12 product heatmap types explained (and when to use each).

Today, companies have a huge array of services and analytics tools to help them improve their websites and apps. One of the best ways is using heatmaps for optimization. These are visual representations of data points gathered from users' interactions.

Heat maps indicate which areas of your site draw the most attention or cause the most frustration. There are also several different types of heatmaps, each providing its own actionable insights you can use to identify issues in your UX or web design. They also help you discover which aspects really excite customers, allowing you to enhance or develop new CRO marketing strategies for increased conversions and revenue.

Either way, using a mobile app or website heatmap tool should be a regular part of your company's product and UX development efforts. Knowing when to use heatmaps and selecting the right type for different use cases is key to deriving the best insights and strategies from them. To get started, check out our UX heatmap guide below:

1) Click maps

Click maps show where high numbers of users click on your website. A click map works by tracking user clicks or taps across unique sessions. Your tool will then show which areas were most clicked on, usually by overlaying them in warmer color tones like red, orange, or yellow

When to use tap and click maps

• Optimizing key webpages within your customer journey, such as sign-up, checkout, and customer onboarding pages
• Measuring what CTAs, navigation elements, or features are getting the most attention
• Conducting A/B testing on old and new design layouts for your website

Key benefits of click maps

• Reveals high engagement elements of your site that you should continue to use and enhance
• Helps optimize conversion rates by showing which aspects steal clicks and cause user distraction

2) Scroll maps

Scroll maps measure the average scroll depth of all user traffic on a given page. In other words, they show how far most users are willing to scroll down a webpage before converting or bouncing. When viewing a scroll map, you'll see a gradual shift in color from warm to cold (often from red and yellow to green and light blue) as you move down the page, as well as the average percent of customers who viewed the page up until a certain scroll threshold.

When to use scroll maps

• With long pages, such as landing or sales pages, that often have low conversion rates
• On pages with important elements such as key product content or submission forms
• When deciding where to place critical information on collection or product pages

Key benefits of scroll maps

• Quickly indicates where customers focus based on how far down the majority of users scroll
• Allows you to trim or restructure content below "cold" zones of your page to improve engagement

3) Mouse tracking maps

Mouse tracking maps are heatmaps based on the way users click, scroll, hover, and pause their cursor on a given page. They appear as shapeless splotches of color overlaying different areas of your page. Warm-colored spots indicate high focus and activity, while colder areas (blue or green) indicate less focus and activity. Mouse tracking maps are great at revealing how users tend to scan and interact with your page, as well as which elements entice or confuse them the most.

When to use mouse tracking maps

• When you and your teams want to understand which elements grab your customers’ attention, not just where they click or tap
• During the development of more complex UI layouts, like analytics dashboards or design tool software
• Signs indicate that users may be hovering or scrolling in confusion, searching for features they want to use next but can’t find easily.

Key benefits of mouse tracking maps

• Uncovers areas where users hover over but rarely click
• Helps your teams further develop and fine-tune the details of your page design

4) Conversion maps

Conversion maps are an incredibly useful data visualization of a page's most effective elements. These heatmaps show which images, CTAs, links, and other on-page elements produce the most conversions. They may show up as color-coded overlays with hot and cold areas, as well as conversion rate percentages for the particular elements that directly drive customers to make a purchase.

When to use conversion maps

• Analytics indicate that influential pages on your website are producing low conversion rates
• When you want to effectively optimize a key page in your customer journey
• As your teams scan for friction points in the website's UX design

Key benefits of conversion maps

• Provides precise insights into what areas of your site or app are preventing conversions
• Allows you to quickly develop conversion rate optimization and UX strategies

5) Attention maps

An attention map is a combination of heat maps that combine click, scroll, and movement data to show where users give their overall attention. Similar to a scroll map, attention maps use warm and cool colors to highlight sections of your page that get the most (or least) attention. However, instead of showing how far down users scroll, these maps indicate what areas of your page stand out to users most. This helps you clock in where your most and least important elements should go.

When to use attention maps

• Whenever you need a quick, high-level view of customers' experiences based on where they focus
• When deciding where to place your key product messaging
• While aligning product, design, and marketing teams under a single viewpoint of your site's performance

Key benefits of attention maps

• Offers an all-in-one visual of what most customers are looking at, so teams can better allocate resources toward specific UX improvements
• Identifies content “dead zones” to help determine whether removal or layout redesigns are necessary

6) Eyetracking maps

Eyetracking maps are a more specialized type of heatmap. They're made with data from eye-tracking technology, giving you the most direct view of your customers’ experience. Eyetracking maps let you see which parts of your site users look at most and for how long. While they involve significant resources, these maps show you where people actually look when scanning your site, not just where they hover their mouse.

When to use eyetracking maps

• During the initial stages of designing or redesigning high-stakes pages, such as onboarding, product pricing, or key landing pages
• When you need research-grade insights into reading patterns and the hierarchy of visual elements
• Designing complex visualizations of data or dashboards to ensure your audience can read and understand them easily

Key benefits of eyetracking maps

• Confirms whether or not a page's visual hierarchy guides the eye as intended
• Allows for deep optimization, ensuring faster comprehension and reduced cognitive load

7) Mobile heat maps

Mobile heat maps alternatively focus on how users interact with your site from mobile devices rather than desktops. Similar to click maps, these app heatmap varieties track and visualize where users tap, scroll, pinch, and swipe with their touchscreens. With mobile heatmaps using the Quantum Metric platform, companies can optimize their websites' UX for mobile, significantly enhancing their web presence and potentially increasing conversions.

