Perhaps you’re already using tools to measure your customers’ online behaviour like clicks, bounces and conversions. And this may lead you to believe that you’re already tracking everything you need to know about the users who interact with your website. But what about all the small, seemingly insignificant actions that happen in between?
This is the question Hotjar asked when they decided to develop an insights tool that gives you a more nuanced, realistic understanding of user behaviour when compared to other analytics tools. It can track things like hesitations, u-turns and scrolls that don’t lead to clicks.
With Hotjar, you can dive deeper into how visitors interact with your website and see first-hand where they’re experiencing roadblocks or frustration and improve where needed.
Below we dive into what Hotjar does best, how to set it up, and take a look at its various features.
What does Hotjar do best?
As mentioned above, Hotjar can be used to accurately track users’ movements on your website. Allowing you to take a sneak peek into how users experience and interact with your website. It’s basically like having your very own user experience tester at your fingertips, day or night.
Hotjar’s pricing plans are split into three packages, one of which includes a free version. Each package focuses on different use cases and is tailored to either small, medium or large-sized businesses. There is also an option to build a custom package if you so wish.
The idea of the packages is to sign up for free and upgrade as you go.
The different packages are:
Observe
Observe contains heatmaps and screen recordings that are great for visualising how users behave on your website.
Ask
Ask is primarily for discovering how users feel about your website with surveys and feedback.
Engage
Engage hosts moderated user interviews to gain in-person feedback directly from users.
Custom
Custom lets you mix and match to choose your observe and ask plans respectively.
How to use Hotjar
Once you’ve signed up for Hotjar and selected your preferred package, you’ll need to link your profile to a website to gain access to the dashboard, all the available features and begin collecting data.
Connecting Hotjar to your website involves installing a tracking code and how you install that tracking code depends on what CMS (Content Management System) you’re using. If you’re using WordPress you can find the Hotjar plugin under the plugins section and just install it.
For other forms of web hosting, you’ll need to add the tracking code manually or install it through Google Tag Manager.
Once Hotjar has been installed, you can expect it to take 1-2 days to start gathering data before seeing any insights reflected on the dashboard.
Hotjar features
Hotjar offers four main features. Heatmaps, screen recordings, user feedback widgets and the new user interview feature.
Below we take a look at what each of these features does and why you should use them.
1. Heatmaps
Hotjar’s most famous feature, heat mapping is a brilliant tool for helping you to see at a glance how people interact with your website. It’s also what most people use Hotjar for.
This unique heat mapping software does a great job at highlighting the most and least active areas of your website in a visual way, as seen below.
The red means busy and blue means less active. You can view heatmaps based on clicks, moves and scrolls.
What’s really useful about the heat mapping feature is the fact that it highlights UX issues that other analytics tools can’t otherwise track. For example, people trying to click on the text at the very bottom of the page when there is no link.
Scroll heatmaps show you how far users scrolled down the page before they moved on. It’s normal that a lot of users won’t make it all the way to the footer of your homepage. But if the heatmap shows blue halfway down the page, you’ve got a problem.
Blue tells you that the page isn’t doing what it should be and that users are leaving before scrolling down all the way to the end. This is most likely due to users to getting bored or not finding what they are looking for.
Below is an example from our website that shows that users are scrolling to the end.
You can choose between the different heatmap options (clicks, moves, scrolls) by clicking the icons in the bottom right corner.
2. Screen recordings
Screen recordings are another useful tool available on Hotjar’s Observe plan and can be used immediately after installing the Hotjar plugin or embedding the Hotjar tracking code on your website.
It works by gathering screen recordings of individual visits to your site and can detect things like frustrations (u-turns, inactivity, exits) and engagements (clicks, plays, and actions). It also ranks the recordings by relevance, frustration level, and engagement level so that you can easily access and view potential problem areas.
You can watch the recordings in order and add reactions and comments at different stages of the recording wherever you see something noteworthy.
When the recording ends you can share it with someone on your team so that they can watch it, see your notes, and make the necessary changes.
3. User feedback and surveys
The Hotjar Ask package consists of two main features – feedback widgets and surveys. These features share the same goal which is to collect feedback from customers.
The feedback widget is a simple satisfaction rating system that you can implement on specific pages of your website as seen below.
As users leave feedback on product features or pages over time, you’ll be able to learn what they like and what to improve.
You can also add custom messages, for example, asking users if they would like to leave their email addresses so that you can reach them if you need more information.
4. User interviews
The latest addition to Hotjar’s offering is the Engage feature which aims to directly connect you with users in order to learn about their needs and expectations. This feature is best for tracking how people use a web-based product like a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, rather than a website.
Engage allows you to easily create target audiences from your customer base (specifying job title, education level and industry, and more) when choosing who to interview. No customer base yet? Don’t worry, Hotjar has you sorted with over 175 000 participants that you can choose from to recruit.
Automating the recruitment and scheduling of user interviews is a breeze with Engage. Allowing you to host and transcribe easily within Hotjar.
Once done all user interviews are saved on the dashboard where you can review and create clips with reactions and comments just like you can with a screen recording feature.
Conclusion
Overall, Hotjar is a really great tool for gathering otherwise overlooked data and information about your customers.
If you’re looking for insights on how to improve your website’s user experience and assess if your website is doing a good job then this is the tool for you.
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