Reading a Heatmap

Use this page to get the most out of the heatmap detail view: review the recorded page snapshot, tune the overlays, filter down to the traffic you care about, rank clicks by element, and export what you find.

Open any page from the Heatmaps list to reach its detail view. Every control below applies to the page you're viewing.

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Review the Replay

A heatmap paints click and scroll data on top of a selected session replay snapshot. It reflects one real page visit, including pages behind login or personalization.

When no replay is available for a page, breakpoint, and date range, the detail view reports that the replay is unavailable.

Use Hide pop-ups to remove supported cookie banners, accessibility widgets, and captured open navigation drawers from the replay. This changes only the replay view; it does not change the underlying event data.

Tip: The replay snapshot captures the recorded page state. Images and sections that load only after scrolling may be missing, and a captured menu can obscure the page until you enable Hide pop-ups.

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Read the Overlays

The detail view has four overlay layers, each answering a different question. All of them respond to the same filters and sit on the same backdrop.

• Clicks: where visitors click or tap. Warm colors (red/orange) mark high-traffic areas; cool colors (blue) mark low-traffic areas.
• Scroll depth: how far down the page visitors get before leaving. A blue band shades the page and fades out as you move down: it's most solid where the most visitors reached and thins toward the drop-off point.
• Rage clicks: bursts of repeated clicks in the same spot over a short period, shown as red indicators.
• Dead clicks: clicks that produced no obvious on-page response, shown as grey indicators.

A legend shows the value at each end of the color scale, so you can read a hotspot as an actual click count rather than just "hot" or "cold." Use the intensity and opacity controls to make a sparse heatmap easier to see or to let a busy one breathe. They change how the overlay renders, not the underlying data.

Note: Rage-click and dead-click overlays are best read alongside session replays. They point you toward potentially frustrating interactions; they don't prove intent on their own.

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Filter

Narrow the heatmap to a specific slice of traffic. All four overlay layers update together when you change a filter.

• Device type: desktop, tablet, or mobile. Each device type has its own breakpoint, so click positions stay accurate.
• Date range: a custom range up to 60 days.
• Country and region: filter by visitor geography.
• Browser: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and others.

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Compare Date Ranges

Use Add comparison to set up more than one date range for the same page, for example this month against last month. Each comparison becomes a tab; switch between tabs to see how the same page behaved across periods. Comparison is the fastest way to spot a layout that worked in one period but broke down in another.

The other filters (device type, geography, and browser) apply to every comparison tab at once, so a comparison varies only the date range.

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Rank Clicks by Element

Alongside the visual overlay, the detail view ranks the page's elements by how many clicks each one received, for example Sign Up button: 1,247 clicks; Learn More link: 832 clicks. This answers "which exact element got clicked?" rather than "which area of the page is hot," which is especially useful when a single button spans several hotspots or when similar elements repeat down the page.

Elements are labeled by their tag, role, and position by default. Add data-heatmap-id to give your important elements stable, human-readable names in this ranking and in exports. No element text is ever captured.

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Drill Into Session Replays

A heatmap tells you what happened; session replay shows you why. The two are linked in both directions:

• Click any hotspot to see the sessions that clicked there, each linking straight to the replay viewer.
• Rage-click and dead-click counts link to the session replays filtered to that interaction, so you can watch the frustration first-hand.
• From a session replay or a page's web analytics detail, jump back to that page's heatmap.

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Export

Export reflects whatever filters and date range are active when you export.

• CSV: download the heatmap data for analysis in a spreadsheet. Each row covers one cell of the heatmap grid with its click, rage-click, and dead-click counts plus the cell's most-clicked element, so your data-heatmap-id labels show up where you've set them.
• PNG: download the rendered heatmap view (backdrop plus overlay) as an image. The file name captures the device, overlay, and date-range context so the image is easy to identify later. Useful for reports and sharing with stakeholders who don't have dashboard access.

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Next Steps

• Heatmaps Overview: the four heatmap types and how they fit the rest of your analytics
• Heatmaps Installation: enable tracking and verify data is flowing
• Element Labels: name important elements with data-heatmap-id
• Heatmaps FAQs: common questions about setup, privacy, and data