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Amplitude Heatmaps: What to Track Now It's on Every Plan

Amplitude Heatmaps moved onto the Plus plan in 2026 — here's what to instrument so screenshot-based heatmaps don't drift from your real event data.

Engagement

Amplitude’s Heatmaps feature, built on top of Session Replay, stopped being a Growth-and-Enterprise add-on in 2026 and now ships on the entry-level Plus plan. That matters beyond pricing: a feature that used to sit behind a sales conversation is now one click away for any team already piping events into Amplitude, which means far more product and growth teams are about to start making UI decisions off a heatmap screenshot rather than a raw event table. Heatmaps here work differently from the coordinate-logging most teams are used to — Amplitude captures a screenshot from a replay or directly from your site or app, maps taps and scroll depth onto that specific visual state, and lets you separate micro interactions (a single button) from macro patterns (which section of a screen gets attention at all).

The catch is that a heatmap is a snapshot of one UI state, and mobile and web interfaces change constantly — an A/B test variant, a personalised layout, or a routine redesign can all silently invalidate a heatmap that still looks authoritative on a dashboard. Teams that treat the heatmap image as ground truth, without tying it back to the underlying event stream and the exact build or experiment variant it was captured against, end up making design calls based on a picture that no longer matches what users are actually seeing. The visual is a useful entry point for spotting dead zones and mis-taps, but it’s not a substitute for knowing which screenshot belongs to which release.

Data Points to Track

  • Screenshot-to-build mapping — the app version, screen variant, or feature-flag state active at the moment each heatmap screenshot was captured, so a heatmap can’t outlive the UI it was drawn from
  • Underlying tap and scroll events feeding each heatmap, kept queryable as raw events independent of the visual, so a heatmap finding can be verified against the actual data rather than trusted on sight
  • Heatmap capture cadence per screen, since a screen that changes frequently (a personalised home feed, an experiment surface) needs re-capture on a much shorter cycle than a static settings page
  • Session Replay sampling rate feeding Heatmaps, to know whether a given heatmap represents a small sample or the bulk of traffic to that screen
  • Cross-reference between heatmap dead zones and existing rage-tap or dead-tap events, so a visual finding and an event-level signal either confirm or contradict each other

Setup Steps

  1. Confirm Session Replay and Heatmaps are enabled on your current plan tier and check sampling settings, since a low replay sample rate under-represents low-traffic screens in the heatmap.
  2. Tag each heatmap capture with the release version or experiment variant active at the time, either through Amplitude’s own metadata or a parallel note in your own tracking system.
  3. Set a re-capture cadence per screen type — short for screens under active experimentation, longer for stable ones — rather than treating one heatmap as permanent documentation.
  4. Cross-check any heatmap dead zone against your existing dead-tap or rage-tap event data before treating it as a confirmed UX problem worth a design change.
  5. Archive retired heatmap screenshots alongside the build they came from, so a past design decision can be traced back to the exact visual evidence that justified it.

Actionable Insights

A heatmap earns the most trust when it agrees with the underlying event data — a visually obvious dead zone that also shows up as a cluster of dead taps in your raw events is a confirmed problem worth fixing, not just a suggestive picture. Where the two disagree, that’s usually a sign the heatmap is stale: a redesign shipped after the screenshot was captured, or the replay sample skews toward one device size or user segment. Used this way, Heatmaps becomes a fast way to generate hypotheses about friction points, with your own event stream doing the job of confirming which of those hypotheses are actually worth a roadmap slot.

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