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Creating a Heatmap View in VWO

Vaibhav Singh
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VWO’s Advanced heatmaps are always ON and track engagement for all pages of the website. You can create customized views to track activities of a specific visitor segment and save the view for quickly viewing subsets of data for specific pages and visitor segments that are of interest to you. For example, create a custom view to view clicks on a landing page for people who arrived via a specific country, or channel. 

NOTE: View collects data from the date it was created and not from the time the Smartcode is present on the website page.

To know about heatmap views and how to create one, refer to this video.

Procedure

  1. Log in to your VWO account.
  2. Go to INSIGHTS > Heatmaps.
    The Heatmaps dashboard appears.
  3. To create a view, click CREATE VIEW present in the panel on the right.
    The New View page appears.
  4. To give a title for your view, click on the pencil icon present next to New View.
  5. In the URL field, enter the URL of the page(s) you want to analyze.
    TIP: Click the Advanced tab next to the URL field to include or exclude URLs from the view. Using this tab, you can also define advanced pattern-matching options to include either a broad URL with wildcard entries or a specific URL.
  6. To record the click pattern of the specified group and plot it on the heatmaps report, enable the option Enable tracking heatmap data for a specific visitor group. To know more about defining audience segments, refer to How to Target a Visitor Segment.
  7. To schedule the heatmap to run, pause, or stop at specific times, expand the Advanced Options to enable and set the scheduling. To know more about the scheduling option, refer to How to Schedule Your VWO Test. This can help you have a heatmap view for weekend visitors, for example.
  8. Click CREATE to complete setting up the heatmap view. 
    You can either immediately start running the view or choose to start it at a later time.

Post-requisite

To verify whether your Heatmap View is successfully created, go to INSIGHTS > Heatmaps. The recently created View must appear in the View tab present in the Heatmaps dashboard. After the View is created, VWO displays a preview of the Heatmap link you have generated. Next time you want this heatmap, all you have to do is select the view from the Views panel on the right side of the dashboard and then click View Heatmap. 

NOTE: By default, the Safari browser blocks third-party cookies. To load the heatmaps data correctly, go to  Safari > Preferences > Privacy and disable the Prevent cross-site tracking option.

Viewing Timeline For Heatmap View

Once a view is created, you can track all the activities corresponding to it in the TIMELINE tab present on the panel on the right of the heatmaps dashboard. This tab displays information like:

  • when was the view created,
  • when was the heatmap data collection started,
  • when was the heatmap data collection paused,
  • when was the observation added or deleted, or any other activity? 

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