Heatmaps — See Where Visitors Actually Click

Q: How is this different from Hotjar or Crazy Egg?

Three ways. First: the heat renders over your live page with correct responsive framing per device — not a static screenshot. Second: qualitative signals (dead clicks, rage clicks) are built into every element ranking, not sold as a separate tier. Third: it's first-party and unsampled — same tracking layer as the rest of Digenio AI, GDPR-friendly, no external vendor script.

Q: What's a "dead click" and a "rage click"?

A dead click is a click on an element that produces no visible reaction — an image that looks like a button but isn't, a link with a broken target. A rage click is three or more rapid clicks on the same element — the classic frustration signal when something doesn't respond. Both are flagged per element in the ranking panel.

Q: Is Digenio AI a good Hotjar alternative?

If you want a first-party Hotjar alternative for click heatmaps, yes: unlimited pages, no traffic sampling, dead-click and rage-click flags built in, and device-true rendering over your live site — no third-party script, GDPR-friendly, EU-hosted. The honest caveat: v1 heatmaps are fold-relative (first screen + scroll-depth histogram), and session recording is on the roadmap — so if replay videos are your main need, Hotjar keeps that edge for now. The Page Analysis view puts the heatmap next to your traffic KPIs, which is where a heatmap tool earns its keep.

The old way

Numbers Tell You What. They Never Show You Where

A 2% conversion rate tells you something is wrong — not what, and not where. Classic heatmaps fix half of that, then break the other half with sampled data and static screenshots.

Analytics can't point

Dashboards count clicks and sessions in aggregate. None of them says "people keep clicking this image that isn't a link" — the single most fixable UX bug on most sites.

Screenshot heatmaps lie

Third-party heatmap tools render heat over a frozen snapshot — often at the wrong viewport, months stale, and blind to how your responsive layout actually behaves per device.

Sampled, stitched, guessed

Vendors sample traffic and infer device from user-agent strings. Your heatmap becomes an estimate of an estimate — fine for trivia, useless for redesign decisions.

What you get

Heat Over Your Live Page

The heatmap renders inside Digenio's Page Preview — your real site, correct responsive framing, analytics header included. Not a screenshot.

Click density overlay

Every click aggregated on a 20×20 grid and rendered as smooth green→yellow→red heat blobs. Colour is relative to the hottest area in your date range, with an intensity slider for sparse or dense pages.

Density map

Device segmentation

Desktop, tablet and mobile each get their own heat map — and the live preview reframes to 375px / 768px so you read the heat against the correct layout. Device class comes from the recorded viewport, not user-agent guessing.

Responsive truth

Element click ranking

A side panel ranks your top 15 most-clicked elements — tag, label, click count — so "what do people actually press on this page" is answered in one glance.

Top 15

Dead click flags ☠

Clicks on elements that produced no visible reaction — non-interactive images that look clickable, links going nowhere. Each flagged element shows its dead-click count directly in the ranking.

Friction

Rage click flags 🔥

Three or more rapid clicks on the same element — the frustration signal that precedes abandonment. Spot broken buttons and stuck spinners before they show up as churn.

Frustration

Scroll depth histogram

How far people actually get, bucketed from 0–9% to 100%. Pair it with the fold-anchored heat map to decide what moves up — and what nobody ever reaches.

Fold analysis

Under the hood

From Raw Click to Heat

Track

Digenio's first-party tracker logs every click, dead_click, rage_click and scroll_depth event with element metadata and coordinates — 100% of sessions, no sampling.

Normalise

Each click joins its session's page_view to recover the true viewport, then normalises onto a 20×20 grid — so desktop and mobile clicks become comparable heat.

Aggregate

The API ranks elements, counts dead and rage clicks, and buckets scroll depth for your chosen date range — per page, per device class.

Overlay

Heat renders on an HTML canvas over the live page preview — hover hotspots for element details, switch devices, lock scroll for reading or unlock to browse the real site.

Inside the product

Real Screens, Real Answers

Every shot below is live from the v2 Heatmap — real sites, real sessions, including our sister brand Websfarm under the lens. No mockups, no stock dashboards. The product UI ships in English and Italian.

Aim the lens

Heatmap page picker in Digenio AI v2: Analyzing /resources with 292 views and Open with overlay button

Pick the page, see its traffic first

"Analyzing: /resources (292 views)" — the picker lists every tracked page with its view count, and one button, "Open with overlay", drops the heatmap straight onto the real page. No export, no screenshot gymnastics: the site renders underneath, the heat renders on top.

Every tracked page, with traffic shown before you commit
One click from list to live overlay
The real page renders under the heat — not a wireframe

One bar: page, period, compare, device

The whole targeting system in a single toolbar: analyzed page (/resources), date range 05/09 → 05/10/2026, a Compare checkbox for period-over-period, and the device trio with live counts — Desktop 2 this period. "Heatmap" toggles the overlay; "Open Direct" shows the page clean, side by side with the heat view.

Page + date range + comparison in one place
Heatmap toggle and clean view, one click apart
Periods explicit — heat always has a date range

Device toggle in Digenio AI v2: Desktop with 2 sessions selected, tablet and mobile icons empty, Heatmap button active

Desktop heat is not mobile heat

The device toggle carries its own counts: Desktop 2 selected, tablet and mobile empty this period. When a phone cohort shows up, the same page re-heats for thumbs — menus fold, CTAs move, and the blobs land somewhere else entirely. Blending devices into one map is how teams misread heat; we keep them apart.

