For virtually any website that its owner intends to use as a self-sufficient means of advancing a business' brand, measuring the numbers of clicks that a given button, link, or feature gets on a given page is a highly valuable method of assessing that site's strong points and deficiencies. Auditing web content tells the user which proportions of the website's currently incoming traffic are engaging with the content as intended. This data can also be used to determine which other parts of the site stand to be improved and what kind of content the site should feature more of. Many auditing programs go beyond merely reporting the raw numbers by attempting to interpret the data for the user in a way that takes into account less legitimate traffic such as bot activity.

Those who are familiar enough with the many nuances and vague procedures of SEO and site auditing can draw value even from programs that merely report the total number of clicks a given element gets. It is primarily for the sake of these users that a particular brand of traffic-reporting tools called heatmaps exists. These visually indicate the intensity of the click rate of a given spatial coordinate on the web page by presenting an overlay that makes the page appear as though it is being viewed through a thermal-imaging camera.

At a glance, novice SEO workers might prefer the visual format that heatmaps use to indicate the portions of the page that receive the most clicks because it shows at a glance how visitors to the site are likely to behave. For example, it might reveal that there are portions of a page that confused users are clicking on despite there being no links or interactive features there; this would indicate that the site needs a clearer design for that area. However, on top of merely showing data that has not been interpreted by a standardized auditing program, a heatmap's results can easily be thrown off by the many ways the arrangement of a page's contents can be affected by the user's browser and window size. For more information click here https://www.oliverpalmer.com/blog/heatmaps-are-shit/.