​Hotjar: Visual Tools for Better UX & CX

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar founder and CEO David Darmanin is mad about customer experience. 

He believes CX is king. The make-or-break for any new business or start-up. That’s why his company’s app is totally dedicated to it.

Hotjar is a tool for visualizing how users engage with your site. It lets you learn about user behavior directly. With heatmaps, recordings, feedback tools, and more. 

Having this tactile information lets you improve user experience and customer experience. When you optimize engagement, you prevent churn. You convert more.

Hotjar’s major selling point is its versatility. It combines feedback tools and behavior analytics in one app. 

And it’s easy to get up and running. Get Hotjar and log in, then navigate to your website. Your website will automatically be given a Hotjar Site ID. 

A Hotjar Tracking Code is assigned that triggers data collection. Once you’re assigned one, you just paste it into the page’s HTML. You’ll receive a verification that the Hotjar script was successfully installed. 

Heatmaps

The app’s prime selling point is its heatmaps feature.

Hotjar heatmaps help you optimize your website for better user experience. It does this by visualizing mouse movements. 

You can see user clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior. A “hot and cold” meter shows where people are clicking and where they aren’t. 

This lets you optimize your landing pages and other parts of your website in a visual way. Make the right changes and eliminate guesswork. Improve your bounce rate, gain more conversions.

Conversion funnels

Hotjar’s conversion funnels let you optimize customer flow on your website. 

Find out how to move users from your most high traffic pages to your goal. Build funnels that lead from landing page to sign-up, purchase, app upgrade, or filled form.

Funnel analytics let you improve engagement on specific pages. And see where your pain points are. 

Identify drop-off rates between pages. View recordings of drop-offs so you know exactly what a missed opportunity looks like. 

Hotjar also lets you test new ideas and see how they did against previous ones.

Recording

Hotjar’s user recordings provide real-time screenshots on how people interact with your website. 

Recording is simple to set up. Just click the “Record Visitors” button on the left-hand side of the Hotjar interface. 

Then choose the max number of visitor recordings you want to collect. That way your sample size stays manageable. You can always add a new quota of recordings afterwards, if need be.

You can configure what info you want to record from user sessions. For example, you might want recordings to trigger if a user lingers for 30 seconds on a page. That way you won’t be viewing a ton of user bounce playbacks. 

You can also use Javascript triggers. Recording can be configured to start when a user gets to a specific page element. Or takes a specific action on your site.

Session recordings respect user privacy. Only whitelisted keystrokes are displayed. Credit card numbers and other private fields remain hidden.

Feedback

Hotjar includes a tool called Incoming Feedback. It lets you get visual feedback from website visitors. And it’s a snap to implement.

You can add a feedback form as a simple pop-up. The user leaves an emoji-style “mood” rating with a comment. The form design is totally customizable as well.

Users can highlight specific elements on your page. This way you can gain hyper-targeted feedback on website features. Or website copy that’s confusing or out of date.

Hotjar includes a progress chart for feedback form analysis. See if your website is getting more user-friendly or less user-friendly over time. Feedback form analytical tools let you sort by date and other criteria. 

Polls

Set up custom feedback polls on your website. You can ask as many questions as you like. And ask as many respondents as you like.

Hotjar polls take the form of a widget. They sit on the bottom of your page. 

By default, they initially appear collapsed when viewed on mobile, and open on desktops. Users can minimize a poll. It will then stay minimized when they navigate to a new page on your site.

Users answer one question at a time and then hit “Next.” If they drop off, you will still have at least partial results for a poll.

You can set up conditional triggers for your poll to appear. 

Say if they are idle on your web page for a certain amount of time. Or scroll halfway down a page. Or if they are about to leave your page. 

Also, set up how persistently polls will appear for users. That way nobody gets annoyed and bounces.

Surveys

Hotjar Surveys let you invite user input via a pop-up on your website.

You can also attach the survey to email newsletters or marketing campaigns. A URL is generated when you build a new survey. All surveys are hosted on Hotjar’s website. 

Your questions can take the form of text, radio button, checkbox, and rating questions. Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions are supported too.

Control the percentage of website users the survey is shown to. And choose which devices the survey will show up on. For example, you may only want to solicit feedback from desktop users. 

The survey user interface supports 35+ languages. But you can input survey form content in whatever language you’d like.

Integrations

Hotjar features a wide range of integrations with other digital tools. 

HubSpot integration lets you beef up your CRM with heatmaps and surveys. You can also send your Hotjar poll data to HubSpot CRM for marketing insights.

Shopify integration helps you boost conversion rate and sales. Get to know your customers better by tracking behavior and the checkout process. Find out what they really think with feedback analytics tools.

An official Hotjar plugin for Wordpress is available. Get insights into any site built on a Wordpress Business plan. Self-hosted versions of Wordpress will work too. 

There’s a Drupal module for Hotjar. This allows you to use Hotjar effectively with any site built with the Drupal CMS.

Use Hotjar with Google Analytics for best practice. Google’s powerful web analytics will tell you what’s going on with your site. Hotjar will give you context, so you understand why it’s going on.

Who uses Hotjar?

Hotjar has a widely varied clientele. They count about 700,000ish customers.

SaaS marketing technology startup Audiense uses it. For them it’s a tool for fixing and improving conversion funnels.

An example: one day their conversions suddenly dropped. They used Hotjar session recordings to diagnose the problem. 

Hotjar showed them the autocomplete feature on their sign-up form was broken. Audiense immediately fixed the feature and conversions went back up.

Unbounce uses Hotjar recordings to optimize its user sign-up page. Watching real users interact with their UX, they identify drop-off points. And they fix bugs.

Navigation company TomTom uses Hotjar to improve email click-through rate. And to generate more conversions.

Many, many ecommerce companies use Hotjar. It’s used to optimize check-out pages and build effective, repeatable sales funnels.

Note also that Hotjar is fully GDPR compliant. In other words, it respects European Union data protection laws. 

Pricing

• Basic plan for starting out (2,000 pageviews per day) is free.

• Plus plan for low-traffic sites & early stage startups (10,000 pageviews per day) is $29 per website/per month.

• Business plan is on a sliding scale. It starts at 20,000 pageviews per day for $89 per website/per month.

• Agency plan is available. Contact vendor for pricing details.

A 15-day free trial is available. No credit card required. Paid plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Website: www.hotjar.com