Heatmaps
Click Heatmaps vs. Session Recording
Session-video recording promises to show you everything a visitor does. The question worth asking first is whether you need everything — or just the answers.
Two Ways to Watch
The same questions, two very different costs
Both tools exist to answer the same handful of questions: where do people click, how far do they scroll, where do they stall or give up. A session recording answers them by filming a visitor's entire screen and letting you replay it. A click-and-scroll heatmap answers them by aggregating those same behaviors across many visitors into a single, readable picture.
The recording shows you one person, in full, one at a time. The heatmap shows you the pattern — where attention actually concentrates across everyone. For most decisions, the pattern is the thing you were after in the first place.
A Deliberate Choice
"No video" isn't a missing feature
Session recording is heavy. It slows the very site you're trying to improve — the tool meant to boost conversions quietly taxes the page speed that drives them. And it captures far more of a visitor's screen than most businesses actually need, or want to be responsible for storing.
Audry's heatmap answers the same questions without asking your site to carry that weight or your visitors to have their whole session filmed. Choosing not to record video is a deliberate product decision, not a gap: faster answers, lighter footprint, the same decisions made.
When Each One Fits
Reach for the pattern first
There are moments a single replay genuinely helps — chasing one specific, weird bug a user reported. But the everyday work of improving a page is pattern work: which button gets ignored, which section nobody scrolls to, where the drop-off clusters. That's exactly what a heatmap is built to show, and it shows it without the load-time penalty or the pile of recorded sessions to secure.
For a small-business site trying to convert better without slowing down, the lighter tool isn't the compromise. It's the right default.
What Audry Does Here
The answer without the weight
A shop wants to know why a landing page underperforms and reaches for a session-recording tool. It works — and it also adds a noticeable drag to the page load, meaning the very fix-it exercise makes the page a little slower for every future visitor, plus a growing library of full-screen recordings to store and protect.
Audry's heatmap gives the same answer — a dead zone below the fold where nobody scrolls, a primary button almost no one clicks — from one ultra-light script, with no video to store. The page stays fast, the privacy exposure stays small, and the decision about what to test next is just as clear. Same insight, none of the tax.
Keep Reading
Next in this guide
See how to read one half of that picture in Reading Scroll-Depth Data, and how the anonymized approach protects visitors in Privacy-Compliant Behavior Tracking. Or return to the full Heatmaps guide.
See where visitors click — without the drag
Audry's heatmap is being built now. Join the waitlist to be first to see where attention goes on your pages, from the lightest script Audry ships.
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