How do clickmaps or heatmaps collect data?
Still have a question, spotted an error, or have a better explanation or a source we should cite?
A clickmap shows you a visual overlay of your email with highlighted areas where people clicked. Instead of a spreadsheet full of click counts, you see your actual email design with colors showing where attention went.
The data behind it comes from the same redirect tracking used for regular CTR reporting. Every link in your email is wrapped in a tracking URL. When someone clicks, the ESP logs which link was clicked. The clickmap then maps those clicks back to each link's position in your email template, turning click counts into a visual heat-map layer.
What clickmaps are useful for:
- Seeing whether your main CTA or a secondary link is getting more attention
- Finding out if subscribers are clicking links you didn't intend them to prioritize
- Comparing link placement across different email layouts
- Diagnosing whether your email hierarchy is working (do people see the important stuff first?)
What they can't tell you: whether subscribers hovered over a link without clicking, or which images they actually looked at. Email doesn't support hover tracking the way web analytics does. Clickmaps only capture actual click events, not scroll depth or reading behavior.
Not all ESPs offer clickmaps natively. If yours doesn't, some third-party email analytics tools offer this as an add-on. The underlying data is the same. What changes is just the visualization layer on top.
Contributors
Who worked on this answer
Every name links to their profile. Every company links to their site. Real people, real accountability.
