Does Google Analytics Have Heat Maps?

Thinking about using heat maps to see where your website visitors click, scroll, and linger? It’s a great way to understand what catches their eye and what they ignore. If you’re a heavy Google Analytics user, you might be wondering if this feature is already built into the platform. We’ll get right to the point: it isn't. This article explains why the confusion exists, what you can use in Google Analytics 4 to get similar insights, and the best tools to add for true heat mapping.

Does Google Analytics Have a Built-In Heat Map Feature?

No, Google Analytics 4 does not have a native, built-in heat map feature. While you can track clicks, events, and user flows, GA4 doesn't provide visual overlays on your pages that show click concentration, scroll depth, or mouse movement in the way a dedicated heat map tool does.

The confusion often comes from an old feature in the now-retired version of Google Analytics, Universal Analytics (UA). UA offered a report called "In-Page Analytics," which included a page overlay view. This tool would overlay bubbles on your webpage showing the percentage of clicks each of your internal links received. It looked a bit like a simple heat map and gave you a quick visual summary of which links were most popular.

However, even this old feature wasn't a “true” heat map. It had several limitations:

• It only tracked clicks on links, not on non-interactive elements like images, headlines, or blank space.
• It didn't show mouse movement or "hover" maps.
• It had no way of visualizing scroll depth to see how far down the page users were getting.

With the permanent shift to Google Analytics 4, the In-Page Analytics report has been completely retired. That means there's no longer a native feature inside GA that color-codes clicks onto a visual representation of your page. But don't worry, GA4 provides other powerful methods for understanding user engagement, and integrating it with dedicated heat map tools is easier than ever.

What GA4 Offers Instead: Analyzing Clicks and User Behavior

While GA4 doesn't give you visual overlays, it offers robust event-based tracking that can tell you a lot about user behavior on your site. Here are the primary ways you can track user actions and get similar insights without leaving your GA4 dashboard.

1. Enhanced Measurement for Clicks and Other Interactions

One of the biggest upgrades in GA4 is "enhanced measurement," a set of events that are tracked automatically as soon as you install the GA4 tag. You don't need any custom code to get this working. Two key events here are clicks and file downloads.

By default, GA4's enhanced measurement tracks:

• Outbound clicks: Clicks that lead users away from your domain.
• File downloads: Clicks on links for common file types like PDFs, documents, or spreadsheets.
• Video engagement: Plays, pauses, and completions for embedded YouTube videos.
• Site search: What your visitors are typing into your site's search bar.

You can find this data in your Reports > Engagement > Events dashboard. To see which outbound links people are clicking, simply click on the "click" event name in the report. This will take you to a detailed view where you can add a secondary dimension like "Link URL" or "Page location" to see exactly which URLs were clicked on from which pages.

2. Using Custom Events to Track Key Clicks

Enhanced measurement is great for starters, but the real power comes from setting up your own custom events. You can track virtually any desired user action as an event, giving you granular data on the clicks that matter most to your business goals.

This is typically done through Google Tag Manager (GTM), which works hand-in-hand with GA4. Examples of custom click events you could track include:

• CTA Buttons: Firing an event named add_to_cart_click or learn_more_click every time those buttons are clicked.
• Navigation Menus: Tracking which items in your main navigation or footer get the most use by creating events like main_nav_pricing_click.
• Internal Promotions: If you have promotional banners on your homepage, you can track their performance with a distinct event.

Setting this up gives you clean, meaningful data you can analyze in GA4. You can see how many people are taking a specific action and even build funnels around these events to see if they lead to conversions.

3. Path and Funnel Exploration Reports

GA4's Explore section offers more advanced analysis tools. The Path Exploration and Funnel Exploration reports provide a unique view of user clickstreaks that heat maps alone can't give you.

