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Hotjar

Hotjar

Overview

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar is a conversion rate optimization tool for digital marketers. Features include heatmapping, visual session recording, conversion funnel analytics, form analytics, feedback polls and surveys, and usability testing. The tool is used by digital analysts, UX designers, web developers and product…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Hotjar has proven to be extremely valuable in a variety of use cases. Users have found success in utilizing Hotjar to solicit feedback …
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10/10 recommend Hotjar

10 out of 10
July 08, 2022
Incentivized
We currently use Hotjar to gather survey information on our acne line for Aloette.com. We are trying to understand who has and hasn't used …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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Hotjar Observe - Plus

$39

Cloud
per month 100 daily sessions

Hotjar Ask - Plus

$59

Cloud
per month 250 monthly responses

Hotjar Ask - Business

$79

Cloud
per month Starting from 500 monthly responses

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.hotjar.com/compare-our-plans

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

Hotjar Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Hotjar is a conversion rate optimization tool for digital marketers. Features include heatmapping, visual session recording, conversion funnel analytics, form analytics, feedback polls and surveys, and usability testing. The tool is used by digital analysts, UX designers, web developers and product marketers. Hotjar was acquired by Contentsquare September 2021, and is now a Contentsquare brand.

Mixpanel, Crazy Egg, and Lucky Orange are common alternatives for Hotjar.

Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 9.7.

The most common users of Hotjar are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(331)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Hotjar has proven to be extremely valuable in a variety of use cases. Users have found success in utilizing Hotjar to solicit feedback from clients through polls and surveys, allowing them to gain a comprehensive understanding of how design changes affect content consumption. Additionally, marketing services teams have relied on Hotjar's analytics and user behavior insights to review site performance for clients and provide high-level audits during the sales process. The continual user feedback collected by Hotjar has brought immense value to product design and engineering teams, empowering them to make data-driven decisions that improve the overall user experience. Similarly, agencies have leveraged Hotjar's heatmaps and session recordings to track and analyze user behavior on client websites, uncovering valuable insights for optimization initiatives. Growth specialists have also found great value in using Hotjar to analyze user behavior during critical engagements like browsing, lead generation, and checkout. This provides them with invaluable insights into landing page effectiveness and helps identify any technical glitches that may be impacting conversion rates. Furthermore, digital analytics and optimization departments have utilized Hotjar to glean insights for optimization or debugging purposes, enabling them to understand how people react to design or functionality changes in order to drive improvements. Marketing teams have found detailed reports generated by Hotjar particularly useful in identifying user struggles and interactions with different elements on their websites. CRO teams have also benefited from using Hotjar as a way to educate clients about areas of opportunity on their websites. Overall, Hotjar has become an essential tool for tracking visitor behavior, understanding user patterns, identifying areas of improvement, and optimizing website usability and user journeys. Whether it's through heatmaps, scroll maps, video playback, session recordings, or surveys, Hotjar provides users with the data they need to make informed decisions based on real user opinions and behaviors.

Valuable customer insights: Users have found Hotjar to be a valuable tool for gaining quick customer insights. Multiple reviewers mentioned that it provides important data for improving their own software, and some users felt that the product offers a practical way to reveal the online behavior and voice of users.

Effective heat mapping: Hotjar's heat mapping feature was praised by multiple reviewers for its accuracy in representing website traffic and providing accessible data. Some users particularly highlighted its ability to quantify the success of page copy rewrites and identify areas where visitors engage with the content. The visual representations provided by Hotjar's heatmaps were also seen as helpful in understanding user interactions and optimizing website layout.

Useful session recordings: Reviewers have found Hotjar's user session recording feature to be highly useful. Some users described it as a real-life view of users navigating through the website funnel, allowing them to retrace the user journey and identify potential stumbling blocks. The recording features provided by Hotjar were also mentioned as valuable in understanding user behavior, addressing usability issues, and enhancing the overall user experience.

Confusing and Clunky User Interface: Multiple users have expressed frustration with the user interface of Hotjar, describing it as confusing and clunky. They have mentioned that it requires too many clicks to navigate, making it time-consuming and inconvenient to use.

