Heatmap

A heatmap is a visual overlay of a webpage that uses color intensity to show aggregated visitor behavior across many sessions — most commonly where people click, how far they move their cursor, or how far down the page they scroll before leaving. Tools built into most session-analysis platforms generate click maps, move maps and scroll depth maps separately, since each captures a different kind of behavior.

A heatmap differs from session replay in what it shows: a heatmap aggregates many visits into one pattern, useful for spotting broad trends like an ignored button or an unexpectedly clicked non-link element, while a session replay shows one individual's path in full detail. Move-map heatmaps also rest on an imperfect assumption — cursor position correlates loosely with visual attention on desktop, and the assumption breaks down further on touch devices, where there is no cursor to track at all.

Heatmaps are widely used in conversion optimization to diagnose why a landing page underperforms: a scroll map showing most visitors never reach a call to action below the fold, or a click map showing clicks on a non-clickable image, both point to concrete fixes for conversion rate. The common pitfall is reading an aggregated heatmap without segmenting by device or viewport size, since desktop and mobile layouts differ enough that combining them produces a blended, misleading pattern that matches neither audience.