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Hotjar has proven to be extremely valuable in a variety of use cases. Users have found success in utilizing Hotjar to solicit feedback …
Starting at $39 per month 100 daily sessions
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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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Pricing
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
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is Hotjar?
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Hotjar Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
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.
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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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!
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reviews
(51-75 of 101)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 15, 2021
Real-World Recordings of Website Users on Your Site
We use HotJar across the organization and for client projects as well. We were BETA testers of the product. The reasons we stay with HotJar are the ease of setting up accounts, new heatmaps for specific pages, and user feedback.
- UX/UI
- Live user recording
- Heatmaps on specific URLs
- Billing/price
- Limits on data use
- Code bloat for install
As the director of a marketing services team, we leveraged Hotjar to review site analytics and user behavior for all of our clients that came to us for a website project. We would also use Hotjar in the sales process to provide a high-level audit to our prospective client. Hotjar is used for our own marketing websites, our client sites, and was also used to help in product-related projects.
- Quick and easy installation via Google Tag Manager.
- Intuitive, easy-to-use user interface makes adding tags extremely easy and quick.
- Hotjar provides heat mapping and user session recording to see how users interact with your website.
- Hotjar is primarily used for web-based experiences. Not that easy to use on mobile apps.
- I'd love to see Hotjar integrated with Google Analytics for an even deeper view.
- Hotjar is primarily used by smaller organizations...pricing can get steep quickly for larger organizations.
April 03, 2021
Hotjar Helps Us Make Better Marketing Decisions
We used Hotjar to track the quality of traffic coming into our website and use that data to make important marketing decisions. It was really great because it provided us objective insight on what the next step is in terms of what to do with our promotions, and it also helped dispel common knee-jerk reactions on certain items that may be irrelevant to our website visitors, who are, ultimately, our prospects.
- It's an accurate representation of traffic.
- It is fast.
- It is accessible data.
- Maybe more flexibility on the free features.
- Chat support that will help understand the service better while using it, probably.
- App version.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
HotJar is used for:
- heatmaps and qualitatively tracking page engagement
- in-line surveys and feedback gathering
- user session videos
We use it across marketing, product, research, engineering, and any other department that works on the website. Generally, it is a cheap and easy way to see how people are interacting with our website.
- heatmaps and qualitatively tracking page engagement
- in-line surveys and feedback gathering
- user session videos
We use it across marketing, product, research, engineering, and any other department that works on the website. Generally, it is a cheap and easy way to see how people are interacting with our website.
- Incredibly affordable and easy to set up
- When I've contacted support, they've been helpful
- Excellent value-for-money
- Very accessible for people with different technical skills
- Hard to look at data at an individual user level (makes cleaning up non-geo traffic or outliers harder)
- Tough to integrate at the user level with other tools
- Some of the tools don't support multiple users as well as they could
HotJar is a heatmap and feedback software and it is used mainly by our marketing department and in particular by our webmasters and digital marketers. We make frequent changes to our website with new landing pages and content and HotJar is a great tool to see if the changes we make work and how effectively we engage our visitors.
- Before HotJar we had to purchase at least three separate software to obtain the same data (Crazy Egg, Qualaroo and Survey Monkey).
- I particularly like the "Recording" section where you can capture each and every session of your visitors when they hit the website and you watch over their shoulders.
- The HeatMap feature is great and it is essential when you design new landing pages. You can get valuable insights on what areas of your site people are spending time on.
- The Poll feature is great and people give us feedback on our site and we can gain valuable insights. The only drawback is that sometimes people ask a specific question and don't leave their contact (because it's just a poll) so we can never get back to them with the answer.
- The Funnel Feature is good but it could be improved. I find it a bit too simplistic and it should have more data.
- The “Recruiters” feature is very interesting in theory but I don’t think it really works in real life. It basically allows you to recruit some of your visitors and invite them to a live user test via screen sharing (Skype) to truly see what they are thinking. The problem if you have to find people that want to do it and I don't think people will do it unless you give them a gift back.
