8. Heatmaps
A single session shows you what one person did. A heatmap aggregates many sessions into one color-coded picture of behavior on a page — where people click, how their cursor moves, and how far they scroll. In FullSession, a heatmap is a saved configuration you build for a specific page, audience, and device, and it's rendered as an overlay on a real snapshot of your page.
8.1 How Heatmaps Work
The three map types
FullSession offers three heatmap types, switched with a toggle at the top of the heatmap view:
Click
Clicks Map
Where visitors clicked or tapped
Movement
Movement Map
Where the mouse/cursor moved
Scroll
Scroll Map
How far down the page visitors scrolled
Rendered on a real snapshot
A FullSession heatmap isn't drawn on a generic screenshot. When you build one, FullSession:
Finds sessions that match your filters (page, segment, device, date, minimum page duration).
Picks a representative session — typically the one with the most scroll depth (or the longest visit) on that page.
Captures that session's full DOM snapshot (the actual page, with its real styles and structure).
Overlays the aggregated heatmap data on top of that snapshot inside a scaled iframe.
Because the overlay sits on a genuine snapshot of your page, the hotspots line up with the real layout your visitors saw. You can swap to a different representative snapshot at any time with Update Snapshot (section 8.7).
Creating a heatmap
Go to Heatmaps and create a new heatmap.
Choose the page:
Page — pick from your site's known pages, or
URL — enter a URL pattern (supports a
*wildcard for matching variations).
Set the filters — segment, device, date range, minimum page duration, and optionally a funnel (section 8.6).
FullSession renders the map. Switch between Clicks, Movement, and Scroll as needed.
Save it so you (and your team) can return to it later (section 8.7).
Tip — heatmaps draw from your recorded sessions. A brand-new page with little traffic will produce a sparse map; give it time to collect visits, or widen the date range.
8.2 Click Map
The Clicks Map overlays your page with a heat visualization of where visitors clicked or tapped — the warmer the area, the more interaction it received.
Switching to Rage Clicks, Error Clicks, or Dead Clicks turns the click map into a frustration map — instantly showing which parts of the page are causing problems, not just where people click.
Page statistics
Alongside the map, a statistics panel summarizes the page's health and traffic for your filters, including:
Total views and unique users
Average time on page and average load time
Totals for Rage, Error, and Dead clicks
This gives you the headline numbers behind the visualization at a glance.
Finding frustration by element — to see which specific elements receive the most rage/dead/error clicks (ranked, with counts), use the Top Elements report in section 8.5. FullSession does not have a separate "raging elements" page; that data lives in the click-map element report.
8.3 Movement Map
The Movement Map visualizes where visitors moved their mouse/cursor across the page. Because cursor movement often tracks where people are looking and reading, it's a useful proxy for attention on desktop.
What it reveals
Areas of attention — sustained cursor presence often indicates where visitors focused.
Reading patterns — movement can hint at how people scan a layout.
Ignored regions — cold areas suggest content visitors never engaged with.
Movement is cursor movement, not hover-only. The Movement Map shows where the pointer traveled across the page; it's most meaningful for desktop sessions, where a mouse is in play. On touch devices, interaction is better understood through the Clicks Map (taps are captured as clicks).
8.4 Scroll Map
The Scroll Map shows how far down the page visitors actually scrolled — answering the single most important question about any long page: how much of it does anyone see?
What it shows
The scroll map colors the page from top to bottom by what share of visitors reached each depth, and it marks several reference lines:
Average Fold
The average scroll depth visitors reached (e.g. "Average Fold 450px")
25% percentile
25% of visitors scrolled at least this far
50% percentile
The median scroll depth — half of visitors reached this point
75% percentile
75% of visitors scrolled at least this far
Reading the scroll map
If your key message or CTA sits below the average fold, most visitors never see it without scrolling.
The gap between the 25% and 75% lines shows how consistent scrolling is — a tight band means most visitors behave similarly; a wide band means behavior varies.
A steep fall-off near a percentile line tells you where visitors tend to stop.
Tip — pair the Scroll Map with the Clicks Map. If an important button is below the average fold and getting few clicks, the fix is usually placement: move it up.
8.5 Top Elements & the Element Report
Beyond the visual overlay, the Clicks Map includes a Top Elements report — a ranked list of the page's most-interacted elements, with detailed metrics. This is where heatmaps connect to the Named Elements and Watch Rules from [Chapter 7 — Recording Rules & Element Tracking].
What each element shows
For every ranked element, the report displays its CSS selector (copyable) and metrics including:
Total clicks, with the percentage of sessions that clicked it
Users who clicked, with the percentage of unique users
Per-element frustration counts — rage, error, and dead clicks
Interaction detail such as hover-to-click counts and average hover time
The ranking follows whichever aggregation is selected — choose Rage Clicks, for example, and the list re-ranks to show the elements causing the most frustration first.