Difficulties in Troubleshooting and Lack of Customer Support: Some users have mentioned difficulties in troubleshooting issues with Hotjar, citing the lack of a direct line for customer support. This absence of immediate assistance can be frustrating for users who encounter problems.

Limited Plan Tiers and Restrictions: Users have found the limited plan tiers of Hotjar to be restrictive, particularly in terms of the number of recordings available. This limitation hinders users who need to gather sufficient data for analysis.

Users of Hotjar have made several recommendations based on their experiences with the product. The three most common recommendations are:

  1. Start with the free version: Many users recommend starting with the free version of Hotjar to track visitor activity on website pages. This allows businesses, especially small businesses or new startups, to gather valuable data on user actions and understand customer behavior and interaction on their website.

  2. Use it as part of a larger data strategy: Hotjar is often recommended as a tool that provides great insights and should be used in conjunction with other software tracking tools for result comparison. Users suggest integrating Hotjar into a larger data strategy and utilizing its features to track user actions and improve marketing plans.

  3. Try before you buy: Several users suggest using the trial version of Hotjar to understand its value and determine if it meets their business and marketing needs. They advise spending more time in Hotjar to improve understanding of users and overall marketing strategy before considering the paid plans.

Overall, users find Hotjar to be an easy-to-use and fully functional tool for understanding website visitors and their behavior. While some caution is advised in drawing unbiased conclusions from the data if there aren't many visits, Hotjar is considered a valuable tool for gathering website analytics and customer feedback.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
October 11, 2016

