A heatmap is a map with color gradations that shows how visitors click, scroll, and spend time on a website.
A heatmap reveals how visitors behave on a website. Through color gradients—high activity is shown in red and orange, while low activity is shown in blue or without color—it provides a clear picture of what is being noticed and used on a page and what is being ignored.
There are different types of heatmaps:
Click heatmaps show what visitors click on.
Scroll heatmaps reveal how far they scroll and where they stop.
Movement heatmaps track how the mouse cursor moves.
The technique of using color gradients to make data understandable has long been used in science, particularly in cartography. In the 2000s, heatmaps were increasingly used for web analytics as well. With the help of specialized tools, visitor behavior could be recorded and visually summarized. The heatmap supplemented the raw numbers of traditional analysis with immediately understandable visualizations.
While numbers may show that visitors are bouncing, heatmaps often reveal where the causes might lie. Unlike abstract numbers, they illustrate concrete behavior. They reveal whether important content is being read at all, whether visitors scroll down to the CTA, or whether they click on elements that aren’t even clickable. These insights can provide clear starting points for website optimization that might otherwise have remained hidden in raw data.
While the heatmap shows what website visitors do, it does not show why. Interpreting these actions remains a matter of speculation. Meaningful assessments of user behavior can only be made with a sufficient volume of visitors. Furthermore, behavior varies depending on the device and screen size, which is why smartphones and computers should be analyzed separately.
Important: The tracking of user behavior must comply with data protection regulations.
Despite a high volume of visits, a company is puzzled by the low number of inquiries. Analysis of the scroll heatmap reveals that very few visitors scroll all the way down to the contact form. Most leave the page before they see the form at the bottom.
After moving the form higher up on the page, the number of inquiries increases noticeably, since the offer is now located where visitors actually look.