We use Hotjar as an analysis tool to review visitors on our website. Hotjar helps us make data-driven decisions about our website as well as our services and products. It gives a great insight into where users go mostly on our website, in addition to Google Analytics. The marketing and the website development teams are able to use this data to make adjustments.
- Heatmap to see wheat people click on most
- GDPR compliant
- Integration with other CRM software could be added
- Customization of the onsite poll would be great to have
January 18, 2020
Awesome company and app
Our product team uses Hotjar to review product usage of our web app, home page, and help center.
We use it to collect feedback and integrate with our Zendesk help desk.
- Always enhancing their product
- Great embeddable widgets
- Customize type of widget, such as into a modal
- Add more features offered by competitors
January 15, 2020
Great tool to gather website feedback
We implemented Hotjar to be able to receive feedback from our online audience that visits our website. We rolled it out globally on the website and we've implemented several additional features that Hotjar offers.
- Provide client feedback about specific page.
- Recording client interaction with specific pages.
November 21, 2019
Hotjar is your best buddy when it comes to improving the UX of your marketing website (and product)!
Hotjar is a new tool that we've recently started using to better understand our user journeys, both on our website and our product. More recently, we upgraded our accounts to get more data so that our findings have statistical significance when it comes to testing different types of page designs and implementing improvements. With Hotjar, we mostly use their heat mapping tools and screen recordings.
- The heat mapping tools in Hotjar are outstanding. By knowing how far our website visitors explore the pages, we have been able to quantify how successful a page copy rewrite has been by merely proving many more people now engaged with the rest of the page!
- The ability to record videos of how our website users interact with key pages has helped us reduce friction and, ultimately, increase our conversion rates.
- Feedback polls have been useful for our product/development team when releasing new features and collecting feedback about their experiences.
- The funnels feature could be improved. I've found this to be largely inconsistent when comparing to data we get from the funnels we build in Google Analytics.
- The feedback polls and incoming feedback surveys could look a little nicer. I'd then be more inclined to use them on our website to see if our visitors, as well as leads, are enjoying their experience.
- It would be great if the heatmaps on blog home pages could tell me more about which new articles are more popular (every time we add a new blog, the order changes, so new articles replace old ones).
November 09, 2019
Hotjar is a powerful tool that reveals the online behavior and voice of your users.
Used to see user interaction with site. Used by the product team.
- It is a powerful tool that reveals the online behavior and voice of your users by combining both analysis and feedback tools.
- Not sure
October 25, 2019
Love Hotjar benefits and functionality!
I am using it with multiple companies that I consult with. At my recommendation, they have installed the code and I set up the various recordings and reports to help them gain a solid understanding of how their visitors interact on their sites. Hotjar provides the added depth that most analytics packages don't have.
- Scroll maps: Illustrates how far down the page visitors are willing to go to view content. It helps us to determine if crucial content is being viewed and by what percentage of visitors.
- Click maps: Shows us what elements visitors try to interact with the most and helps us identify items that maybe should be clickable if they're not already.
- Recordings: Helps us see what pace people are reading the site's content and which elements often trigger their response to click further into the site. A majority of visitors scanning quickly over a section indicates a lack of interest that needs to be rethought. I can't always get that from standard analytics.
- Clicks in regions on a page sometimes don't add up. There are individual or "section" clicks tabulated within a region and an overall count.
- The "Move" option on heatmaps isn't that useful to us.
October 23, 2019
Recording Traffic with HotJar
We implemented HotJar into our website with a recent revision to our BigCommerce template moving from a free template to a paid version to increase traffic. 420EDC is basically a one man show, we have help from some other folks for SEO & photography content. HotJar allows us to record the traffic on our website which is what I primarily use the application primarily. There are other features Heatmaps, funnels & forms which I have not had a chance to implement or research as the recordings really show what is going on. This literally takes the guesswork out of traffic. It allows for visuals of problems customers experience in searches with bad URLs and shows what the website looks like across whatever platform/device the customer is using from their perspective. Numbers don't come through, so your customers' credit card information is secure from 3rd parties.
