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What is a heatmap and what does it tell me?

Technically – what is a heatmap?

A heatmap graphically shows users’ most significant actions on your pages. Each activity, like a click or mouse move, adds to the hotness of a given area. These actions can be, for example, clicks and mouse moves. Any recorded activity makes an area hotter. The places where users click most often are marked as hot areas. Hot regions are marked in warm colors, red being the hottest. The places where users click less often are shown as cold. Cold colors like blue and green mark areas where visitors click but not that often. Any areas without colors are the places where there’s no user action.

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Sometimes people get frustrated, and they click somewhere a hundred times just out of anger. CUX heatmaps can show you that as well. For more information on angry clicking see Types of heatmap events and parameters.

Hot N Cold

Have you ever thought that Katy Perry was singing about heatmaps? Or about the visitors to your website? 😊 Well, think about it like this, people get hot about some things on your website. And they are totally cold about other stuff. This is perfectly normal. Stay calm, don’t get frustrated as the singer did. CUX heatmaps come to the rescue as they help you understand when visitors “are yes,” and when they “are no.” This is a goldmine of insights on your way to understanding your user preferences and behavior.

What does a heatmap show me?

CUX heatmaps show you the most valuable things that happen on your website:

  1. Where people click
  2. Where they don’t click (but were supposed to click)
  3. Whether people click on things that aren’t links
  4. Are visitors clicking out of anger or frustration

Heatmaps can be your website debugging help:

  1. You can find clicks on broken links.
  2. You can identify missed opportunities to have links (dead clicks).

I can’t wait to see my heatmaps!

Well, you need to wait. Perhaps this doesn’t sound like good news. Heatmaps are created out of user activity. We need to record and collect enough user click and mouse movements to show you meaningful results. The more visits on your page, the better the heatmaps are. You’ll see this yourself as time passes by, and the heatmaps show more reliable data.