How to Use Heatmaps to Improve Your Landing Page
Your landing page has a conversion rate. That is useful, but it only tells you what happened.
If 1,000 people visit your page and 50 convert, you are left with a much more interesting question: what did the other 950 do?
Did they see your offer? Did they scroll far enough to reach your form? Did they click your main call to action, or something completely different? Did they stop at the section you spent hours perfecting, or scroll straight past it?
That is what heatmaps help you see.
What is a landing page heatmap?
A landing page heatmap is a visual layer drawn over your own page that shows how visitors behaved on it: where they clicked, how far they scrolled, and where they spent time. Instead of a single conversion number, you get the behaviour behind that number, so you can decide what to change next rather than guess.
Leadpages includes three types of heatmap on the Optimize and Scale plans: click heatmaps, scroll depth, and attention maps. They sit in the Insights panel inside the editor, drawn over the page itself. There is no separate tool to install and no extra cost.
The three types of heatmaps in Leadpages
Each one answers a different question.
1. Click heatmaps: what are people clicking?
A click heatmap shows where people click or tap on your page, colour-coded by intensity. That makes it easy to see which buttons, links, images, and other elements attract interaction, and which do not.
But do not just look for the hottest part of the page. Look for:
Your main CTA getting ignored. If secondary links are attracting more clicks than the action you actually want visitors to take, that is worth investigating. Your CTA might need to be more prominent, moved, or rewritten.
People clicking something that is not clickable. An image, headline, logo, or other element getting repeated clicks can be a clue that visitors expect it to do something. Maybe it should. Or maybe the design is unintentionally making it look interactive.
Distractions stealing clicks. Navigation, secondary links, or competing CTAs may be pulling attention away from the action the page was built to drive.
The question is not simply are people clicking? It is are they clicking what I want them to click?
2. Scroll depth: how far do people actually get?
You built the whole landing page. That does not mean people are seeing the whole landing page.
Scroll-depth heatmaps show what percentage of visitors reach different parts of your page, with breakpoints at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%.
This becomes particularly useful when you compare where people stop scrolling with where you have put the information that matters. Imagine your page has the main offer near the top, customer proof halfway down, pricing farther down, and another CTA near the bottom.
If most visitors disappear before reaching your customer proof, rewriting the testimonial probably is not your first problem. People are not seeing it.
Instead, look at where visitor numbers start dropping. Then ask:
- Is something immediately before that point losing people?
- Does the page take too long to get to the value?
- Is your strongest proof buried too far down?
- Is an important CTA sitting below the point where many visitors leave?
Sometimes what looks like a conversion problem is really a page-order problem.
3. Attention maps: where are people spending their time?
Scrolling past something and spending time with it are not the same thing.
Leadpages Attention Maps use mouse movement and hover duration to show where desktop visitors are spending time on your page. This gives you another signal about which areas might deserve a closer look.
Maybe visitors spend more time around your comparison section than your testimonials. Maybe pricing attracts a lot of attention. Maybe the section you thought explained your offer perfectly gets skimmed almost immediately.
There is an important caveat: more attention does not automatically mean better. Someone might spend time on a section because they are interested. They might also spend time there because they are confused. The heatmap gives you a signal. Your job is to decide what that signal might mean, and then test your hypothesis.
Attention Maps are available for desktop views. On mobile and tablet, Leadpages provides click and scroll-depth heatmaps.
Five things to look for on your own landing page
You do not need to stare at a colourful heatmap and wait for an insight to appear. Start with five questions.
1. Are people clicking your main CTA? Find the action the page was designed to drive. Is it actually attracting clicks? If not, look at its position, prominence, copy, and the information immediately before it. Do not assume you need a new button colour. Ask why someone reaching that point on the page might not be ready, or motivated, to click.
2. Are people clicking things they should not be? Unexpected clicks are useful clues. If visitors repeatedly click an image or piece of text that is not interactive, ask why it looks clickable and what visitors might expect to happen. That might reveal an opportunity.
3. Are people reaching your most important content? Open the scroll-depth view. Find your form, CTA, pricing, social proof, or product demonstration. Are visitors actually getting there? If not, moving important information higher may be a better experiment than rewriting it.
4. Where does attention disappear? On desktop, use the Attention Map to look for areas where visitors appear to spend more or less time. If people consistently move quickly past a section, look at the section itself and the transition into it. Is it too long? Repetitive? Hard to scan? Is the value unclear? Again, do not treat the heatmap as the answer. Treat it as a reason to investigate.
5. Do mobile and desktop visitors behave differently? Do not assume they experience your page the same way. A CTA that is immediately visible on desktop might require several swipes on mobile. A section that is easy to scan on a large screen might feel endless on a phone. Use the available device views to understand the experience your visitors are actually getting.
How much traffic do you need before a heatmap means anything?
Heatmaps get more useful as data accumulates. With fewer than about 30 sessions, the data will be sparse. For most pages with steady traffic, clearer patterns start to appear within a few days.
That means you should not redesign a page because three people did something unexpected. Look for patterns, not individual behaviour. More traffic gives you a clearer picture of what is actually happening.
You found something. Now what?
This is the important part. Finding an unexpected hot spot is interesting. Doing something useful with it is optimization.
A simple process looks like this:
- Observe. Your scroll-depth heatmap shows that a large portion of visitors are not reaching an important CTA.
