If you want to improve your website conversion rate it’s essential that you understand the behaviour and motivations of your website users. If like me you run a start-up and have a limited budget you might think you can’t afford user experience analytics and customer feedback tools to evaluate how well your website is performing.
But that's where your wrong, you can get 3 heatmaps and 1050 recodings a month in Hotjar for FREE! Want to know more - read my Hotjar review below and see how this tool can help you to get more leads and sales from your website.
Hotjar Overview: What is it?
Hotjar helps you to understand what how users behave on your website and how they REALLY experience it!
By using the power of heatmaps and user recordings (i'll tell you more about these features later) this powerful tool will help you to optimise the conversion and usability of your website.
It also combines both feedback and analysis tools to help you discover where users are clicking, how much time they spend on each page and their scrolling patterns. All these help you pinpoint areas that need improvement.
How to Use Hotjar Effectively: The Features
With more people hesitant to share personal information, Hotjar provides an easy way to truly understand your mobile and website visitors. Here are the main features:
1. Heatmaps
The heatmap feature helps you to visually see where users click, move, and scroll on your website (and is often quite different to what you may expect!).
They’ll show up like actual heatmaps. You’ll see the most popular parts of your site in red/yellow. The least popular parts of your website will appear in green/blue.
These give you great insights for knowing which elements on your pages need improving most or making more or less prominent. For example, when you see where users click and how far they scroll, you can determine whether to move a CTA or to A/B test other changes to copy, page design, or the user interface.
2. Visitor Recordings
This is by far my favourite feature! Hotjar lets you record the sessions of random users on your website. You get to see what they do once they get on your site. Where does the mouse go? Do they click on any of your links? What did they search for? Did they buy anything? What page did they go to next.
Watching these recordings can help you to pinpoint problems right there on the spot. It will also let you see what your user actually experiences once they get on your website.
3. Incoming Feedback Widget
This Hotjar user feedback widget helps you to understand what users really think about your website and it's so easy to use, I set mine up in less than 2 minutes!
This simple but effective feedback tool allows visitors to leave ratings of your pages and website elements, and allows them to easily take and send screenshots of what they are having issues with or what they are loving.
See the red feedback button on the right hand of the page? That’s my feedback widget!
What I also love about this feature is you can then link it up to the live recording, so if someone rated it as a bad experience and told you why you could then look at the recording and try and fix the problem.
4. Surveys
I love using surveys to understand their customers purchase decisions or processes. These often contain gems that lead to terrific wins.
Hotjar includes a terrific survey tool every bit as good as SurveyMonkey.com. You can use it to find out in-depth feedback from your visitors, and exactly what they think of your website content and your offerings, and get feedback on how they would improve it.
And if you're a bit stuck on what to ask then you can steal ideas from their question bank, or use a pre-built template.
Hotjar Pricing
Hotjar insights has four categories for pricing plans- Basic, Plus, Business, and Scale.
- The BASIC plan is free forever. It includes up to 35 daily sessions and up to 1050 recordings per month. It’s ideal for users with low traffic volumes or for those who prefer to sample the tool first before settling on it.
- PLUS comes at just $39 per month. You get up to 3000 recordings, and 100 daily sessions.
- BUSINESS is for enterprises and SMBs and starts from $99 per month. you get 500- 2500 daily sessions.
- The SCALE plan is priced at $389/mo and you get 4000+ daily sessions.
Hotjar Vs Google Analytics and Why You Need Both
Google Analytics and Hotjar are complementary analytics tools. Google Analytics is the king of aggregate data and measures everything in numbers and Hotjar provides the qualitative data view.
Here are 5 of the most common scenarios where you can use them together to get maximum insight:
1. When you want to improve conversion rate
2. Before and after a website redesign
3. When you want to improve the customer experience
4. When you need buy-in from new management/clients/colleagues
5. When your business embraces digital transformation
You might also be interested in - 5 Essential Conversion Metrics to Track
How Easy Is It to Add Hotjar to My Site?
Hotjar works by adding a JavaScript snippet of code to your site just before the head close tag. It needs to be on every page where you wish to record visitors or gather feedback. It normally only takes a few seconds to add the code to your site.
Hotjar offers some great installation guides for the following:
Hotjar for Wordpress - Add Hotjar to Wordpress
Hotjar for Shopify - Add Hotjar to Shopify
Hotjar for Wix - Add Hotjar to Wix
Hotjar Review: Wrapping Up!
Hotjar caters for all types of business websites regardless of traffic volumes. It's a valuable asset for online brands that want to improve the site’s user experience and increase conversion rates.
Hotjar will help improve your website sales or leads!
Now over to you – have you started using Hotjar yet? What is your favourite tool to gain insights?