There are a few tools that help website owners to determine what their visitors get up to when they visit their website.  Google Analytics provides some excellent data on visitor traffic, in terms of which websites people are coming from, how long they spend on your website, and which page they eventually leave from.

But if you are curious to see exactly where the “hotspots” are on your website, ie. where your visitors actually click, there is a tool that can show this information.  And the information is shown in the form of a Heat Map.

What is a Heat Map?

According to Wikipedia a Heat Map is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors. The term is also used to mean its thematic application as a choropleth map.

In simple terms, a heat map is a tool that can help test a website’s usability in a very easy way. You can see where the attention of the user goes as soon as they visit the website. As you can guess, the red color means high intensity of clicks, the orange color is medium intensity, yellow is very little and when it comes to green and blue there is no activity at all.

There are a few companies on the web that offer the heat map tracking service. Most of them have a trial period so you can test it and see if you like it, or find it helpful.  There is even a WordPress Plugin for those whose website is a WordPress Blog:

1. Click Density

2. Crazy Egg

3. Click Tale

4. LabsMedia (Free)

5. Mouse Eye Tracking – WordPress Plug In

I don’t know anyone personally that has been using Heat Maps, so if you are using them please tell us your experience.  Or if you think this kind of tool might be helpful, please share below.