IT Glossary
What is a heatmap?
A colour map of the page: the hot areas where visitors click and linger, the cold ones they ignore — real behaviour made visible.
Analytics tells you that eight out of ten visitors leave the pricing page without acting. It does not tell you that six of them clicked repeatedly on a heading that was never a link, which is the kind of thing a heatmap shows in a single image. The tool records anonymous interaction — clicks and taps, cursor movement, how far down the page people scroll, where attention stops — and paints it over a screenshot in warm and cool colours, so patterns that would take hours to extract from a table become obvious in seconds. Session recordings usually come in the same package, replaying an anonymised visit as a film. The value for a company is diagnostic rather than statistical: heatmaps are poor at proving that one design outperforms another, and excellent at generating the hypotheses worth testing. Typical findings are humbling and cheap to fix — the call-to-action sits below where anyone scrolls, the mobile phone number is not tappable, a decorative image is being clicked because it looks like a button, and half the visitors never reach the section the last redesign was commissioned to add.
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Why it matters for your business
A diagnosis for why it does not convert
Visual evidence of where attention stops replaces the meeting where three people assert three different theories about the page.
Design decisions backed by evidence
Layout changes are argued from observed behaviour rather than taste, which shortens approval and improves the odds of an uplift.
Near-zero cost, installed in an hour
Free tiers cover a small site and installation is a single script, so the barrier to gathering real behavioural data is negligible.
Frequently asked questions
Are heatmaps legal under GDPR?
They are, with conditions. Because these tools use cookies or similar storage and can capture behaviour, they require consent through your cookie banner and must load only after it is given. Configure the tool to mask form fields and text input by default, keep recordings for a limited period, name the provider in your privacy notice, and confirm data is processed in the EU or under valid transfer terms.
How much data do I need before drawing conclusions from a heatmap?
As a rough working threshold, two to three thousand sessions per page and per device type, gathered over at least two full weeks so weekday and weekend behaviour are both represented. Below that you are reading noise. Always separate mobile from desktop, since combining them produces an average layout that describes neither audience accurately.
What do heatmaps typically reveal on company websites?
Four findings recur with remarkable consistency: the main action sits below the point where most visitors stop scrolling; visitors click non-clickable elements that look interactive; long forms lose people at one specific field, usually the phone number or company registration; and the mobile experience diverges sharply from the desktop one the design was actually approved on.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247