heat mapping

Definition

A visualization tool showing where users click, scroll, and hover on a webpage using color-coded overlays. It reveals the uncomfortable truth that nobody reads your carefully crafted copy; they just look at pictures and buttons.

Example Usage

The heat map showed users were clicking on non-clickable images while completely ignoring our CTA button, which explains our conversion rate.

Origin

Adapted from data visualization techniques, popularized for web analytics in the mid-2000s

Fun Fact

Heat maps consistently show that F-shaped reading patterns dominate, yet designers keep putting important content in spots nobody looks at.

Source: Web analytics and user experience research

Related Terms

Intermediate

native blindness

Consumer tendency to scroll past native advertising without noticing it, having developed immunity to sponsored content that mimics editorial. Evolution in action, advertising division.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

the fold

The visible portion of a webpage or email before users have to scroll down. The prime real estate where your most important content lives or dies.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Intermediate

CPC

Cost Per Click, or the exact dollar amount you pay every time someone accidentally taps your ad while trying to close it. It's like putting a coin jar next to a door handle and charging people for touching it on their way out.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Intermediate

net promoter score

A metric measuring customer loyalty by asking how likely someone is to recommend your company on a 0-10 scale. Promoters (9-10) minus detractors (0-6) equals your score, which somehow ignores the passives (7-8) entirely.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Intermediate

retargeting pixel

A snippet of code that tracks website visitors so you can haunt them with ads across the internet. The technology that makes people think you're literally reading their minds.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Intermediate

recency, frequency, monetary

A customer segmentation method analyzing when someone last purchased, how often they purchase, and how much they spend. Abbreviated as RFM, it's the scorecard that determines whether you get the good coupons or the desperate ones.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

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