Per-device heatmaps, counts on the icons
Empty device = honest zero, not hidden data
Mobile-first pages get mobile-only analysis

See the heat

Heatmap canvas in Digenio AI v2: heat blobs over the analyzed homepage navigation and hero call-to-action areas, fold-relative viewport-anchored view

Where attention actually lands

The overlay itself: the real page, fully rendered, with heat clusters exactly where people clicked and tapped — here concentrated on the navigation, the AI menu and the hero CTAs of the analyzed site, fading to cool everywhere else. The badges tell the engineering story: "fold-relative view (viewport-anchored)" — heat is anchored to what visitors actually saw, and "scroll locked" keeps the map honest while you browse.

Heat on the real page — fonts, menus, forms, all live
Viewport-anchored: heat tied to what was on screen
Click a cluster and browse without losing the map

Heatmap hover tooltip in Digenio AI v2: anchor element Shadow AI Audit with its click count of 1

Hover a blob, get the element

Every heat cluster drills down: hover and the tooltip names the exact element — tag, visible text, click count. Here a link ("Shadow AI Audit — Find every AI tool your…", 1 click) under the hero of the analyzed page. The blob is the question; the tooltip is the answer; the fix meeting takes five minutes.

Element tag + text + clicks on every hover
From color impression to code-level specificity
Small counts stay visible — not just the loud zones

Quantify it

Heatmap evidence panel in Digenio AI v2: element clicks ranked from AI button at 14 clicks down, 68 heat points on map, scroll depth distribution and overlay opacity slider

The map, ranked — plus the reading depth

The side panel turns heat into a ranked table: "AI" button 14 clicks, inputs 8, "Resources" 8, "AI Act Quiz" 7, "Request a Diagnostic" 4… 68 heat points on the map, all devices, current range. Below it, scroll depth in six bands — 455 sessions reach 75–99%, 208 hit the absolute bottom, and nobody stops before 25%. An opacity slider tunes the overlay when you present it.

Element clicks ranked with counts, synced to the map
Scroll-depth bands beside clicks — depth and heat, one panel
Opacity control for demos and screenshots

Period stats strip in Digenio AI v2 heatmap: 725 pageviews, 659 unique visitors, 28s average time, 97.7 percent bounce, 2 conversions, traffic forecast sparkline, 4205 total users

The numbers the heat rides on

The period strip framing every map: 725 pageviews, 659 unique visitors, 28s average time, 97.7% bounce, 2 conversions — plus a traffic sparkline with forecast tail, 4,205 total users (4,327 sessions) and new/returning split (4,196/9). A 97.7% bounce with two conversions is a very specific story: narrow, but it closes. The heatmap shows you where; this strip tells you how much it mattered.

Views, uniques, time, bounce, conversions — same period as the map
Traffic trend with forecast — is this page rising or dying?
Heat always paired with the volume that produced it

FAQ

Questions, Answered

Does the heatmap work on any website, or only pages built with Digenio?

Any page carrying the Digenio tracking snippet gets full heatmap coverage — no rebuild needed. And if you create pages with Smart Pages, they come pre-instrumented, so heat data flows from the first visitor.

How is this different from Hotjar or Crazy Egg?

Three ways. First: the heat renders over your live page with correct responsive framing per device — not a static screenshot. Second: qualitative signals (dead clicks, rage clicks) are built into every element ranking, not sold as a separate tier. Third: it's first-party and unsampled — same tracking layer as the rest of Digenio AI, GDPR-friendly, no external vendor script.

What's a "dead click" and a "rage click"?

A dead click is a click on an element that produces no visible reaction — an image that looks like a button but isn't, a link with a broken target. A rage click is three or more rapid clicks on the same element — the classic frustration signal when something doesn't respond. Both are flagged per element in the ranking panel.

Does the heatmap cover the whole page or just the first screen?

Heatmap v1 is fold-relative: clicks are normalised to each visitor's viewport, so the map shows where attention lands on the first screen — the highest-value real estate. The scroll-depth histogram alongside it tells you how many people ever get further. A scroll-linked version mapping the full document is on the roadmap.

Where does the heatmap live inside the product?

Analytics → Page Analysis → pick a page → open the Page Preview. The 🔥 Heatmap button sits in the preview toolbar; KPIs, traffic sparkline, next-page flow and user analysis stay in the same screen, so heat and context are never more than a glance apart.

Is Digenio AI a good Hotjar alternative?

If you want a first-party Hotjar alternative for click heatmaps, yes: unlimited pages, no traffic sampling, dead-click and rage-click flags built in, and device-true rendering over your live site — no third-party script, GDPR-friendly, EU-hosted. The honest caveat: v1 heatmaps are fold-relative (first screen + scroll-depth histogram), and session recording is on the roadmap — so if replay videos are your main need, Hotjar keeps that edge for now. The Page Analysis view puts the heatmap next to your traffic KPIs, which is where a heatmap tool earns its keep.

Heatmaps: See Where Visitors Actually Click