See what your users actually do — Shift

Numbers tell you "what", not "why"

Classic analytics teaches you that 70% of visitors leave your pricing page without clicking. That's valuable information — but it doesn't say why. Is it the price? An invisible button? Confusing copy? A display bug on mobile? To answer, you have to leave the tables of numbers and watch actual behavior: where the cursors go, how far people scroll, what they click (or click on in vain), where they hesitate.

That's the role of a family of tools dedicated to experience: heatmaps, session recordings, and visual funnel analysis.

Heatmaps: the heat of attention

A heatmap aggregates the behavior of hundreds of visitors on a page into a colored image. Three main types:

Click heatmap: where people click. Reveals ignored buttons and, above all, elements people click on that aren't clickable (a sign they expected an action there).
Movement heatmap: where the cursor wanders, a rough proxy for attention.
Scroll heatmap: how far visitors scroll down. Reveals whether your key argument or buy button is below the "fold" that 80% of people never cross.

The scroll map is often the most actionable: how often a decisive call to action is placed too low, seen by only a minority of visitors.

Session recordings: the visitor's film

A session recording replays, anonymized, a visitor's journey: movements, clicks, scrolls, hesitations, back-and-forths. Watching ten sessions of people who abandoned a form often teaches more than weeks of numbers. You see the precise moment the person gets stuck — the problematic field, the incomprehensible error message, the button they're looking for.

Good use isn't to watch everything (impossible), but to filter: only view sessions where there was a "rage click" (repeated, angry clicks in the same spot), a cart abandonment, or an exit on a critical page.

The tools, by budget

Microsoft Clarity: free and unlimited, with no session cap. It offers heatmaps, recordings, and automatic frustration signals (rage clicks, dead clicks, quick scrolls). For most entrepreneurs, it's the best starting point — hard to beat "complete and free".
Hotjar: the historical reference, very user-friendly, adds on-site surveys (asking the visitor directly why they're leaving). Limited free plan by number of sessions, then paid.
PostHog: if you already use it for product analytics (chapter 2), it includes heatmaps and recordings — one fewer tool to manage.
Maze or Lookback: to go further, guided user tests (you give testers a task and observe), useful before a launch.

Practical rule: start with Clarity (free), add Hotjar if you want surveys, or use PostHog if you already have it for product.

Combining quantitative and qualitative

The power comes from chaining the two families of tools:

graph LR
    A[Analytics: 70% leave<br/>the pricing page] --> B[Heatmap: they don't<br/>scroll to the button]
    B --> C[Recordings: they<br/>hesitate over the price]
    C --> D[Survey: 'too expensive<br/>without understanding the value']
    D --> E[Decision: move the button up<br/>+ add value proof]

Analytics points to where things break down (the quantitative). Heatmaps and recordings show how they break down (the qualitative). The survey reveals why. It's this combination that turns a page losing visitors into a page that converts.

Privacy: a reflex, not an option

These tools record real sessions. Two non-negotiable precautions: mask sensitive data (password and bank-card fields and personal data must be automatically hidden — Clarity and Hotjar do this by default, check it), and disclose in your privacy policy that you use session-recording tools. Compliance isn't an ancillary legal detail: it's a condition for collecting this data legally, covered in more depth in the tracking & GDPR chapter.