Heatmaps are 2D data visualizations that use color to represent values in a matrix. Used by everyone from social scientists to financial analysts and biologists, heatmaps have been around in one way or another for over 100 years.
In this blog, Morten Hornbaek, Head of Customer Success at Mouseflow, explains why heatmaps are such a powerful diagnostic tool when it comes to understanding how users interact with websites.
1. Heatmaps give an instant overview of key web performance parameters
While other kinds of analytics have their strengths, heatmaps draw instant attention to major issues on your website.
We’ve written about the different types of web diagnostic heatmaps before. Click heatmaps reveal the clicking patterns of your users. Scroll heatmaps expose the average visibility of your pages. Attention heatmaps show which parts of your site are most engaging to users. Movement heatmaps track mouse movements. Finally, geo heatmaps reveal user locations in an anonymized fashion.
Taken together, web diagnostic heatmaps add significant speed to the problem-solver’s journey. For example, cold spots (areas that don’t get much attention) and folds in the scroll heatmaps quickly identify problem areas. Geo heatmaps instantly reveal the territories or countries where conversions are good and where they are not. In short, heatmaps tell you at a glance what’s working and what needs to be addressed.
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