User behavior analysis is a very complex matter. It’s one of the most important ways to understand how customers engage with your website, web app, or landing page. You can analyze user behavior via different user activities on your website, such as cart abandonment, interacting with buttons and other elements, navigating through different pages, or scrolling up and down the page.

Researching this data is imperative if you want to capture users’ attention. Scroll maps are a great way to learn more about your visitors and measure the effectiveness of converting elements found on important parts of your website, such as landing pages. 

Landing pages usually contain action-driven buttons to encourage customers to sign up for your product and service and to run them further down the sales funnel, which is precisely why they’re so important.

Scroll maps record and capture data on how users scroll through your pages and help you spot different ways to improve their experience.

In this article, we’ll go in-depth about scroll maps, their importance, and how you can use them to provide your customers with pixel-perfect user experiences. First, let’s discuss what scroll maps are and how they work.

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What is a scroll map?

A scroll map is a tool that analyzes user behavior to help you better understand their actions and figure out what encourages them or prevents them from converting. You can capture scroll maps across different device types (tablet, computer, mobile) and use scroll data presented in visual reports to understand how far down the page your customers scroll.

When reviewing your scroll map data, you will see different colors on each page. Red represents the most viewed sections, while cold colors represent the least viewed page sections. Scroll maps also provide you with numerical data to show the percentage of individuals who went all the way to the bottom of the page. You can also calculate average fold data showing the parts of pages that receive the most attention from users before they scroll. 

You can try FullSession, our web analytics tool, which offers many features that help you get inside your customers’ minds. Sign up for a free trial to test different options like heatmaps, session recording, session replay, or customer feedback tools and learn how to improve your website.

Overall, analyzing customers’ scrolling behavior can give you many insights into which pages need improvement to increase visitor engagement and achieve maximum conversions. 

While many use the terms scroll maps and heat maps interchangeably, it’s important to note that these two terms aren’t to be confused – here’s why.

The difference between scroll maps and heat maps

Scroll maps are only one type of website heat maps where warmer colors represent the most popular sections on a website, web app, or landing page, while colder colors represent the least engaging ones. “Heat maps” acts as an umbrella term for all user behavior tools that gather user data based on their activities on your website and visually present them to help you understand how users interact with your web pages.

It helps your product team deduce which page elements work and which don’t. We have different types of heat maps:

Scroll mapsMaps that offer a visual representation of website visitors’ scroll behavior. You can see how many users scroll to or before the bottom and how many abandon the page.
Click mapsMaps that show where users click on your page. You can see which elements and buttons are the most effective and which sections require some improvement.
Mouse movement mapsThese maps track general mouse movement. You can spot different patterns like which parts of pages users hesitate to click. Move maps can also help you optimize complex pages with dynamic elements.
Eye-tracking heatmapsThese maps use sensor-based technology to track the user’s eye movement when they’re on your page. It monitors blinking, pupil dilation, and overall eye activity.
Error click heatmapsThese maps help you visualize which elements trigger errors once the user clicks on them.
Dead-click heatmapsDead-click maps show which unclickable elements are often mistaken for clickable by visitors, such as a piece of text or image that resembles a button. 
AI-generated heatmapsAI-generated heatmaps use artificial intelligence to suggest which elements the users will likely pay the most attention to. They use previously-aggregated data to make these assumptions.

What is a heatmap used for?

Heatmaps are a compelling way to learn more about your site visitors’ behavior. Marketers and business owners most commonly use them to determine which elements on their website require some attention.

They categorize information by color, where warm colors depict parts of pages that customers find the most interesting. In contrast, colder colors represent parts that users interact with the least. These categories are also known as heat zones.

You can create heatmaps for every category, product, and landing page, and they help you understand what exactly users click on, how far visitors scroll down, and which parts of pages they completely ignore. Overall, this is a must-have in any strategy if you want to have a responsive website, improve your conversions and stay ahead of trends.

How are heat maps generated?

You can generate heat maps with the help of third-party software, and the process is quite easy. When choosing the perfect heat map tool to gather this type of data, make sure to opt for services that offer different kinds of user experience analytics.

FullSession is a comprehensive web analytics software that helps you aggregate and analyze different data sets to make effective UX improvements, like learning where to place important elements.

FullSession Heatmap

It is one of the most effective ways to spot false bottoms, bring in more visitors and have fewer people bounce before they become converting customers. Key features include:

  • session recording and replay
  • insights that gather data and analyze user engagement
  • customer feedback feature that lets you communicate with customers in real-time to learn what they’re having trouble with
  • interactive and real-time heat maps

Create data-driven scroll maps with FullSession

FullSession offers some of the most advanced user behavior analytics out there, including comprehensive heat maps for all your website pages. Creating a heat or scroll map with FullSession is very easy and can be done through our dashboard in a matter of minutes.

What makes FullSession stand out from our competitors is the fact that our heat map data lets you track dynamic elements, unlike most other companies that only offer static element tracking.

Instead of having to wait for your heat map to process data every time you want to view it, FullSession lets you keep track of it in real-time, meaning that the wait time is reduced to zero.

interactive heatmap

The interactive heat map feature will help you perfect even the most complex pages to minimize user frustrations and reduce the bounce rate. 

