Do you use heatmaps?

A couple weeks ago I received an email from Bing Webmaster Tools announcing the launch of Microsoft Clarity, a free tool for webmasters showing how folks use your site. The email stated clarity provides three key features:

• Session recordings: Replay user interactions to find out where people are getting stuck.
• Heatmaps: Deep insights at a glance. Visualize what parts of your site get the most clicks.
• An Insights dashboard: ML derived insights like “rage clicks”, “dead clicks”, and “excessive scrolling” to help you zero in on interesting user sessions

I particularly noticed the mention of heatmaps since I've never personally used them, but have thought I should. I know there are a wide variety of products that offer website heatmaps. Typically they visualize the most popular (hot) and unpopular (cold) elements of a webpage using colors on a scale from red to blue. By aggregating user behavior, heatmaps facilitate data analysis and give an at-a-glance understanding of how people interact with an individual website page—what they click on, scroll through, or ignore—which helps identify trends and optimize for further engagement.

So, for this weeks poll I thought I would ask if you have ever used a heatmap tool. If you have, please share your thoughts with us. And, if you have never used one, how interested are you in adding heatmaps as a tool you make use of in the future.

Michael

I do use heatmaps and found them quite helpful. I used to have some page elements and brand review page sections, which I thought were cool but in reality they were just annoying users.
Heatmaps and recordings also help me find different things which users don't interact with the way I planned.
Indirectly they also helped me workout how to better get people to share their email addresses.

Too busy pumping out content to worry about optimizing the nitty gritty ****.

But who knows, maybe that is backasswards thinking.

Microsoft Clarity is really eye opening stuff - gives true insight into how your visitors interact with your pages. Although, I'm mostly with PROFRB on this one - only have so much time in a day as a small operation.

I'm not currently using heatmaps and I've been fairly occupied doing social media advertising work instead. But I'm hoping to do that this year as they have multiple advantages to them. They do look quite interesting for sure.

Clearly useful and it would be fairly surprising to hear that any site with major traffic doesn't use them for occasional analysis at least.

Not so obviously useful for anyone with lower traffic levels - given the balance of where you need to be spending the limited/little time you have in building content (alongside all the other stuff that needs to be handled)....but even there it's possible/likely that heatmap analysis will show you where to improve (or test improvements) on a page...which then eventually leads to increased user satisfaction....which theoretically (and likely) leads to improved rankings.

I used them before and whilst it's a fascinating subject of visitor interaction, it slowed down the site. Ultimately, the value of seeing the heatmaps isn't worth the sacrificing of website speed.

I should add that I was using Hotjar, not Clarity.

Agree with Tex Holdem. I am worried it would slow down the website. Maybe run it for a couple of days and then remove it just to get a feeling of what can be improved on the site.
Clarity looks promising!

I've used them before, even went as far as video recording of the user session. From what I understand of the new GDPR rules, you'd have to ask for consent before doing that but that's a different subject.

I honestly had different expectations and was quite disappointed with the results. Sure I did see where most people held the mouse or where their attention was, which was only good for identifying button/banner spots.

The rest wasn't really helpful. The videos of the user sessions I observed were odd. It did not resemble knowledgeable humans using the internet, but more like apes holding a mouse for a first time. I don't know it was bots or anything else, but for a whole month, I kept watching sporadic mouse movements, ADD scrolling up and down, nervous clickings 125 hits a second, clueless guessing on what exactly is a button and which one is clickable and so on.

Poor loading speeds are not worth it and the prices these services charge were quite high. Don't know what's it like in 2021

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Originally Posted by xecutable

The rest wasn't really helpful. The videos of the user sessions I observed were odd. It did not resemble knowledgeable humans using the internet, but more like apes holding a mouse for a first time. I don't know it was bots or anything else, but for a whole month, I kept watching sporadic mouse movements, ADD scrolling up and down, nervous clickings 125 hits a second, clueless guessing on what exactly is a button and which one is clickable and so on.

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Actually this is useful in itself. It indicates that (while we as builders know what we're doing on a page - because we've created it and looked at thousands of them before) the average 'normal' user may not have a clue. Would seem to be a very good illustration of why it's good to hit them right between the eyes with something valuable related to their query. The jumping around the page (assuming real users) would seem to indicate confusion/misunderstanding, while at the same time a desire to find what they want on the page somewhere (and a belief that they would actually get it, possibly from a title/description/first impression of the page quality)

I have not personally used heatmaps but from what I have read they are something that should be taken advantage of. Will help in understanding and improve interactions.

heatmaps are the only way to understand your users behavior - often you will be surprised how the flow of the traffic in your website moves differently from what you were thinking and planning.

it provides you great insights, specially the "click counter" - to mention one :eyebrow:

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Originally Posted by Cash Bonus

But I'm hoping to do that this year

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Maybe making your site SSL, mobile compatible, and update your coding 1'st, might be a better goal... just sayin.

Mouse clicks? Scrolling?
75% of our traffic is mobile - and the touch points are simply where it's convenient to scroll.

Heatmaps and structuring screens are very 2010 concepts.
In these days of mobile rendering and vastly varied viewports I had expected this to be long dead - but consultants will flog a horse long past it's use-by date I guess.

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Originally Posted by TheGooner

Heatmaps and structuring screens are very 2010 concepts.
In these days of mobile rendering and vastly varied viewports I had expected this to be long dead - but consultants will flog a horse long past it's use-by date I guess.

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yeppers.