Analytics tells you how many people visited a page and how long they stayed. It doesn’t tell you what they tried to do while they were there.
That’s what a heatmap is for.
What A Heatmap Is
A heatmap shows where people click, how far they scroll, and where they stop. Session recordings go a step further: you watch a real visit play out, mouse movements and all.
I used Microsoft Clarity. It’s free, and it groups the frustrating moments for you: rage clicks, dead clicks, and quick backs.
Angry Clicks
On a site I worked on more recently, the heatmap showed a lot of angry clicks.
That’s when someone clicks the same spot over and over because they expect something to happen and it doesn’t. Clarity calls them rage clicks. I call them angry clicks, because that’s what they look like in the recording.
They showed up all over:
- Images people thought were links.
- Text and headings that looked clickable.
- Buttons with broken links.
The most were on the page numbers at the bottom of the blog posts.
The broken buttons got fixed. Those are the easy ones: a button that goes nowhere is a dead end analytics never flags. The visit still counts. The page view still counts. Nothing says the buyer tried three times and gave up.
What People Actually Look At
On the same site, the owner thought most people read the information above the products.
The heatmap said otherwise. What people looked at was the product comparison chart at the bottom of the page.
That changes what you work on. If buyers scroll past the intro to get to the chart, the chart is doing the selling. Make it easy to find, keep it up to date, and stop worrying so much about the paragraph at the top.
It’s also a good reason to compare products on the page in the first place.
Where Analytics And Heatmaps Fit
They answer different questions.
- Analytics: how many people came, where they came from, which pages they left on.
- Heatmaps: what they clicked, how far they scrolled, what they ignored.
- Recordings: what it was like to be the buyer on that page.
Analytics tells you which page to look at. The heatmap tells you why.
Where To Start
- Install Clarity or another heatmap tool on your site. Clarity is free.
- Give it a few weeks to collect visits before you draw conclusions.
- Check your top product pages, category pages, and checkout first.
- Look for rage clicks and dead clicks. Fix anything broken right away.
- Watch five or ten recordings on your most important page. You’ll learn more than any report.
- Check what people scroll past. If the important part is below where most people stop, move it up.
Heatmaps are one way to see your own buyer’s journey. For the rest, see 5 Stops on the B2B Buyer’s Journey (And Where You Lose Them). For what buyers tell you directly, see How to Use Customer Feedback and Reviews to Fix Your Website.
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