- Records traffic
- Generates heatmaps from traffic
- Allows forms to be implemented into the website for marketing research
- I use the paid plus plan as we don't have enough traffic for the bigger upgrade just yet. I had some confusion as to how many videos would be recorded and HotJar was quick to provide details that were still a little vague. They could come up with some better terminology to prevent this type of confusion and with a better description of the plans offered and what they really provide.
- I used the Basic Plan which was free until it maxed out. I was under the impression I would have to pay for the business plan which is $99 per month. The Plus Plan is almost hidden which is $49 and the perfect fit for my needs currently. Make this easier to find.
- Auto playback on recordings should stop after 5 or 10 recordings just to make sure someone is still watching. Distractions happen so it would be nice to have a better way of watching 5 or 10 recordings in an auto-mode.
October 22, 2019
Awesome tool for optimizing your website
Hotjar is used by the product and marketing teams. This tool helps us understand how users behave, what actions they perform and where they get dropped off while using our product. It helps us understand what the users really want.
- Captures user's clicks and heatmaps.
- Shows your user traffic on your site.
- It provides insights and analytics using all of these data points.
- It should capture all screen recordings for iOS tools.
October 14, 2019
See what your users are doing on your website!
We're using HotJar to see where our web visitors are clicking on key pages. This allows us to make informed decisions when we want to test out new content or reorganizing content. We're also using HotJar's click-tracking software that shows videos of how users are scrolling and clicking through the site.
- Heatmap Tracking - Seeing where users click is very important.
- Click Tracking - Watching videos of user actions shows us where they're getting hung up.
- Interface - Once logged into HotJar, it takes a few clicks to get to where I want to go. Shortcuts on the landing page would be helpful. But this is a minor complaint.
- Removing clicks that take place on a drop-down menu, or showing the menu separately would help.
- Make it easier to remove the monitoring of the clicks that close out the Privacy Policy alert.
June 11, 2019
HotJar helps you analyze your UX deficiencies
HotJar is used by our organization to check up on how a new website design or landing page is faring with our users. When we launch a new design or UX for a specific page, we'll install HotJar and record an analysis of where our users are going on the page and whether they are understanding the page (or not!). The fact that we can record sessions and then play them back is unbelievably helpful. The fact that we could fix early bugs or report issues helped us grow our business and that's thanks to HotJar.
- Recording user sessions
- Surveys
- Feedback loop
- Polls for users
- HotJar could install a version of "live-chat" so we could communicate directly to our users from the recordings. This would enable us to fix issues in a quicker format than what we currently have.
- The pricing could be improved to make it more affordable for SMEs
- Some of the descriptions when using the software are a bit confusing to understand. It takes a lot of time to analyze and figure things out!
March 29, 2019
Hotjar is the King of User Experience Analysis
We use Hotjar for almost all of our clients, including ourselves. This tool helps make strategic and intelligent recommendations for our website projects.
- Provides in-depth information on what the website user is actually doing.
- Provides context to data like Google Analytics. Ex. The home page has 100 clicks but low time on the page. Hotjar can show exactly what the users are doing on the homepage.
- Price. It's extremely affordable for the power it has.
- Navigating complex functionality on websites. Often, it doesn't know how to read certain elements that appear on the page.
- Recovering deleted heat maps or recordings.
March 28, 2019
Hotjar for agencies
Hotjar is used by the UX & CRO department of my agency, which provides digital marketing services. It helps us understand how users are behaving on our client's websites, letting us see what sections of pages are valuable to users, and any technical issues they may have. It adds an extra layer of insight to data gathered via Google Analytics.
