Heatmaps

A heatmap shows you where people actually clicked on a page, drawn straight over the page itself, plus how far down they got.

Opening one

There are two routes:

• Open Analytics, then Site Analytics, and scroll to Click heatmaps. You get small previews for your five newest published pages. Click one to open it full size.
• Or open a page's analytics from your Pages list and click View heatmap.

Turning it on

There is nothing to switch on. Collection starts as soon as the page is published and visitors arrive.

Until then you will see No click data yet. If the page has not been published, the empty state tells you to publish it first, because unpublished pages are not tracked at all.

Reading the click map

The page is rendered exactly as it is published, header and footer included, with links frozen so you cannot click through by accident. The clicks are painted on top.

Brighter areas got more clicks, with a Cold to Hot legend under the heading. The pill at the top of the page shows the total clicks in the view you are looking at.

Device filter. A segmented control offers All, Desktop, Mobile and Tablet. Only devices that actually have data appear, so a page nobody has opened on a tablet will not offer a tablet tab.

Two things to keep in mind. The click map is all time, it does not follow the date range control at the top. And positions are approximate: clicks are recorded as a position within the whole document and grouped into a grid of 40 columns by 100 rows, so a hot cell means "around here" rather than one exact pixel.

Reading the scroll reach

Below the map, Scroll reach breaks the page into ten depth bands and shows the share of visitors who reached each one. Unlike the click map, this does follow your selected date range.

Underneath it, one line summarises the shape: half of your visitors reach at least a given percentage of the page.

What to do with it

Check whether your main call to action sits above the depth most people actually reach. Look for clusters on things that are not clickable, which usually means people expect a link there. And compare mobile against desktop, since layouts often reorder in ways that push the important part far down.

Related: Site analytics.