Combined with advanced filtering options that make the data analysis process more convenient, FullSession lets you take full control over all content on your website. It helps you gain valuable insights into optimizing the overall user experience.

Here’s how you can use FullSession’s heat map feature:

  • learning how many visitors scrolled to the bottom of the page
  • analyzing interaction with dynamic features like popups, drop-down menus, and hidden items
  • understanding which parts of the page can induce frustration in users
  • learning which elements and calls to actions are the most effective and bring the most conversions
  • comparing digital engagement by segmenting users
  • determining the reasons that prompt users to drop off the page

While most digital customer experience platforms slow down your website significantly when running sessions, FullSession doesn’t affect its performance whatsoever – your customers will enjoy a glitch-free website. At the same time, you gather data on their behavior and interests.

Install A Scroll Map On Your Site

It takes less than 5 minutes to set up your first scroll map with FullSession, and it’s completely free!

FullSession Plans

The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial. It provides two paid plans—Basic and Business. Here are more details on each plan.

  1. The Basic plan costs $39/month and allows you to monitor up to 5,000 monthly sessions.
  2. The Business plan costs $149/month and helps you to track and analyze up to 25,000 monthly sessions.
  3. The Enterprise plan starts from 100,000 monthly sessions and has custom pricing.

If you need more information, you can get a demo.

5 ways scroll maps can help you understand your customers better

Let’s have a quick rundown of the five ways how scroll maps can help you analyze and optimize different app pages, category pages, and all other elements on your website:

Learn why visitors leave your website

Scroll maps help you determine where your visitors start losing attention during their on-page experience. When you notice the appearance of cold colors on your scroll map, you’ll know that that section is often the part where users start to lose their interest. You can analyze and test different elements from these cold sections to see why they left the page.

Pinpoint false bottoms

“False bottom” is a term that describes parts of pages that resemble the bottom, though they still have content below. Because they look like bottoms, customers often ditch the page before they can consume the content that’s found under it. Pinpointing these helps you use the whole page better and learn where to place important elements.

Analyze your page above the fold

Your customers are the most exposed to parts of the page located above the fold. A scroll map will calculate the average fold on your pages for desktop and mobile users. It shows you where to place calls to action and other important elements.

See how easy it is for customers to find what they want

Sometimes, you may notice raging scroll activity from your customers that results from struggling to find what they want. Learning more about how long it takes before they scroll to the desired part will help you organize all elements better in terms of priority.

Analyze cross-device experience

Users don’t have the same behavior patterns when browsing their phones compared to desktop browsing. Scroll maps can identify weak spots across different devices to show you how to optimize each of the layouts to create the best cross-device experience.

Pros & cons of using scroll maps

Scroll maps are a very effective way of analyzing user behavior. We’ve already discussed the many benefits of including scroll maps in your strategy to notice various data patterns. However, one issue is that they aren’t very versatile and have certain drawbacks. Here’s a quick rundown of all pros & cons that are associated with using scroll map data:

Pros:

  • scroll maps are handy for optimizing pages above the fold
  • watching how visitors scroll can show you how easy it is for them to find the desired items or pages
  • you can analyze how users scroll and help you think of ways to make them scroll even further down the web page
  • it’s great for helping you design a high-quality, converting page
  • it enables you to understand how to prioritize content and elements on each page
  • they are very visual, easy to understand, and a great resource for gathering valuable quantitative and qualitative data

Cons:

  • Scroll maps are not very useful for web pages that have dynamic elements
  • The data isn’t always that accurate
  • Scroll maps can’t show and compare user interactions with page elements

Ready to boost your conversions?

Scroll maps are only one method you can use to learn more about your customers’ behavior. This information is of great value if you want to provide your users with a great experience when they visit your pages.

Scroll maps can help you determine which pages need to be fixed and optimized. They also help you spot patterns, like finding out which pages perform well, allowing you to apply that same principle to other pages to improve the retention and conversion rate.

FullSession’s advanced user experience analytics has the power to take your website from regular to above industry standard in a matter of weeks.

Sign up for free to see how FullSession can help you grow your customer base and why our customers choose us over all other competitors.

FAQs In Relation to Scroll Maps

What is a confetti map?

Confetti maps, also known as click maps, are analytical tools that show how users interact with your page. They record and help you observe each click made by the user while they’re on your website. Then, it categorizes each click into a respective category for easier data analysis.

The name confetti stems from the fact that these maps have different color clusters, each representing a distinct category. So, for example, if you want to see which countries your users are coming from, you can select the Country metric – different colors will represent different countries. Some other metrics include:

  • time of day
  • search term
  • operating system
  • browser
  • user variables
  • campaign source

What does scroll depth mean in Google Analytics?

Scroll depth in Google Analytics analyzes how far your customer scrolls down on your page during their visit. Scroll depth is divided into two main categories – horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal scroll depth option measures how far the user scrolls from left to right, while the vertical scroll depth option shows scroll data from top to bottom of the webpage.

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