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Marketing

Heatmap

Click Heatmap | Scroll Map | Website Heatmap

Portrait of Lukas Horvath, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Lukas HorvathCo-founder

What is Heatmap?

A heatmap is a visualization that overlays visitor behavior on a webpage using color — warm colors where activity is high, cool colors where it is low. Common types include click heatmaps, scroll maps, and hover or attention maps. They aggregate the behavior of many sessions into a single picture that shows which parts of a page get attention and which get ignored.

Why it matters

Analytics tells you what happened. Heatmaps tell you why. A page might convert poorly, and the analytics will not explain it — but a heatmap might reveal that 80 percent of visitors stop scrolling before they reach the CTA, or that everyone is clicking on a graphic that is not actually a link. That kind of insight is hard to get any other way. The lazy version is to install a heatmap tool, generate a colorful screenshot, and put it in a slide. The strong version is to use the data to form hypotheses, run A/B tests, and ship changes — and then verify with another heatmap that the changes actually worked.

How it works

A snippet from a tool like Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, or PostHog gets installed on the site. As visitors browse, the tool records their clicks, scroll depth, and mouse movement, anonymizing personal data along the way. Once enough sessions accumulate — usually a few thousand per page for confidence — the tool aggregates the behavior into a heatmap overlay you can view by device type, source, or audience segment. Smart teams pair heatmaps with session replays, where you can actually watch individual sessions, so a confusing pattern in the heatmap becomes an obvious problem in the replay. The combined picture tells you exactly where to start fixing.

Related terms

  • PostHog

    Marketing

    An open-source product and web analytics platform that combines events, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, and heatmaps in one tool — the all-in-one…

  • A/B Testing

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    Showing two versions of a page or element to different visitors at the same time, then measuring which one drives more conversions — replacing opinion-driven…

  • Conversion Rate Optimization

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    The practice of systematically improving the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — sign up, book a demo, buy — instead of just chasing…

  • Google Analytics 4

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    Google's current analytics platform — the forced replacement for Universal Analytics — built around events instead of sessions, and the default free analytics…

  • User Experience

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    How it feels to use a product from start to finish — the speed, the clarity, the flow, the copy, the moments of friction, the parts that just work — not just…

  • Landing Page

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    A standalone page built for one job — convert visitors from a specific campaign or audience into a single action — with no main menu, no competing links, no…

  • User Flow

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    A diagram of the steps a visitor takes to complete a task on your site — from the landing page through every screen to conversion — so the team can see where…