- Heatmaps.
- Session recordings.
- On-site polls.
- More control in URLs heatmaps/session recordings/polls and more advanced URL options.
- Certain content doesn't load in Hotjar, eg iframes, reviews widgets, maps.
- Sometimes heatmaps don't seem to load properly so that less than 50% of users appear to make it to the average fold marker (normally most would make it to the average fold marker).
March 28, 2019
Hotjar is a useful tool
We use Hotjar within our agency on our client's websites. We mostly use if for heat mapping and session recordings. It is a good place to start if you are want to know what your users are doing on your website, and it is a good visual aid.
- Heat mapping is great on Hotjar. It is a good place to start when you are looking at the UX & CRO on your website. You can see the % of people clicking on elements on a page, how far they scroll, and mouse movements.
- Hotjar is great for session recordings. These record the mouse movements, clicks, pages and scrolls of a user in video format. You can watch these to investigate what works well on a site and identify potential roadblocks and bugs.
- Hotjar is great as it ensures that users details are anonymous; for instance, if you are watching a session recording, you cannot see what a user types in a form field, as Hotjar blanks this out.
- Hotjar has a poll function, so you can have polls on your website.
- Hotjar doesn't always render correctly. For instance, on heatmaps, not all elements will show, as it takes a snapshot of the first user's screen, and if elements haven't loaded, it does not show for any of your heatmap data.
- There is no way to exclude URLs when watching session recordings; for instance, if you specifically don't want to see users who are looking at careers, you have to skip through the videos manually.
- Hotjar has the ability to track forms; what fields users are completing, how long it takes, where do users abandon the form etc. Although this is highly dependant on how the form is built on the site, so it doesn't work for all forms.
March 28, 2019
Hotjar is great and still has opportunity to get better
It is currently being used by the UX & CRO department and is included in most, if not all, UX & CRO campaigns. It is used to inform test recommendations and quick fixes to the site which may be hard to add to the dev queue without the data from Hotjar/other user research.
- Split heatmaps by device.
- Session recordings.
- Polls.
- Filters within session recordings.
- Allowing us to see elements/JS/CSS within the heatmaps so you can be more specific where users have clicked.
- Date ranges.
March 04, 2019
A great budget UX tool
Hotjar is being used to do both quantitative and qualitative analysis of our marketing site. It helps us answer the question of "how are people using our site?" in ways we cannot assume. It's Recording and Heatmap features help us see how people are using the site, and surveys give us the ability to gather feedback quickly. We use the surveys on our support site for the team to evaluate the effectiveness of individual articles.
- Recordings are easy to watch and gather insights.
- Heatmaps are easy to set up and have a very simple interface to browse through.
- Setting up surveys is very intuitive.
- The free plan is very generous if you just want to try it out.
- Results can be a bit cumbersome to parse through, especially if you have a lot of survey feedback. It'd be nice to have additional ways to sort and filter feedback.
- It's somewhat annoying to have to preemptively set up heat maps. It takes active participation while other tools allow you to autorun your allowance across the site to be able to bring up the data on demand. This is preferable.
- The visual feedback tool doesn't seem like it'd get the right type of feedback. Maybe for a team without designers, it might, but having people give design feedback on your site doesn't usually have the best results.
January 25, 2019
The best value visual behavior analyzing tool on the market. Get your free account today!
I use Hotjar to get visuals of how visitors behave on websites; how far they scroll, where they click, how they move on the page, and much more. From here, this information can be used to modify websites to improve conversions. I use it on my website and also on my client's websites too. The problem addressed is to confirm to clients how their site could be improved. Often times, they need to see it so they believe what I tell them. :)
- Value-oriented, great for startups and SMB
- Heatmaps (click, move, scroll)
- Feedback polls and surveys
- Easy Reporting
- Honestly, none that I can think of. :)
January 25, 2019
Let Hotjar help you optimize your user experience!
