This is a great article from Miloš Gizdovski on the Screaming Frog blog where he walks through the process of how you can create these heatmaps for an audit that you're conducting.
1. Use Screaming Frog to extract all of the URLs that you want to analyze. For instance, you can use an "Includes" filter to crawl all of the /blog/ pages of a site.
2. Next connect the Google Analytics API to Screaming Frog. Navigate to Configuration > API Access > Google Analytics 4 and run through the steps to connect your analytics account.
3. In the "API Access" report, choose the date range and metrics that you want to analyze. For instance, if you want to create a heatmap of organic traffic, you'd want to ensure that "Sessions" filtered to "Organic Search" were selected.
4. Next, crawl your original URLs that you extracted. Switch Screaming Frog to "List" mode and enter the pages you want to crawl. As the tool crawls, it will also integrate the data from GA4.
5. Create a new Google Sheet. In his article Miloš Gizdovski showcases what the output should look like. You'll have the URLs in the left-most column and the months you want to analyze in the right-most.
6. With Screaming Frog, change the date ranges for each month you want to analyze and add that data to the spreadsheet. You can use either VLOOK or descending ordering to ensure that the new data matches up.
7. In Google Sheets, click the dropdown next to the fill option and choose "Conditional Formatting". You'll be able to have each cell change color depending on the value. For instance, the article uses red, light green and dark green to signal traffic growth.
A really interesting way to use Screaming Frog to extract and then visualize data that you find!
This post was originally shared by Chris Long on Linkedin.