Heatmaps
Turning Hotspots Into Tests
A colorful heatmap is where most people stop. It's actually where the useful part starts — the map is a list of questions, and a test is how you answer one.
A Map Is Not a Plan
The heatmap is the question, not the answer
A hotspot map shows exactly where attention and taps concentrate, and where they don't. That is genuinely useful — but on its own it's a picture, not a decision. A bright cluster on a non-clickable image, a cold spot on your main call to action, a dead zone where you expected engagement: each of those is a question the map is raising. The work is turning the most important questions into changes you can actually prove out.
Three Signals Worth Testing
Where hotspots point to real fixes
People click something that isn't a link. A hotspot on a non-clickable element means visitors expect it to do something. Make it clickable, and test whether that lifts the next step.
Your main action stays cold. If the button you most want clicked barely registers, that's a placement, wording, or prominence test — not a reason to redesign the whole page.
A whole section is ignored. Combined with scroll-depth data, a dead zone tells you something is either buried too low or not worth the space. Move it, cut it, or test a different version in its place.
One Change at a Time
A specific guess, then proof
A good test starts as a specific, falsifiable guess: "moving the call to action above this cold zone will increase clicks on it." Change that one thing, watch that one number, and let the result decide. The heatmap gets you to a real hypothesis fast; the test is what keeps you honest about whether the hypothesis was right. That discipline — signal, then guess, then proof — is the whole difference between improving a page and just rearranging it.
What Audry Does Here
A hotspot on a picture of a button
A heatmap shows a hot cluster of clicks on an image that looks like a button but isn't one — visitors keep tapping it and nothing happens, then they leave. The real call to action sits a little lower, cold. Nobody would have guessed this from the analytics alone; it only shows up as a pattern on the map.
Audry turns that hotspot into a concrete test — make the image a real button pointing at the intended action, and measure whether completions rise. This is where Audry hands off cleanly to the reading side: Audry sees where people are getting stuck; ARIA's Conversion Intelligence is built to read why a funnel leaks and frame the hypothesis. One finds it, the other explains it.
Keep Reading
Related guides
Read the other half of the map in Reading Scroll-Depth Data, and when a test points at something technical, see CRO & Site Audit for the fix side. For the diagnostic read behind a leaking funnel, cross to ARIA's Conversion Intelligence. Or return to the full Heatmaps guide.
Turn attention into a change worth making
Audry's heatmap is being built now. Join the waitlist to be first to turn where your visitors click into a short list of tests that actually move the number.
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