When to use mobile heat maps

• Analytics show significantly more traffic from desktop users than from mobile device users
• When you are looking to further improve app performance beyond its current version
• Seeking out differences in user behavior between desktop and mobile users

Key benefits of mobile heat maps

• Significantly enhances mobile-based UX design, particularly in thumb zones and with gesture-based controls
• Helps your teams produce and enhance content to fit smaller mobile screens

8) Rage click maps

Rage click maps show where users persistently tap or click on a specific element of a page. In particular, they highlight colored spots on pages, displaying elements that either don't work or mislead users into thinking a feature is clickable when it’s not. These heatmaps are excellent for ensuring pages have a satisfying and intuitive UX design.

When to use rage click maps

• High increases in drop-off in customer funnels
• After releasing a new UX design or feature
• When recent support tickets frequently mention unusable buttons or in-app glitches

Key benefits of rage click maps

• Rapidly pinpoints where problem elements are on your page, allowing development teams to fix them sooner rather than later
• Helps prioritize software patches and fixes based on which errors have the highest frustration footprint

9) Error & dead click maps

Error and dead click heat maps are similar to rage click maps, except they’re more focused on revealing clicks that either result in no effects or unintended ones within your site. These particular heatmaps may be based on click tracking and session replay data that shows users rage-clicking, refreshing the page, or leaving and returning to the page within short spans of time. Error and dead click maps are color-coded to reflect which elements are most responsible for causing these user behaviors.

When to use error & dead click maps

• To help QA and development teams find where the website or app UX tends to fail
• When testing to validate user behavior with newly added UI elements
• Investigating a poor performing page

Key benefits of error & dead click maps

• Reveals hidden bugs in your site before they cause a massive amount of customer churn
• Reduces the gaps between what looks clickable and what elements actually lead to actions and conversions

10) Confetti maps

Confetti maps are a more granular type of heat map. Rather than showing the intensity or concentration of the user's interactions as a blended blob of varying hot and cold colors, confetti heat maps show each individual click as a colored dot. Each color is segmented according to different values that you can set, such as traffic sources, devices, or campaigns. These maps enable you to compare and contrast differences in user behavior across a wide range of factors that directly affect your business.

When to use confetti maps

• Comparing user behavior between different acquisition sources, such as paid, organic, vs. email
• Evaluating why certain segments convert better while others don't
• When you want to know how different campaign audiences react to the same website or app page

Key benefits of confetti maps

• Shows which user segments are attracted to particular features and CTAs, so you can produce more tailored experiences
• Reveals low-quality traffic sources that don't interact much with your platform, providing validation to focus on more engaged audiences

11) Geographic maps

Geographic heat maps are very common in digital experience analytics. They're often used in various research studies to illustrate the population density of specific data points, such as store locations, traffic accidents, and power outages. For website heatmap types, a geographic map is often used to display user engagement intensity or conversion rates based on geographic locations, either globally, nationally, or within a major region or city.

When to use geographic maps

• When launching products with regional variations in pricing, regulations, language, and other factors
• Choosing where to localize or add customer support coverage
• Seeing which markets have adopted your brand after a big product launch

Key benefits of geographic maps

• Ensures your company can invest more confidently in high-engagement regions
• Allows your teams to make data-driven decisions when forming a prioritization roadmap for long-term strategies, such as site languages and localized integration availability

12) Feature usage maps

Feature usage maps are an excellent type of heat map for companies seeking to optimize UX and improve their customer experiences. These heat maps focus on the key feature elements of a website or app page, tracking and measuring how frequently users interact with them. Leveraging feature usage maps allows you and your company to immediately know when a feature is or isn't popular with users, which is great for implementing extensive A/B testing strategies.

When to use feature usage maps

• Prioritizing tasks when setting up product and development roadmaps
• Evaluating the success of recently launched features or redesigns
• Comparing feature usage across different customer segments

Key benefits of feature usage maps

• Identifies the most favored features used by high-value customers that can be promoted earlier in onboarding
• Ensures evidence-based decision-making on what features to remove or invest more product and development resources into

Discover opportunities for growth with heat mapping by Quantum Metric.

Each of these app and website heatmap types reveals its own unique insights. Knowing what you're looking for is the first step towards knowing which ones to use most effectively. It’s also essential to use a heat map tool that is intuitive and easily syncs with your products.

With Quantum Metric, all of your teams can utilize and iterate upon interaction heatmaps simultaneously. You'll have access to custom dashboards and alerts adjusted to each team's ideal metrics and heatmap data.

You'll also get to use advanced features, like rapid generative summaries of key data points with Felix AI. This feature will give you fresh insights from each of your teammates’ perspectives. You'll also get session replays, customer journey analysis, and other real-time analytics features that provide a full view of your customers’ experience and product performance, all in one place.

When looking for top-quality heatmapping tools and data analysis, look no further than Quantum Metric's digital experience analytics platform. Ready to transform your business? Schedule a demo or contact us today.