Use Historical Heatmaps to Analyze and Compare Past Versions of Your Site

Overview

Historical Heatmaps is a powerful feature that allows you to generate and view heatmaps for past versions of your website pages. To make this possible, this feature uses snapshots (saved records of your page’s structure and appearance from a specific point in time). You can view a heatmap for a single past version of the page or compare two different versions side by side (such as a snapshot of a past version versus the current live version).

For example, you completed a major homepage redesign. With historical heatmaps, you can compare a past version’s heatmap (before the redesign) with the live heatmap to see how users are interacting with the new layout. Or, you ran a holiday campaign with a special banner on your product page. After the campaign ends and the banner is removed, you can view the page heatmap from the campaign period to analyze how effective the banner was at attracting clicks.

With this feature, you can:

• Analyze user click behavior on your page at the time the snapshot was taken, even after you have made design changes.
• Measure the impact of redesigns or UI changes by quantifying how they affect user clicks and engagement.
• Retain past insights, allowing you to analyze data from pages or elements that no longer exist on your live site.
• Leverage comparative analysis to directly compare a historical version with the live version or with another historical version.

This article further explains how you can generate, view, and compare historical heatmaps to gain deeper insights.

Prerequisites

• Enable Session Recordings: You must enable session recordings to collect data for your website. Historical heatmaps rely on session recording data to create snapshots.
• Ensure the page URL is not excluded: When declaring your campaign URLs, ensure the specific URL you wish to analyze is not listed in the Excluded URLs section within your session recordings configuration. If a URL is excluded, no data will be available to create a snapshot.

View Historical Heatmaps

1. Log in to your VWO account and navigate to Insights > Heatmaps.

2. Under Generate a heatmap from this data, enter the URL of the page you want to analyze. This URL must be an exact match to the one you used to generate the snapshot. To narrow down the list of available snapshots, apply any necessary filters at the top of the page. For example, set the Date Filter to the specific period you want to investigate. You can also apply a Visitor Segment (such as Device Type: Desktop) to view only the snapshots that were captured on that device type. This way, you can find the correct past version faster.
    

   Note: Use the Advanced tab above the URL field to:

   • Include or exclude the data from multiple URLs in the heatmap.
   • Define advanced pattern-matching rules, targeting either a specific URL or a broader set of URLs with wildcard entries. When viewing historical heatmaps in the advanced flow, you select one URL as the canvas and specify additional URLs from which click data should be fetched. In this case, the snapshot always corresponds to the URL selected as the canvas.
3. Check the box labeled Select past version.
   
   A list of all available snapshots for that URL appears. This includes both, your manually Saved snapshots and the automated VWO snapshots. Manually saved snapshots are always prioritized in the list. If you have not saved any snapshots manually, you will see only automated VWO snapshots.
   If a past version of the URL does not exist, VWO displays the message No past versions found. If you see this message, it could be due to one of the following reasons:
   1. There are no session recordings for the specified URL in the selected date range.
   2. You haven't manually saved a snapshot for this URL, and VWO has not yet auto-generated one.
   3. The URL is part of the Excluded URLs list in Session Recordings settings.
4. Select the desired past version from the list. To see a preview of the snapshot, click Preview. The Preview dialog displays a preview of the snapshot. Click View Heatmap in the dialog to view the corresponding heatmap. Alternatively, you can select the snapshot in the list and click View Heatmap.
   
5. VWO loads the heatmap data rendered over the past version of your page in a new browser tab. A banner at the bottom will confirm that you are viewing a historical version. You can click Switch to Live at the bottom right corner to view the live version's heatmap.
   Note: Historical heatmaps are static, so you are not viewing them on a live site. This means standard heatmap features, such as navigation, are disabled. Suppose you want to view a heatmap on a specific dynamic state of the page (for example, with a modal open, a dropdown menu expanded, or an accordion tab selected). In that case, you must play the recording to that exact state, click a snapshot, and then view its heatmap.

Compare Historical Heatmaps

1. Follow steps 1 to 4 from the section above to select a past version.
2. Instead of clicking View Heatmap, click Compare.
3. The Compare Heatmaps modal appears.
   • Box A is pre-filled with the URL, filters, segmentation, and past version you selected. Click the box to update your selection and click Next. If you don’t wish to update the selection, simply proceed to Box B.
   • Configure the selection in Box B. By default, the live version of the site is selected. To compare a different past version of the site, click Select past version and select the desired snapshot from the list.
     
4. Click Compare.

VWO displays a side-by-side view of both heatmaps, allowing for direct comparison of user behavior between the two versions.

Troubleshooting

FAQs

• When launching the heatmap directly from Saved snapshots, what is the date range selected for the clicks?
  The heatmap displays click data from a 30-day period ending on the date the snapshot was recorded.
   
• Does the heatmap for a saved snapshot only show clicks from that one session recording?
  No. The session recording from which you save a snapshot is only used to capture the page's HTML structure at that time. The click data displayed on the resulting heatmap is aggregated from all visitor sessions that occurred on that page version. It includes only sessions that match your selected filters, such as date range and visitor segments.

Need more help?

For further assistance or more information, contact VWO Support.