Heatmaps

What this report gives you#

Numeric reports tell you a page got so many views and so many people bounced. They do not tell you why. Heatmaps, at /heatmaps, is the missing layer: a sample of real visitor interaction — clicks, mouse movement, scroll depth — drawn over a faithful rebuild of the page.

It sits in the sidebar under the Explore group.

There are five views, all drawn over the same page:

Turn capture on#

Heatmap capture adds extra JavaScript to your page, so it is off by default and enabled per data stream.

"Run until" is enforced on the server, not only in the browser: past that date the configuration served to the tracker reports capture as off, so even cached trackers stop.

The backdrop is not a screenshot#

What you see under the heat is a serialised copy of the page's own DOM, which the console rebuilds inside a sandboxed iframe. The reason is practical: rasterising a page breaks on cross-origin images, web fonts and lazy or dynamic content, and you end up reading heat over a broken page.

A few consequences that matter day to day:

• The rebuild is the latest one captured for that page and is not tied to the report's date range. Redesign the page and last month's heat lands on the new layout.
• It is captured once per session per combination of page, device class and window size.
• If a modal or full-screen overlay is open at capture time, the capture is skipped so your backdrop is not the dimmed modal state. A later clean visit takes it.
• Until a rebuild arrives, a note above the map says no page snapshot has been captured yet and the heat is drawn on a neutral grid.

Reading the map#

A row of filters runs across the top.

• Page — the busiest captured pages, each with its sample count. Pages are grouped by canonical route, so /product/123 and /product/456 are the single row /product/:id. Numeric segments, UUIDs and long alphanumeric ids all collapse to :id; note that this is a different placeholder from the * used by path exploration.
• Period — Today, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days. This period is independent of the global date picker and defaults to thirty days, because a heatmap accumulates over time and a "Today" window is effectively empty.
• Source, country, visitor — the usual cuts: traffic channel, country, and new versus returning visitors.
• URL match — exact page (the default), URL contains…, or URL starts with…. The last two aggregate the heat of many real URLs; a /blog pattern shows the whole blog at once.
• Device — desktop, tablet, mobile, all.

Above the map are three spotlight cards — most clicked, top rage, top dead. Select one and the view switches and pins that element on the page.

On the map itself: hovering shows the element under the cursor with its click count and share of the page's clicks; clicking pins it and opens the Element panel beside the map. The radius and opacity sliders change only how the heat layer looks, never the numbers. The % badges control writes each element's share onto it, and hide page strips the backdrop so only heat remains.

Below the map is the top clicked elements table: the element's structural selector, its text label, click count and share. Each row's Locate button finds and highlights that element on the page.

The PNG download saves the composite of backdrop plus heat as one image. If the captured page carries cross-origin assets that cannot be rasterised, the export degrades to the heat layer alone.

The scroll map#

The scroll view works differently: depth bands rather than points. Each pageview stores only the furthest depth it reached, not a stream of scroll events. Two numbers appear below the map — the average fold, and the quick-back rate.

Friction signals#

This is where a heatmap turns from interesting into actionable. The tracker classifies each click after a short delay, to see whether the page responded at all.

A click that causes navigation deliberately stays a plain click, because rage and dead are by definition clicks that achieved nothing. That is what keeps the two signals low-noise: any click that did something is excluded from them.

The quick-back rate is reported in the scroll view, because its unit is the pageview rather than the element.

Consent and privacy#

For consent purposes, heatmap capture belongs to the Statistics category.

• If the consent banner is on for the property, the capture module does not load at all until the visitor has accepted Statistics. In opt-in mode, before any choice has been made, the answer is no — the failure direction is not capturing, never capturing.
• Input values are masked in the page rebuild; text a visitor types is never sent.
• Element labels are never taken from an input, textarea, select or option, and every other label is trimmed to 64 characters. Label text is read from visible content only, so script and noscript bodies never end up in it.
• Samples carry the pipeline's visitor ID, so like every other report they stay scoped to your organisation and property.

The per-user filter, which narrows a map to one identified person, requires a separate permission and is simply not offered to anyone who is not allowed to see user identifiers.

Retention, caps and what the platform enforces#

Heatmaps are the highest-volume data AdPix captures, so a few controls sit above your stream settings and are held by the platform operator:

Retention is applied by a nightly prune rather than an instant delete, so a changed retention value takes effect on the next run.

Small things that come up#

• With fewer than thirty samples on a page, a limited-data warning appears above the map. Treat the map as directional until then.
• Click and move density is read by default from a pre-bucketed table built for speed, which is approximate. The moment you apply a source, country, visitor or user filter — or move URL match off exact page — the exact query runs instead. Small differences between a filtered and an unfiltered view come from this.
• The number of move samples per pageview is bounded and move samples are thinned in the browser as well; the move map is a representative sample, not a full recording of every pixel.
• The elements table returns up to fifty elements and the map up to eight thousand points.
• Elements are stored by structural selector. Change the page template and old selectors no longer resolve against the new rebuild, so their Locate button disappears — the numbers are still right, only the position on the page is lost.

Frequently asked questions#

Related#