Within your reporting, you’ll be able to see where and how your recipients have engaged with your email. To view, first go to your reports and select the campaign you want to look at.
In the report, select the clicks tab, then the heatmap tab.
The email will be displayed with a series of numbers overlayed on all the links- these represent the ranking of each link by number of clicks. The most clicked link will be marked as 1, the second most clicked link marked as 2 etc.
How to interpret the Heatmap
This main benefit of using the heatmap is to determine how your customers are engaging with your content so that you can optimise future sends.
For example, if you have social media links in your header and they’re very low in the ranking of clicks, then you may decide that they’re not important enough to warrant such a prominent position in the future, and that its better to move them to your footer. Conversely, if you have highly engaged content thats always further down, moving it further up might increase the number of click throughs you achieve.
Heatmaps also give you a good indication of how people are engaging overall- as a general rule, nine out of ten people that open your email will probably only scan read the email quickly, rather than reading all the content word for word. With that in mind, the articles near the top are likely to be the most engaged.
If towards the footer of your email you see that hardly anything is being clicked on, it could indicate that your email is too long and not holding your recipients attention, and that sending the content split over two separate emails would be a better way of getting people to read everything you’re sending.
Drill down into the Heatmaps data
View all recipients that visited a particular URL
If you want to drill down from your heatmap to see a list of all subscribers who clicked through on each particular link, click on the heatmap link summary and select view all recipients that visited this URL
Once selected, you’ll be redirected to the subscribers tab in the reporting where it will automatically run a search to give you all records which recorded a click on any link which went to that url.
From there you can filter down further with the rest of the advanced search options.
This list may not only be just the people who clicked that specific link in your message, but will include everyone who clicked any link to that went to that url.
FAQs
Q. If my heatmap said a number of people clicked a link, why is it that when I click through to see all recipients I see more than that?
A. This is because it is not showing you records who clicked that specific link, it is showing you everyone who clicked a link in that message which went to the same url as that link.
It is common to link to the same page url from more than link in an email. For instance, you may have linked an image, a call to action button and turned some text into a link too. In this example, there are three links all going to the same place, plus all of those links will also exist in the plain text version.
Subsequently whilst the heatmap stats on your call to action button might say 3,000 people clicked that link, your subscribers search could give you 4,000 records, because 700 people clicked the image and 300 people clicked the text link in the copy; all of them linking to the same page; all of them carry the same level of engagement as a prospect for that call to action.