What is a heatmap?
A heatmap shows aggregate visitor behaviour as colour over a page: clicks, scroll depth or attention. The three types, and where heatmaps mislead you.
What is a heatmap?
A heatmap is a visualisation that overlays aggregate visitor behaviour onto a screenshot of a page, using colour to show intensity. The three common types are click maps, scroll maps and attention or movement maps. Each summarises thousands of sessions into a single image you can look at rather than read.
The three types of heatmap
They are often bundled under one label and they answer quite different questions. Only one of them is reliable enough to make decisions from on its own.
| Type | Shows | Good for | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Click map | Where people clicked or tapped | Finding non-clickable things people try to click | Says nothing about what happened after the click |
| Scroll map | How far down the page people got | Deciding what is actually above the fold | Depth is not attention: people scroll past things |
| Attention or move map | Where the cursor lingered, or estimated attention | Directional read on what draws the eye | Cursor position correlates weakly with gaze, and not at all on mobile |
Mouse position is a poor proxy for eye position, and the correlation studies behind attention maps are weaker than the marketing suggests. Scroll maps are the most trustworthy of the three.
What heatmaps are genuinely good for
They are a fast way to spot a specific class of problem that aggregate numbers describe badly.
- People clicking things that are not links: a styled heading, an image, a stat card that looks interactive. This is the single most useful heatmap finding.
- Content below a scroll cliff: if 70% of visitors never reach your primary call to action, that is a layout decision made visible.
- Navigation nobody uses: a menu item with almost no clicks across thousands of sessions is a candidate for removal.
- Mobile versus desktop layouts diverging: the same page can have completely different click patterns on each.
What they are bad at is anything causal. A heatmap shows where attention went, never whether the page achieved anything. A beautifully engaged page that converts at 0.4% is still failing.
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Where heatmaps mislead
Dynamic and personalised pages
Heatmaps overlay one screenshot. If your page varies by user, by test variant, or by viewport, the overlay averages layouts that never coexisted.
Sample size
A heatmap over 200 sessions looks just as convincing as one over 20,000. There is no confidence interval on a colour gradient, which makes them easy to over-read.
Segments blended together
New visitors and returning customers behave differently on the same page. A blended heatmap shows a pattern that describes neither group.
Screenshot drift
Ship a redesign and the historical heatmap is overlaid on a page that no longer exists. Most tools handle this badly.
Mrkr does not offer heatmaps
This is worth stating plainly rather than hedging. Mrkr has no click map, no scroll map and no attention map. If a heatmap is a requirement for your team, Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity both do them well, and Clarity is free.
What Mrkr offers instead is the underlying behaviour in a form you can query rather than squint at:
- Scroll depth per page, as a distribution, which answers the same question as a scroll map with an actual number attached.
- Engagement time per page, which is the closest honest proxy for attention.
- Session replay, which shows one real visit in full rather than an aggregate overlay.
- Funnels and exit rates, which say whether the page achieved anything, which no heatmap can.
The trade-off is real in both directions. A scroll depth distribution is more precise and less immediately legible than a coloured overlay, and there is no substitute for a click map when you are hunting for people tapping a non-interactive element. If that is your problem, use a tool that has one.
Questions, answered.
Related terms.
- What is session replay?
Session replay reconstructs a visitor's session as a playable recording of what happened on screen.
- What is time on page?
Time on page is how long a visitor spent on one page before moving to the next.
- What is conversion funnel?
A conversion funnel is an ordered sequence of steps a visitor takes toward a goal, measured by how many people reach each step.
- What is landing page?
In analytics, a landing page is the first page a visitor sees in a session, whatever page that happens to be.
- What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the share of sessions that end without a second interaction: one page loads, nothing else is recorded, and the visitor leaves.
Where this shows up in Mrkr
- Watch individual sessions in Mrkr instead of an aggregate overlay
What Mrkr offers in place of heatmaps, alongside scroll depth and engagement time.
- How Mrkr compares to Hotjar, including where Hotjar wins
- Browse the full analytics glossary
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