Heatmap: how to find the best day and hour

What is a click heatmap?

A heatmap is a colored table that crosses two pieces of information: the day of the week and the hour of the day. Each little square represents one combination, like Tuesday at 3 pm, and the color shows how many clicks happened there. The stronger the color, the more clicks.

In WhatsClicks, it sits on the Summary tab, together with other hour charts. The advantage is that you see in a few seconds where the hot spots are, without adding up numbers in your head.

It is useful because the traffic on a site is almost never the same on every day. Many people reach out on WhatsApp at lunchtime, others only at night, and for some businesses the weekend is the strongest. Instead of guessing, you look at the picture and see what really happens with your audience.

Think of the map as a traffic map. The strongest colors are the hours when the line of people arriving at your door is longest.

How do you find the best day and best hour, step by step?

Follow these steps in the dashboard. At the end of each one, you should see what is described.

1. Log in to your account and click the Summary tab. You should see the numbers for the current period.
2. Choose a period with plenty of data, such as 30 days or 90 days. The longer the period, the more reliable the pattern. The charts update by themselves.
3. If you have several links, choose the link you want to analyze in the filter. The map then shows only its clicks.
4. Scroll down to the heatmap block. You should see the grid with days of the week on one side and hours on the other.
5. Look for the squares with the strongest color. They are your peak hours.
6. Compare with the highlights in plain sentences at the top of the Summary, which already state the best hour and best day of the week.

The map shows when people clicked. It does not say when they usually buy.

How do you read the other two hour charts?

Besides the heatmap, the dashboard has two simpler charts that help confirm what you saw.

The first is Click times, with bars by hour. The stronger the bar color, the more clicks at that hour. The second is Clicks by day of the week, which runs from Monday to Sunday. A happy face appears on the best day and a sad face on the weakest day.

Use all three together. If the heatmap, the hour bars and the happy face point in the same direction, the pattern is consistent. If they disagree, the period probably has few clicks and it is worth waiting for more data.

An example reading with made-up numbers

Here is an example, just to practice reading. The numbers are invented for this explanation.

Imagine that, over 30 days, your dashboard shows the strongest squares between 7 pm and 9 pm, mainly on Tuesday and Thursday, and the happy face sits on Thursday. The sad face is on Sunday, with almost no clicks.

The reading is this: people reach out more in the evening, on weekdays, and almost never on Sunday. That does not prove they will buy in the evening, but it indicates that is when interest appears. If nobody replies to those chats until the next morning, it is a good sign to rethink how you are organized.

What can you do with this information?

Knowing the peak hour only helps if you act on it. Here are some practical and safe ideas:

• Organize who replies: have someone available at the hottest hours.
• Plan your promotion: publish posts and ads a little before the peak hours.
• Write an automatic away message for the quietest hours, saying when you will reply.
• Avoid concluding too much from little data. With 10 or 20 clicks, a single day changes the result.

WhatsClicks does not promise more sales. It shows the click pattern so you can decide better.

A good monthly routine

A good routine is to open the map once a month, write down the three hottest hours and compare with the previous month. If the pattern repeats, you can trust it. If it changes a lot, it is a sign that your audience is still taking shape.

When can a heatmap be misleading?

There are three situations in which it pays to be suspicious of the picture. The first is when the period is short, because few clicks create false patterns. The second is when you ran a one-off promotion, like an ad on a specific day, which can push an hour up. The third is when you clicked many times yourself to test, since the owner's own clicks count.

To reduce the problem, look at periods of 30 or 90 days, write down the dates of special promotions and confirm the pattern over more than one period.