- Form a hypothesis. Moving that CTA higher on the page might get more visitors to see and act on it.
- Make the change. Create another version of the page with the CTA in the new position.
- Test it. Run an A/B test comparing the original page with your new version.
- Measure what happened. Did the new version actually increase conversions?
How big does your test need to be?
Calculate sample size and confidence before you ship the experiment — free, no signup needed.
Open the A/B Test CalculatorThat is the difference between making a page look better and proving that you made it work better. If you are not sure how long to run that test or how to tell a real winner from a lucky one, start with A/B testing statistics, and use a landing page testing plan to decide what to test first.
One important distinction: Leadpages Heatmaps show behavioural data for the published page. Version-aware heatmaps that compare behaviour across individual A/B test variants are on the roadmap and not available today. So use your heatmap to find the hypothesis, then use your A/B test results to prove whether the change worked.
How to use heatmaps in Leadpages
If you are on Leadpages Optimize or Scale, heatmap tracking is built into your published pages. There is no separate tracking code to install, no JavaScript snippet to copy, and no tag manager setup required. The built-in tracking is lightweight and non-blocking, using batched event sending so it does not get in the way of your page load.
Once your page is published and receiving traffic, Leadpages begins collecting the behavioural data for you. To explore it:
- Open your published page in the Leadpages editor.
- Open the Insights panel and select the Heatmap tab.
- Pick a mode: Clicks or Attention.
- Turn on the Scroll Depth layer to see drop-off drawn over either mode, and Click Labels to see your top click targets ranked in order, so you can tell at a glance whether your main CTA is number one or number nine.
- Switch the viewport between desktop, tablet, and mobile.
- Choose a date range: 7, 14, 30, or 90 days.
- Export a PNG if you need the view for a report.
- Return to editing when you have found something you want to change, then publish it or put it into an A/B test.
The Heatmap tab inside the Insights panel. The numbered pills on the page are the Click Labels layer, ranking the top click targets in order.
That is an important difference between having heatmaps inside Leadpages and using a separate analytics tool. You do not have to find a problem in one product, switch tools, find the page again, make the change somewhere else, and then set up another tool to test it.
See the behaviour. Edit the page. Test the idea. It is one workflow.
How Leadpages heatmaps compare to Hotjar and Crazy Egg
The heatmap data itself is comparable. The difference is workflow.
Hotjar and Crazy Egg are standalone tools: you see the data in one place and edit your page in another. In Leadpages, the heatmap overlays directly on your page inside the editor, so you can see the problem and fix it without switching tools, and create an A/B test on that change in the same session.
Heatmap data is retained for 24 months on Optimize and 36 months on Scale, and you can export heatmap screenshots as PNG files for reporting.
Heatmaps are evidence, not instructions
If visitors are not clicking a button, a heatmap cannot tell you why. Maybe the button needs stronger copy. Maybe it is in the wrong place. Maybe visitors have not seen enough proof yet. Maybe the offer is not compelling. Maybe they do not understand what happens when they click.
The same is true of scroll depth and attention. The goal is not to make every section of your heatmap look hot. The goal is to replace "I think we should change this" with "here is something visitors are doing, I have an idea why, let us test it."
That is a much better way to improve a landing page, and it is one part of a larger loop. The rest of it is in the complete guide to landing page optimization.
Your conversion rate tells you what happened. Your visitors tell you why.
A 5% conversion rate tells you five out of every hundred visitors converted. It does not tell you what happened to the other 95.
Heatmaps give you another layer of evidence. Where did they click? How far did they get? Where did they spend their time?
Once you can answer those questions, you have something much better than another opinion about what your landing page needs. You have a hypothesis. Then you can change the page, test it, and find out whether you were right.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a separate heatmap tool if I use Leadpages? No. Leadpages includes click heatmaps, scroll depth tracking, and attention maps on the Optimize and Scale plans. The data overlays directly on your page inside the editor. No separate tool, no extra cost.
Which Leadpages plan includes heatmaps? Optimize and Scale. Grow includes A/B testing and Dynamic Text Replacement but not heatmaps. Upgrading from Grow to Optimize also adds Smart Traffic and automatic personalization.
What are the three types of heatmaps? Click heatmaps show where visitors click, colour-coded by intensity. Scroll-depth heatmaps show what percentage of visitors reach each section, with breakpoints at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. Attention maps show where visitors spend time based on mouse movement and hover duration, on desktop.
Do I need to install any tracking code? No. Tracking is built into every published page at the Optimize tier. No JavaScript snippets, no tag manager, no third-party scripts.
Does the tracking slow down my pages? The built-in tracking is lightweight and non-blocking. It uses batched event sending to avoid affecting page load time or the visitor experience.
Does attention tracking work on mobile? Attention maps use mouse movement data and are available on desktop views. Mobile and tablet views show click and scroll-depth heatmaps.
How much traffic do I need? With fewer than about 30 sessions the data will be sparse. For most pages with steady traffic, actionable patterns appear within a few days.
Can I see heatmaps for A/B test variants? Heatmaps show data for the published page. Version-aware heatmaps that compare across A/B test variants are on the roadmap.
How long is heatmap data retained? 24 months on Optimize, and 36 months on Scale plus data warehouse export.
Can I export heatmap data? You can export heatmap screenshots as PNG files for reporting and presentations.
Leadpages Heatmaps are included with Optimize and Scale. There is no separate heatmap tool to install or pay for.
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