Hotjar - You Decide

Patrick Eng | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used HotJar to track visitors to our website. We wanted to see where they went, what they clicked on, where they gravitated towards and what wasn't working. We used it to make adjustments to our website to accommodate some of our visitors' actions and habits.
  • Heat maps for where on your website people have scrolled or clicked.
  • Tracking and monitoring the visitor's journey from the homepage to the product page.
  • Recordings of all the visitors let you see how they interact with your website, and let you make adjustments based on that.
  • Form analysis. We used HubSpot forms, but HotJar was not equipped with the capabilities to analyze those forms.
  • HotJar significantly reduced the loading speed of our website. This became a serious problem and we eventually had to remove it all together.
HotJar is great for tracking visitors' actions on your website. By reviewing recordings of many users, designers and developers can change small things on the website that could have a dramatic impact on its effectiveness. It is also great to see how and why people drop off in the funnel and how one could improve on that.
  • We did not use HotJar long enough to gather enough concrete data to make any conclusions. Due to it affecting the speed of our website, we took it down after a few weeks.
We have not used any other similar products. We heard of HotJar from HubSpot and while learning about growth-driven design.
1
They helped our team analyze the traffic that we received on our website. We looked at heat maps and where users dropped off on their journey towards certain pages and/or products. It gave us the necessary information to make educated decisions about how our website could be optimized for a more user-centric experience.
1
Basic HTML and web development skills. I personally installed Hotjar on various client's websites and analyzed the heat maps. I also set up the funnel analysis and pop-up questions that appeared on certain pages. It does not require any technical knowledge once the tracking script is setup.
  • Heat maps
  • User's journey down the funnel
  • Video recordings
  • Video Recordings
  • We did not experiment too much with Hotjar
  • We were not able to use the form analysis section because our forms were not compatible with Hotjar's capabilities. That is something we would definitely want to use in the future.
  • We did not use any surveys that Hotjar offered but would possibly later
Even though the heat maps and user recordings were useful, our website was significantly slowed down after we installed Hotjar, so much so, that it took over a minute for our blog to load. The data that we gathered was not worth the length that it took our website to load.
  • Understanding the heatmaps
  • Viewing the user recordings
  • Setting up pop-up questions
  • The user journey down the funnel
  • Figuring out why the forms analysis was not working for our website
Overall, it was quite easy to use. Setting up its functionalities did not require any technical skill and was quite user-friendly. It just did not perform as well as we thought it was going to.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Hotjar plays an important role in our user engagement and web optimization efforts. Hotjar is used by a combination of people responsible for product management, engineering, and marketing. The main use case of Hotjar is gathering quantitative data (heat and click maps) and qualitative data (recorded user sessions) to determine what is and is not working about our website from a usability perspective. There are many capabilities that we don't yet use (on-site interrupt surveys and a few others).
  • User session recording that shows what individual visitors are doing on each of our pages. You can target particular pages or sets of pages for real-time user session recording, tag recordings either manually or as we do with the Hotjar API. This allows us to record the haystacks in batches of 2,000 then search for the needles by specific pages visited or events that happened during a session.
  • Heatmap generation on particular pages allows us to see what draws users' attention (hint: pictures of faces are a big deal) -- and what doesn't draw the attention level we'd like.
  • Click maps show us where users are clicking on targeted pages.
  • Form fill analysis allows us to see, on our lead generation forms, the field-by-field fill in and drop-off rate, which allows us to quickly realize where people are getting stuck or precisely what adding additional fields to our form is costing us in terms of conversion.
  • On the session recording, it would be good if when the user leaves the browser window for another tab or etc. but winds back up in the same session if they would indicate this. This happens for us when users land on one page, cruise around a bit then leave the browser tab to click on another search result that happens to be ours. Then the whole screen changes because they're back in our session. That can get confusing.
  • It could do better with handling templated pages -- it would be nice to target a heatmap at a set of pages that could vary in their composition (because it's a template that may or may not have certain data on it, or because it's in an A/B test)
  • Hotjar should absolutely consider adding A/B testing. I think if they did a reasonable A/B testing implementation they could steal other vendors' customer bases overnight (e.g. Optimizely)
  • These are all minor issues or areas for improvement in an otherwise incredibly useful product. The Hotjar team also continually adds new features and clearly is listening very carefully to their early customers.
This is the tool I would start with for doing qualitative web optimization analysis. It provides good capabilities that typically require multiple other tools to implement, and is quite affordable to boot.
  • We've used Hotjar to improve engagement by removing clearly confusing navigation paths or interface options.
  • We've used Hotjar to improve conversion by fixing lead form issues that weren't obvious at first.
Hotjar provides a variety of features typically available in multiple other products. We used it to replace (or instead of) several other products. It may not be best-in-class at every single feature it provides, but Hotjar is the lowest hassle way to make quick impact if you have limited time and resources.
4
Our Hotjar users are in Product Management, Engineering, and Marketing
It really requires virtually no support. Once the snippet is installed on the page (and in our case once we are pushing tags over to recordings from the site as events happen), it seems to be on autopilot from a support perspective. I'm well-versed in web analytics but haven't had to explain any of the features or functions to co-workers I've invited to look at the data and videos inside of Hotjar.
  • Watching recordings of user interactions when the land on or visit particular types of pages
  • Analyzing scroll maps to understand the impact of content ordering or placement on engagement and exploration by users.
  • We are considering using the on-site survey capabilities for interrupt / exit type surveys in the near future.
For what it costs (at least as of now!) it's too good a bargain to pass up as long as you are dedicated to using Hotjar even infrequently for finding opportunities for improvement on your site.
  • Everything is very straightforward and simple to use. The intuitiveness of the interface is a big factor that allowed us to start generating meaningful insights within a day or two.
  • We didn't find anything difficult and whenever there's a question or something isn't obvious they do a good job of putting contextual help that links to clear, concise documentation.
It has never taken me more than a few seconds to figure out how to do what I want to do. I hope the Hotjar team remains committed to keeping the software intuitive to use as they continue to add more capabilities!
  • Google Analtyics
We don't directly integrate with Google Analytics per se, but by taking Google Analytics Events (and their Category / Action / Label information) -- we pass those over to Hotjar at the time we log them to Google Analytics. So now, by default, any event we track in Google Analytics becomes a tag for filtering and searching in Hotjar.
Feeding Google Analytics events through to Hotjar as tags on session recordings, then using the search inside Hotjar to find recordings of sessions where certain events or types of events happened -- it was really simple to setup and incredibly powerful!
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