What is a Heatmap?

Step into the visually engaging world of Heatmaps, a feature in Squid that transforms how you view your website's user interactions. Heatmaps are like thermal images for your website, showing you the 'hot' areas where users click, move, and scroll the most.

As you navigate through our Heatmaps, you'll see color-coded representations of activity on your site. Areas with the most interactions are highlighted in warm colors like red and orange, while less active areas appear in cooler colors like blue and green. This immediate visual feedback provides a straightforward way of analyzing what draws the most attention and engagement on your website.

Why are Heatmaps useful? They offer insights into user behavior that traditional analytics can't match. By seeing where users are most active, you can optimize your website layout, improve content placement, and make data-driven decisions to enhance user experience. Whether it’s adjusting the position of your call-to-action button or reworking the layout of your homepage, Heatmaps give you the actionable insights you need.

No technical expertise? No problem! Our Heatmaps are designed to be user-friendly and easily interpretable. Just a quick glance can give you valuable insights into your website's usability and effectiveness.

Using Squid's Heatmaps

Squid automatically captures and calculates where users spend their time on each page of your website. Every time a user clicks, scrolls or moves, we capture their unique behaviors.

On your dashboard, scroll down to the 'Pages' analytic. For each page, you will see a fire icon (🔥).



Click on the icon to launch Squid's heatmap viewer. Based on teh amount of traffic and the timeframe, you will see a heatmap such as this:



In the top menu bar of the heatmap viewer, there are several functions:

Eyeball

Clicking the eyeball will turn on and off the visual display of users. The eyeball is lit up in purple in the picture below. When active, you can see Squid displays the number count alongside the colored "heat" overlays. 

Hovering

You can also 'hover' over the heatmap and you will see the user count, as well, noted by the black box in the picture below. 


Clicks are the amount of clicks by all users. Users are unique users. So, if you have 10 clicks and 2 users, you might have 1 click by 1 user and 9 clicks from the other.

Unique Users

If you click on the black box, Squid will display the actually users with their click count. This is a great way to get a detailed understanding of the distribution of users and their engagement. If Squid knows the user and your privacy settings are turned off, we will displayed the user's email if we know it. If we don't know the users email or if your privacy settings are on, we will show the users as anonymous. 

Desktop/Mobile View

In the heatmap menu, you can change your view to see how users interact differently between mobile and desktop. Squid tracks these events separately based on the user's device. 

Time

Adjust the drop down to view results over different periods of time.

Exit Heatmap

When you are done viewing your heatmap, click 'Exit heatmap' to return to Squid's dashboard.

Updated on: 09/02/2024