, about where the data is stored, how long it is kept, and who can open it. That conversation belongs with your security work rather than with marketing. Linkysoft treats the heatmap itself as the start of a website fix, never as the proof.