Email Click Map: Reading Where Subscribers Click

An email click map lays every tracked link’s clicks over the rendered email. So you can see which blocks of a long newsletter actually get attention and which ones are just taking up space. Below: what the map shows, where its numbers lie to you, and how to turn it into a layout decision you can test.

What does an email click map show?

It’s the per-link click report, just drawn on the email. Each link is marked in place with its share of all clicks. No more matching URLs from a table to sections of the design by hand. You open it and see right away that the second story beat the featured one. (Happens more often than editors like to admit.)

Most reports give you two counts per link. Total clicks count every click, so one reader coming back to the same link five times shows up five times. Unique clicks count each person once. If you want to know what a block is worth, go with unique clicks. They tell you how many readers the block persuaded, not how often a handful of enthusiasts kept returning.

And no, an email heatmap for email is not the same thing as a website heatmap. No scroll depth. No hover data, no reading time. It only records clicks on tracked links, and that’s it. Don’t compare blocks by opens either - the article on why opens mislead reports explains why that number drifts. MailCraft offers reports with click maps alongside click geo data, so you can also see where each block’s clicks come from.

What a click map hides or inflates

The map counts every recorded click, including the ones no human made. Corporate mail filters and link scanners open every URL in a message to check it for threats, often seconds after delivery. What you get is a suspiciously even spread of clicks across all links, right down to the footer and the unsubscribe link. Nobody reads the footer that carefully.

Bot clicks in email reports usually give themselves away:

• clicks arriving right after the send, before a person could have read anything
• one recipient clicking every link in the message
• geography that doesn’t match your list, such as a cluster in one data center region

Filter these out before you read the map. Seriously, before. But bots aren’t the only problem. When the logo, the header and a button all point to the same URL, the counts can merge, and the map may credit the wrong block. Blocked images, mobile vs desktop view and dark mode all change what the reader actually saw. Oh, and a click is not a conversion. The map stops at the click and tells you nothing about what happened on the site.

How to read an email click map for a long newsletter, block by block

Group the links into content blocks and compare blocks with each other, not single links. Read a newsletter with forty links link by link and it’s pure noise. Group it into eight blocks and a pattern shows up. Here’s how I’d work out which newsletter blocks get clicks:

1. Filter out suspected bot clicks.
2. Assign every link to a block: header, lead story, secondary stories, promo, footer.
3. Add up unique clicks per block.
4. Compare each block’s clicks with its position in the email.
5. Flag blocks that got no clicks across several sends.

Position skews everything. Blocks near the top get clicks just for being there, so a strong block lower down tells you a lot more than a weak one at the top. And look at several campaigns, not one. A single send mostly reflects that week’s topic. A pattern that keeps repeating? That’s the layout talking. One more thing: click tracking in newsletters has to cover every link. An untracked link won’t show up on the map at all, and its block will look dead when it isn’t.

Button vs text link clicks: what are you really comparing?

You can only compare a button and a text link when they point to the same place and sit in a similar spot. Otherwise you’re measuring two different offers, not two formats.

The button usually wins. It’s bigger, it stands out, and it’s easier to hit with a thumb on a phone. So a button vs text link test is really testing form and placement at once, and the button’s lead doesn’t prove buttons work better everywhere in your newsletter. Tempting conclusion, though.

Give each link its own identifier so the counts don’t collapse into one. The guide to UTM parameters for email campaigns shows how to tag links so they stay separate in your analytics too. In practice my advice is simple: button for the main action, text links for supporting content, and never the same link twice in one block.

Turning click data into a layout change

Every layout change should come from one specific observation on the map and get tested as one change. “The recipe block gets few clicks” is an observation. “Let’s redesign the newsletter” is a mood.

The kind of decisions the data can actually back up:

• move a block that does well despite a low position higher up
• cut or shorten a block that has had no clicks for a long time
• merge similar blocks that split the same readers’ attention
• change the form of the call to action, for example from a text link to a button

One change at a time, run against the old version. The guide to testing a new layout covers the setup. When the test ends, open the click maps for both versions in the same report and compare blocks, not totals. Totals hide exactly the thing you changed.

So: an email click map is a solid tool for deciding what to cut and what to move, as long as you strip out bot clicks first. For more on reading campaign results, browse the email campaign analytics articles.

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