Funnel conversion per element
When the heatmap is linked to a funnel (set in the heatmap's configuration — see section 8.6), the Top Elements report gains three additional columns for each element:
Funnel finished
Sessions that interacted with this element and completed the funnel
Funnel total
Sessions that interacted with this element
Funnel conversion rate
The share of those sessions that went on to finish the funnel
This answers "which elements on this page are most — or least — associated with users completing the funnel?" without any cross-referencing. Elements with fewer than twelve clicks are excluded from this view to avoid noisy percentages.
Actions on each element
Label
Give the element a human-readable name (creates a Named Element) so it appears clearly in reports and funnels
View Sessions
Jump to the sessions where visitors interacted with this element
Picking elements directly on the heatmap
The element report includes an Element Selector mode that lets you pick elements directly on the heatmap to track — creating or updating a Watch Rule ([Chapter 7, section 7.4]) without hand-writing a selector. This is the most convenient way to start tracking a specific element.
There's also a Hidden Elements toggle to show or hide elements that are no longer present or visible in the captured snapshot — useful when reconciling a heatmap against a page that has since changed.
Per-element details
Clicking an element on the map opens a detail popup with its full stats — number of clicks and hovers, unique-session clicks, visitor click rate, hover-to-click rate, average hover time, and timing metrics — so you can analyze one element in depth.
Tip — use View Sessions on a high-frustration element to watch real recordings of people struggling with it, then confirm the cause before filing a fix.
8.6 Filtering, Segments & Device Views
A heatmap of all visitors is useful, but the real insight comes from scoping it. FullSession heatmaps support a specific set of filters, applied when you configure the heatmap.
Direct heatmap filters
Page / URL
The page to analyze — a known page or a URL pattern (with * wildcard)
Segment
The audience to focus on ([Chapter 11 — Segments])
Device
Desktop, Tablet, or Mobile (see below)
Date range
A relative preset or a custom start/end window
Minimum page duration
Excludes very short, bounce-like visits (helps filter out noise)
Funnel (optional)
Link to a funnel to show per-element conversion data in the Top Elements report ([Chapter 12 — Funnels])
Filtering by audience uses Segments
Heatmaps don't have direct filters for country, traffic source, new vs. returning, browser, or OS. To narrow a heatmap by any of those, build a Segment with those conditions and select it as the heatmap's segment. Segments are FullSession's reusable audience definitions — see [Chapter 11 — Segments].
Device views
Switch the heatmap between three device renderings, each with its own viewport size:
Desktop
1920 × 1080
Tablet
768 × 1024
Mobile
412 × 915
The snapshot and overlay are scaled to fit your screen while preserving the page's responsive layout. Always review desktop and mobile separately — the same page often behaves very differently across viewports, and a CTA that's a hotspot on desktop can be missed entirely on mobile.
Comparing segments
There's no built-in side-by-side segment comparison in a single heatmap. To compare two audiences, create two saved heatmaps for the same page — one per segment — and view them side by side. (See section 8.7 for saving and duplicating.)
8.7 Saving, Managing & Updating Heatmaps
Because heatmaps are configured artifacts, FullSession keeps a managed library of them per site.
The heatmap library
Your saved heatmaps appear in a list showing each one's name, URL, creator, and date. From here you can edit, duplicate, or delete a heatmap, and search by title, URL, or creator. This makes it easy to maintain a standing set of heatmaps for the pages you watch most.
Saving and duplicating
Save — update the current heatmap's configuration.
Save As — create a copy under a new title (handy for spinning up a segment- or device-specific variant).
Duplicate — one-click copy from the list.
Duplicating is the practical way to build the two-heatmap comparison described in section 8.6 — duplicate a heatmap, change the segment or device, and view both.
Update Snapshot
The map is drawn on one representative session's snapshot. If that snapshot doesn't represent the page well (or the page has changed), click Update Snapshot to re-pick a different representative session and re-render the overlay.
Heatmaps in the session player
Heatmaps are also reachable from the session player: the player offers a Session Replay / HeatMaps tab pair ([Chapter 6, section 6.1]), so you can flip from watching one visitor to seeing the aggregate heat for that page.
Exporting
Heatmap export is not yet available. A download option is marked coming soon. For now, share findings by saving the heatmap (so teammates can open it directly) or by capturing your own screenshot.
The big picture — FullSession heatmaps are saved configurations rendered over a real page snapshot, in three flavors (Clicks, Movement, Scroll). The Click Map doubles as a frustration map via its Rage / Error / Dead aggregations, and the Top Elements report ranks the exact elements driving interaction and frustration — with one click to label them or watch the sessions behind them. Link a funnel to a heatmap to see per-element conversion rates alongside click metrics. Scope by device, date, page-duration, and Segment (for geo/source/returning audiences), and manage everything from the heatmap library. There's no separate raging-elements page, no segment-comparison view, and export is still coming.
Next up: [Chapter 9 — Dashboards] zooms out from individual pages to your whole product, assembling session metrics, heatmap insights, and custom events into shareable dashboards.
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