A Shopify heatmap is a visual layer on top of your storefront that aggregates how every visitor interacted with a page — where they clicked or tapped, which regions pulled the most attention. Instead of one session at a time, you see the patterns across hundreds. On Shopify specifically, a good heatmap also lets you split the data by device so you can compare what mobile shoppers do vs. desktop — typically the biggest signal you'll find on a Shopify storefront.
Heatmaps tell you what visitors clicked. Replays tell you why.
Toggle between click density and area density on the same canvas, on the live store, segmented by device. Scroll and movement views are coming.
Visitors tap product images expecting a zoom. They tap "FREE SHIPPING" banners that aren't links. They tap thumbnails that should swap the hero image and don't. A click heatmap surfaces every one of these dead clicks in one view.
On Shopify, the most common wins from click heatmaps are: making product images zoomable, turning informational banners into actual links, and demoting CTA copy that nobody clicks. Pair the click view with rage-click detection on the recordings to find the elements visitors are pounding on in frustration.
Click density is a story about specific elements. Area density is a story about real estate — which blocks of your hero, your PDP, or your collection page are working, and which are taking up space without earning it. The colour intensity tells you where a region is pulling interaction; the dead patches tell you what to demote or cut.
Most Shopify product pages have one or two zones doing all the work and a long tail of sections nobody touches. The area view makes that obvious in one glance — much faster than scrolling a click map element by element.
Hotjar, Lucky Orange, Microsoft Clarity, and Smartlook are all multi-platform tools. They work on Shopify in the sense that any JavaScript will run on any page — but their tracking scripts ship through GTM or a hard-coded snippet, which costs you measurable Lighthouse points on a theme that's already fighting for speed. And once you're past the heatmap, the rest of the workflow stays generic — no link to the Shopify order, no replay filtered by customer tag, no proactive alert when a product page's add-to-cart rate falls off a cliff.
Propel is built on Shopify primitives. The script ships as a theme app embed — Shopify injects it at the bottom of every page after the rest of your theme has loaded, async, with 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals. Every replay links back to the actual Shopify order in admin. Recordings filter by every Shopify customer field — order count, total spent, tag, cart value. And insight alerts and product-page alerts surface the heatmap pages that are quietly underperforming so you don't have to hunt them down.
To be honest: if you don't run on Shopify, this advantage doesn't matter and Microsoft Clarity is a great free option. We win when "in Shopify" is load-bearing.
Most stores have one or two products that drive most of the revenue, and one or two PDPs leaking it. A click heatmap on the top product reveals what visitors expect to be tappable that isn't (the gallery, the size chart link, the variant swatches). The area view tells you which zones of the page are doing the heavy lifting and which sections nobody touches. Twenty minutes with both views is usually enough to ship a higher-converting PDP by Friday — if you want a walkthrough of what to look for, our guide on how to read a heatmap covers the specific patterns Shopify merchants spot first.
Most Shopify stores are 60–80% mobile traffic but get themed for desktop. Pull up a heatmap, filter to mobile, then flip to desktop. Differences pop immediately: hero CTAs that are hidden behind a hamburger, sticky add-to-cart bars that overlap pricing, accordions that don't open on tap. Mobile is almost always where the friction is — the mobile heatmap tells you exactly where.
A theme update or a new app installs and your conversion rate dips two points. Propel's product-page alerts flag significant drops in add-to-cart rate the day they start, so you don't have to wait for a customer to email. Open the click heatmap on the affected page and the broken element usually shows up in the first scroll — a button that was getting taps and isn't anymore tells the story in seconds.
Honest comparisons — including when they're the right fit and when Propel is.
Install Propel Replays and watch your first heatmap fill in by tomorrow morning. Free up to 750 pageviews/mo. 7-day free trial on every paid plan.