Heatmaps vs. Scrollmaps: What’s the Difference?

Heatmaps and scrollmaps are both useful analytics methods that show hidden user behaviors. They can greatly help you understand the weaknesses and strengths of your website’s design and content.

Of course, interpreting them needs a bit of expertise. In this blog post, we’ll explain what heatmaps and scrollmaps are and how you can use them to improve your website.

Also, you’ll learn the key differences between heatmaps and scrollmaps to use them correctly in your website auditing strategy.

What Are Heatmaps in Web Analytics?

A heatmap is basically a colorful display of the activities of your website’s visitors. It shows where people are active on your website.

Web analytics tools usually use colors like red and orange to spot parts of your website where users click or hang out. Also, they use different colors, like blue or empty areas, for areas that are ignored by visitors.

So, heatmaps turn your visitors’ activities into a map that everyone can interpret, even beginners.

As a result, you don’t need to struggle with numbers to calculate the engagement of users. Heatmaps show the truth to help you see:

In fact, heatmaps track the interactions of users on your page via their mouse activities. Here is what heatmaps show:

Find fake buttons

Sometimes people click on items, like images, icons, or text, that aren’t linked. In fact, they expect to find more information about those items.

In traditional web analytics, you can’t find these behaviors, but heatmaps will give you detailed insights into these fake buttons.

You can use this report to revise your content and make more clickable items to increase the engagement rate.

Spot less-attractive items 

This especially happens on product pages. Visitors usually watch pretty photos while important items like the specs tab or “key features” section get no notice.

Using heatmaps, you can easily spot those items and improve them to attract the attention of visitors.

Improving layouts

Heatmaps make the process of designing landing pages much easier. They help you find friction and dead zones on important sections. You can use them to optimize the design and improve user experience.

What Are Scrollmaps in Web Analytics?

Scrollmaps measure how much users scroll on a page. Then, web analytics tools translate that data into a visual gradient to show you where users’ journey on your page ends.

As you know, traditional web analytics gives you the number of visitors and total views of a page. 

However, it can’t see how much of the content the visitors have read. That’s where scrollmaps can be beneficial.

A scrollmap shows how far people read into your blog posts and uncovers which parts of your page are attractive to your visitors.

Scrolling behavior usually shows interest and momentum, and scrollmaps display it in a visualized form to make behavior analytics much easier for you.

Scrollmaps help you analyze long-form content, landing pages, and multi-section layouts.

Using scrollmaps, you can figure out:

• If visitors scroll down the hero section.
• Whether or not they see the main CTA.
• If your content flows naturally from section to section.
• If your page is too long, too dense, or too overwhelming for mobile users.

Overall, scrollmaps often reveal recurring patterns like:

If you use scrollmaps in the right way, they can be an analytics tool for auditing your website. They show you:

• Design issues
• User journey problems
• Content weaknesses

Heatmaps vs. Scrollmaps: Key Differences

Although both heatmaps and scrollmaps are in the same category of behavioral analytics tools, they provide different insights. If you want to interpret them correctly, you have to know these differences.

As said earlier, heatmaps track interaction, while scrollmaps show content visibility. In other words, heatmaps focus on what users click and hover over on your page, and scrollmaps reveal how far down a page they visit.

A heatmap might show low engagement with a CTA and help your team recognize that the button doesn’t attract attention.

On the other hand, a scrollmap might say that most visitors don’t reach the section of the page where you’ve put the CTA. This might be more basic than the details of a heatmap. However, without this information, you can’t make the right decision.

Also, sometimes the result of a scrollmap might be misleading. For example, if scrollmaps show that users scroll the entire page, you might think that the page is perfect. But a heatmap can show that visitors don’t interact with the elements in their visits. This tells that the content is interesting, but it doesn’t encourage visitors to take action.

In fact, without analyzing both analytics, you can’t find the right solution because you don’t know the true reason.

The following table summarizes the key differences between heatmaps vs scrollmaps:

The Best Web Analytics Tools for Heatmaps and Scrollmaps

Behavioral analytics has grown rapidly, and modern tools now offer sophisticated heatmap and scrollmap capabilities with minimal impact on performance.

While different products suit different needs, several platforms consistently stand out for their accuracy, ease of use, and actionable insights.

Some tools are designed for deep UX research, while others specialize in marketing optimization. Many combine heatmaps and scrollmaps with session replays, form analytics, funnels, and A/B testing. This blend allows teams to view user behavior from multiple angles.

Here is a concise overview of the leading tools:

Some platforms excel in speed and simplicity, while others offer enterprise-level precision. The “best” tool ultimately depends on your traffic volume, optimization goals, and how deeply you want to analyze behavioral data.

Tips for Interpreting Heatmaps and Scrollmaps

Now that you know what heatmaps and scrollmaps are, learn how to use them to improve your website.

Here are the best practices when analyzing heatmaps and scrollmaps on your website:

1. Qualify the results: The colors are obvious, but you still need to know more to be able to analyze. Try to understand who’s visiting, what phone or computer they’re on, and why they came.
2. Use heatmap & scrollmap at the same time: Heatmaps show if people click items, and scrollmaps show if they saw the items. If you don’t consider them together, you can’t find the problem to fix it. 
3. Check mobile and desktop visitors separately: Visitors who use mobile phones scroll way more than desktop users. Also, they tap anything that looks like a button. In fact, an item that looks dead on a computer screen can be interesting on mobile. So, you have to analyze them separately.
4. Consider traffic source: Filter the results by traffic source to have a better picture of heatmaps and scrollmaps. A visitor who clicked your link in an email is totally different from someone who googled something and found your page. So, you have to analyze them differently.
5. Consider a longer period: Sometimes, one viral post can change the result. So, you should not consider it for decision-making. You have to wait a few weeks to have a general view of your visitors’ behavior.
6. Optimize clickable items: When your visitors click something that doesn’t work, you have to create a clickable item linking to more information or something they want.

Conclusion

Heatmaps and scrollmaps can show you behind the scenes. Using heatmaps, you can see where your visitors have clicked or waited. Also, scrollmaps show how much of the page has been read by your visitors. Remember that you can’t audit your site based on this data without considering other analytics results. Try to track all important behavioral metrics to spot issues and optimize your website’s layout and content. 

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