We use Hotjar with the 75 employees at our web agency to understand user experience on our client's websites. By using HotJar we are able to get more accurate data and help with the implementation of new features.
- Heatmaps work well
- Recording user sessions
- Ability to deploy polls and surveys
- Recording feature sometimes glitches
- Hard to organize the data
- Popup customizations
November 06, 2018
HotJar for UX Design
We use HotJar to get detailed user interaction data to help validate and influence usability and design decisions. When designing our web products, we have a relatively limited ability to do the breadth and depth of usability research before we launch new features. When new features do get released, they are validated only by that small audience. Using HotJar, we are able to get more data than we know what to do with to help validate or invalidate our decisions made at launch.
- User session video capture - HotJar allows us to conduct usability testing as if we were sitting behind a user, interacting with our web software. Although we don't get audio, we can see exactly how a user interacts and moves around our software. We can see clicks, mouse movements, time spent during any given activity, and more. And best of all, the video timeline gives us timestamps/markers where major interactions happened, allowing us to find those interactions quickly.
- Hot spot heat maps - Just like any good analytics tool, HotJar provides great colored heat maps of how frequently users clicked/interacted on different parts of our web page. This gives us a quick, at-a-glance idea of what our users are focusing on.
- Dynamic user surveys - Sometimes pure interaction data is not enough to get the info we need. Luckily, HotJar gives us the ability to create dynamically-driven surveys on our web app. These surveys can be change without needing to re-deploy our entire application - they can be updated through the HotJar tool.
- Customization of in-page user surveys - Although it is a great tool to be able to publish and update user surveys that appear on our web page, the customization options (mostly UI) are somewhat limited, making the survey either stick out like a sore thumb, or look like an advertisement or error on our site. It would be great to get a little bit more control over how the survey appears on our site.
- Honestly, I have not run into any other major examples I can detail where HotJar has not been able to do what I have needed it to do!
October 30, 2018
Website tracking tool that uncovers it all!
We're using Hotjar in the marketing department to analyze how the website is performing and what should we be changing in order to improve conversions. The tool shows clicking data (where website visitors are clicking on) and the scrolling data (how far down the page are the visitors scrolling). We use the gathered information to decide what to change on the website to improve users' experience and conversions.
- Tracks number of clicks on the website
- Shows you how the users are moving on the page. It records their mouse movement.
- It shows you the scrolling data so you know if your content is being seen at all.
- It would be great to have it set so you can pick a specific time period to show the data for, ie last week, last month. Sometimes we run different campaigns that can cause different behavior on the page (ie, webinar promotion) and it'd be great to observe the specific period only.
- More how-tos and guides on how to read the numbers and what changes you should be making based on the numbers.
- Visual reports instead of csv ones. It's much easier to understand!
Hotjar is being used specifically in our marketing department to help have a better idea of what our customer journey on our website is in relation to what we intend it to be. Using Hotjar, we can see where on our website people bounce from our pages, where people click, hover their mouse, and watch individual recordings to see how users interact with our website. It adds a more visualized perspective on a lot of information provided by Google Analytics.
- Visitor recording is amazing. To be able to see how a user that starts on a landing page progresses through and interacts with your website is incredibly useful to iterate on high traffic pages and to find impactful places to A/B test
- Heatmaps are also impressive. To see where people drop off of your page or where they click and hover their mouse is incredibly valuable information to have. It shows where your visitors' attention is drawn and can point to places where you could add a CTA.
- Hotjar could use more algorithms and advanced analytics to make suggestions for you. As valuable as all of the information available to you can be, sometimes it is an overwhelming amount of data and if they had a way to help guide you towards data driven decisions (lots of people leave your page by this point, maybe you should reorganize the page, etc.), that would be nice.
- It would be nice to be able to see why people leave the page on the heatmaps. For example, on a page with a full nav menu, a lot of users will leave the page at the top since they find the page they find the page they're looking for.