MGH Guides: User Experience Tools for Beginners: Heat Mapping

Heat mapping is a great way to collection information about how your users interact with your site. The applications track and visualize the clicked links on your website and often much more.

How to Use Heat Mapping

There are free services for generating heat maps, but they tend to be too limited to be useful. Thankfully there are inexpensive options as well.

Once you sign up, they'll give you the embed code to put on your site. Then you visit their page and see your heat map. Some even let you see videos of users' paths through your site.

Tools for Heat Mapping

All of the following services' heatmaps include click tracking, scroll reach, and segmentation. Additional features are listed next to each. These are in no particular order.

Content Square
Screen capture replays, integration with other UX services (analytics, A/B testing, etc.).
CrazyEgg
Segmentation based on traffic source, but no screen capture recording of individual visitors. Subscription limits by "active pages" not domain. 30 day free trial lets you test out the features before committing.
Inspectlet
Screen capture replays, and form analytics. They do have a free version, but lets you capture only 100 sessions per month. The number of sessions jumps to 5,000 in the next tier up, while still being relatively affordable.
LuckyOrange
Screen capture replays, polling, and chat features. Free 7 day trial, with entry level subscription of $10/month for 25,000 page views