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Click maps: using them to optimize your website

People can't use a website without clicking a mouse somewhere or tapping on a mobile device. Those clicks and taps help them navigate pages and find the products, services, or information they're looking for.

But do YOU, as a website designer, marketer, or business owner, know exactly where your visitors click and tap? And do you know how to use that information to build a better website and experience?

That's where click maps come in.

In this quick article, you'll learn about how to track where users click, the benefits and limitations of click maps, how you can use them to optimize UX, and how to set up click maps on your website in just a couple of minutes.

PX insights

Behavior analytics

What is a click map?
Why use website click maps?
How to use click maps on your website
Final pro tip: find out why people click

What is a click map?

A click map (or clickmap) is a type ofwebsite heat map that displayswhere users click the mouse on a desktop device or tap the screen on mobile. Click maps help website owners track on-page user engagement, such as clicks on buttons, links, images, etc. across a website, which in turn helps them optimize their pages and CTAs for better conversion.

A CLICK MAP EXAMPLE ON HOTJAR'S HOMEPAGE

Click maps are used by user experience designers and marketers to track user activity,identify opportunities to improve conversions,fixbugs, and iteratebetter website design. Click popularity is displayed using a color scale from red to blue (where the most popular points are 'hot' and represented in red), alongside quantitative data on thenumber of clicks anduser click percentage on each webpage element.

🏆 See it in action: take a look at this live click heat map example to see how click maps work and the type of data you can collect. Put your mouse over any hot/cold point to see the number of clicks that were recorded, and toggle between different devices in the top left to review desktop, tablet, and mobile performances.

Click map vs. heat maps

Heatmaps (or heat maps) is an umbrella term that describes different types ofvisual website analytics. Click maps are a specific type of heatmap (together withscroll maps and move maps) where the red or 'hot' dots show page elements that have been clicked on most frequently, while blue or 'cold' dots show the ones that have been clicked on the least. Any area that contains no color has never been clicked on.

Why use website click maps?

With click heat maps, you can:

See where website visitors click and tap
Identify underperforming CTAs that are getting ignored
Find bugs and areas for improvement
Showcase engagement data visually

Click maps are a key click tracking tool that helps youspot elements where users engage (or don't) with your pages and quantify user behavior patterns. You'll see where visitors clicked on CTAs (calls-to-action) and/or on unexpected elements, which in turn gives you a solid starting point forUX improvement and CRO (conversion rate optimization) work. Look at this quick example:

This click map was placed on an old version of our homepage that included a video above the fold with a play button that visitors could click. In reality, as both the mobile and the desktop click maps show, nobody really did: the overall engagement is 0.04%—meaning that out of 7000 people, around 3 (!) clicked the play button. Had the video included unique, valuable information about the product that was not replicated anywhere else on the page, we'd have been in trouble—and this click map alone would have alerted us to a problem that needed fixing.

In addition, click maps can be used as avisual aid to help communicate website issues and optimizations to stakeholders and/or clients, which is particularly helpful if you're pitching to a non-technical audience.

THE FOLKS AT SKYSCANNER ANALYZING A HOTJAR HEATMAP

How to use click maps on your website

You canuse click maps on any website—e-commerce site, product listing, blog, landing pages, etc.

Here's how to set up Hotjar click heat maps using our heat Map analytics tool and start collecting click data on your website today. Each Hotjar heatmap will automatically generate all three heat map types (click, move, and scroll), so there's no need to do anything special to set up a click map.

Log into the main Hotjar dashboard (sign up first for a free forever account if you're new to it), and navigate to the Heatmaps section to begin.

1. Click the green "New Heatmap" button

2. Give your new heatmap a name

Using a descriptive name likeHomepage v1 November will help you find the right heatmap later, especially if you're setting up more than one.

3. Choose the number of pageviews to capture

You can record 1,000, 2,000, and 10,000 pageviews on your heatmap depending on the Hotjar plan you're on. Your click heat map results will show right from the first clicks.

4. Enter the target page(s)

You can add a click map on a single page, or aggregate clicks across multiple pages with the same basic layout (i.e. product pages).

5. Click "Create Heatmap" and your click map is live

Here's how the click heat map results will look from inside the Hotjar dashboard:

You can toggle any heat map to show desktop, tablet, or mobile sessions. To view the click map data, select the 'Click' tab in the heat map type options. You can also view and download the raw data.

A technical note: to ensure that Hotjar accurately reports where your visitors have clicked, we collect clicks relative to elements on the page. For instance, if a visitor clicks on a button, we will record the position of their cursor relative to that particular button, not the entire page.

Final pro tip: find out why people click

Click maps are great at showing youwhat users click and tap on, but that's only part of the story—you still need to understandwhy users click (or, perhaps more urgently: why they fail to).

To do that, you cancombine click map insights with qualitative insight from user feedback surveys and session recordings. Using Hotjar, you can quickly set up Recordings and Surveys (our name for on-site feedback surveys) alongside Heat Maps on your website to get all the data you need to make optimizations and improve UX.

Further reading: check out how to combine heatmaps and other tools for extra insight, and learn how SaaS company CCV Shop used click maps in combination with session recordings to improve conversions for their customers.

Click maps are a quick and easy way to see what people arereally doing on your site. They are a key analytics tool in the UX and optimization toolkit of marketers, UX designers, and conversion rate optimizers—and they are especially useful if you are a business selling online, looking to deeply understand the behavior of your customers: what drives them, what interests them, what they interact with/fail to notice on your site.

Here we collected the most common questions asked about clickmaps:

4 common click map FAQs