Product review: Amplitude as a heat mapping tool
Amplitude is widely known as a powerful product analytics platform, enabling data-driven teams to analyze user journeys, product usage, and conversion paths in depth. While not a traditional heatmap tool in the visual sense (like Hotjar or Twipla), Amplitude includes heatmap-style visualizations within its event tracking and behavior analytics modules. These heatmaps are data-dense, interactive, and designed to surface insights about user engagement at scale — particularly across digital product experiences.
Event-based heatmaps
Unlike pixel-based click or scroll heatmaps, Amplitude’s heatmaps are event-driven. That means you can visualize how often specific actions (e.g., button clicks, video plays, feature interactions) occur across your product UI. These heatmaps are especially useful in identifying which features get used most and when user engagement tends to drop.
Path and funnel analysis
Amplitude allows you to create behavioral funnels and overlay heatmap-style metrics to see where users drop off and which actions they take most frequently between steps. These insights can be visualized in a heat-like gradient based on event frequency, enabling quick detection of bottlenecks or dead zones in user flows.
Retention and cohort heatmaps
Another standout feature is Amplitude's cohort retention heatmaps. These allow teams to compare how different user segments behave over time. For example, you can track feature adoption rates or daily engagement levels, and display these patterns in color-coded retention grids — perfect for understanding lifecycle behavior.
Custom segmentation and filters
Amplitude excels at segmenting data across nearly any dimension: platform, geography, plan type, traffic source, feature usage, etc. This lets you create highly customized heatmaps for very specific use cases — such as comparing how power users interact with a product versus free trial users.
Cross-platform tracking
Amplitude supports seamless data collection across web, mobile, and other digital environments (including IoT and TV apps). Its heatmap visualizations adapt to multi-platform tracking, giving teams a full picture of how user behavior varies between devices and platforms.
Collaboration and dashboards
All heatmap-style charts in Amplitude can be added to shared dashboards or sent via scheduled reports. This makes it easy for product, marketing, and engineering teams to collaborate and use behavioral data as a unified source of truth.
Limitations to consider
Amplitude does not provide traditional visual heatmaps (e.g., mouse movement or scroll-based data overlaid on a webpage). It’s not the right tool if you’re trying to see where users hover or how they navigate a static website visually. For that, tools like Twipla, Hotjar, or Crazy Egg would be more appropriate.
Also, Amplitude’s advanced analytics capabilities may be overwhelming for non-technical users or marketers unfamiliar with event-based models. Initial setup (especially for tracking custom events) requires close collaboration with developers or a technical team.
Bottom line
Amplitude is a high-powered behavioral analytics tool that brings heatmap-style insights to product teams — but with a data science edge. It goes beyond simple click maps and instead helps uncover why users behave the way they do across key product features and user journeys.
If you're building or scaling a digital product and want deep visibility into engagement patterns, retention cohorts, or feature usage across segments, Amplitude’s event-based heatmaps offer unmatched analytical power. It may not replace visual heatmap tools, but it delivers broader, richer context for optimizing product experiences at scale.