• Path Exploration: This report is a flow chart that visualizes the steps users take after landing on a page or triggering an event. For example, you can start with your homepage and see a tree diagram of the most common pages people click to next. It answers the question, "Where do people go from here?"
• Funnel Exploration: This report lets you map out a specific journey you want users to take and see where they drop off. For example, a funnel might be: 1) Visited product page, 2) Clicked "Add to Cart", 3) Reached checkout, 4) Completed purchase. The visual bar chart will clearly show what percentage of users bail at each step, helping you identify sticking points in your conversion process.

These reports don't show you where users clicked on the page, but they do show you what they clicked to get from Point A to Point B, which is often an even more valuable insight for conversion rate optimization.

The Best of Both Worlds: Integrating Dedicated Heat Map Tools with GA4

The smartest setup combines the quantitative data from Google Analytics with the qualitative, visual insights from a specialized heat map tool. GA4 tells you what users did and in which quantity, while a heat map tool shows you why they might have done it by visualizing their behavior on the page itself.

Most modern heat map platforms offer simple integrations with Google Analytics. This connection unlocks a new level of analysis, allowing you to:

• Filter session recordings: Watch session recordings in your heat map tool that are filtered by GA4 data. For example, "Show me recordings of users from the recent Facebook campaign who spent more than 3 minutes on the site but didn't convert."
• Create segments based on hot spots: Identify a page element that gets a lot of "rage clicks" (when a user clicks something repeatedly in frustration) in your heat map tool, and then create an audience in GA4 of users who performed that behavior.
• Add context to your GA4 data: If you see a page in GA4 with a high exit rate, you can jump over to your heat map tool and look at the scroll map for that page. You might discover that 90% of users aren't scrolling far enough to see your main call-to-action, instantly explaining the high exit rate.

Top Tools for Creating Heat Maps for Your Website

Ready to add visual analysis to your toolkit? Here are a few industry-leading platforms known for their powerful features and seamless integration potential with Google Analytics.

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity stands out for one massive reason: it's 100% free with no traffic limits. It doesn't skimp on features, offering excellent heat maps (click, scroll, and area maps), session recordings, built-in analytics, and AI-powered insights like "rage click" and "dead click" detection. Its integration with Google Analytics is dead simple, when you connect them, Clarity will pass a custom parameter with a link to the session recording into your GA4 account, letting you view specific recordings an event's data point on your GA dashboard.

Hotjar

Hotjar is arguably the most well-known name in the user behavior analytics space. It's an all-in-one suite that includes heat maps, session recordings, on-site surveys, and user feedback widgets. Its heat maps are clean and intuitive, making it easy to see where users are clicking, moving their mouse, and how far they scroll. The integration allows you to create user segments in GA4 and use those segments to filter reports and session replays in Hotjar, perfectly blending quantitative and qualitative insights.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is one of the original players in heat mapping and continues to be a top choice. Beyond standard click and scroll maps, they offer unique visualizations like the "Confetti Map," which breaks down clicks by referral source, campaign, or other visitor attributes. This is incredibly helpful for understanding if users from different marketing channels behave differently on the same page. Crazy Egg also supports A/B testing, letting you test page variations and view heat maps for each to truly understand which layout performs best.

Final Thoughts

To sum it up, Google Analytics 4 does not have a native heat map feature like the old "In-Page Analytics" report. However, GA4's improved event tracking and exploration reports provide a wealth of data about what users click on and the journeys they take through your site. For true visual heat maps, the best approach is to use a dedicated tool like Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar, or Crazy Egg and integrate it with your GA4 account for a complete picture.

While an integrated toolset gives you the raw data across platforms, making sense of it all in real-time can still be a manual process - and a major time sink. That’s where we help. With Graphed , you can easily connect data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and your ad platforms in one place. Instead of cross-referencing dashboards, you can use simple language to instantly build reports. For example, just ask, “Create a dashboard showing our top landing pages from organic search alongside their 'add to cart' click rates,” and get an answer in seconds, not hours.