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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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| 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.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(76-100 of 101)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 21, 2018
Hotjar is a MUST-HAVE tool for UX testing
We use Hotjar to understand the user experience on our website, to test new features, to run surveys and to study heatmapping. Primarily we set recordings of user sessions that we study to give us directional information about how people are interacting with our brand.
- Records user sessions.
- Allows for specific webpage research.
- Pop-up surveys on specific pages.
- It would be great to have the option of audio feedback about the website.
August 27, 2018
Great insights for a very low price
We use it for two things: understand how people react to changes in our design or functionality, and to understand intent (or try to deduce it) with polls. It is mainly used by the marketing team, and we use the video recording feature a lot, and the polls too. We used the feedback button but it's a bit annoying that you can't choose were to show it. It just pops up everywhere and on mobile that might be a bit confusing and annoying.
- Video recording works very well. You choose which pages to record (based on many factors) and records appear very quick. This is the most useful feature for us. Of course you can't understand intent completely, but certainly there are usability things that will popup quickly.
- Polls work well too. We have an eCommerce site so we ask different questions in many places, and it has proven to be helpful. You need a certain volume and also beware that it's annoying or confusing for some users. But considering that cost, it might be worthwhile when it's about an important page.
- Heatmaps works well but they aren't that useful. Yes, the scroll % of people is nice but not as actionable as the other features.
- The video recording feature is very slow to use. I know there is a very powerful process going on (saving your CSS and the DOM movements you make) but anyway it's slow to use.
- Hotjar itself is heavy and has effects on your load times. This is a very important issue and I hope they're working on that.
- Adding more segmentation would be nice. For example, being able to connect your API or more information to show relevant polls or feedback buttons to certain users. Aggregated info is hard to process.
June 12, 2018
Price + Features = Slam Dunk
We use Hotjar in our AdOps department to analyze user behavior on websites that we are running campaigns too. Our Growth Specialists install Hotjar, then use the heatmaps and user recordings to inform us about how users are interacting with the website during browsing, lead generation, checkout and other engagement. We also use Hotjar information to evaluate how effective landing pages are and whether there are any technical glitches we need to address, especially for mobile devices.
- User recordings are the most useful feature of Hotjar - they separate the tool from competitors by allowing an anecdotal, real-life view of users working their way through your website funnel.
- The ability to deploy polls and surveys is a great feature to level up information gathering. Simple questions around intent/goals, objections or demographics can add color to your understanding of visitors and flesh out personas.
- A core component of Hotjar is heatmaps. The fact that these heatmaps are segmented by device and offer click, mouse movement AND scroll tracking are crucial to understanding user interaction on web pages in aggregate. This is especially valuable on landing pages.
- The Hotjar user recording feature sometimes glitches up and doesn't render CSS properly, which can lead to a recording of low value when you can't understand what's stopping a user.
- User recordings have a lot of attached metadata such as country, device, operating system or day/time - however, not all of these pieces of metadata are usable in segmentation. Most notably, it would be useful to filter by recordings NOT from a certain set of countries, to eliminate or target internal users.
- Funnel tracking is a good idea in theory, but in practice, I've found it to be inaccurate and misleading, due to the way that HotJar processes the data it receives at each step.
June 11, 2018
An absolute hottie
Working with a FinTech, it is important to know what clients are doing when they arrive at our website. When a client arrives it is important to know where they are looking. For instance, are they looking at a call to the beauty of Hotjar that we can see the heatmaps and then look at repositioning the CTA?
- Heatmaps, unbelievable, let us look at the movement of our visitors. Where are they, what do they do, where are our CTAs?
- Visitor recordings. Also picking up OS and Device type on visitor recordings are absolutely amazing information.
- I have mentioned this before with a lot of software. Put an FAQ that is not just a quick reference to your sales pitch
- Hotjar is amazing. Settle down with the sales pitch. You are awesome. We will buy your product on our own
Hotjar is used by our Product Management and Design/UX resources to deeply understand how our users interact with our product and specifically where in the onboarding process they are abandoning creating and funding their account. The team uses the information to optimize the user experience and to streamline onboarding. It is tremendously valuable in understanding where users get hung up without expensive focus groups.
- Hotjar does an amazing job of visually showing us how our users interact with our software. Their software creates videos showing how users navigate our app, complete forms, etc. The videos that they create are earmarked when key events happen (change pages, click back, etc.) so that we can hone in on key milestones in the user experience.
- It works seamlessly across PC web, mobile web, and mobile app.
- It tracks where the user's mouse is so that we can track how the user is processing each screen.
- They also provide heatmaps for key screens and highlight where the users are spending time on each page.
- For our needs, we really have no areas that could be improved. I imagine with very complex apps understanding the user flow and navigation could be tedious, but for most apps, it is a great solution.
May 16, 2018
Hotjar - A Very Useful Little Tool
We use Hotjar to track user behavior on our website, by pulling heatmaps of certain high-traffic pages, and setting up user recordings so analyze user behavior. We simply select the subpages on our website we want to track, and Hotjar records sessions, showing you where a user clicks and scrolls to on our pages.
- Ease of Setup - To setup Hotjar, we were able to use the pixel through Google Tag Manager. It took only a few minutes, and as long as you have an existing GTM account, Hotjar begins tracking instantaneously.
- Low Price Point - Hotjar is very reasonably priced for a user behavior tool. Instead of hiring user experience testers, we can leverage the traffic we already have to understand how customers use our website.
- Heatmaps - The heatmaps provided by Hotjar are easy to analyze and aesthetically simple.
- Updates - The product has released very few updates or improvements since I began using it, and the core offerings have remained the same.
April 06, 2018
Certainly a HOT product
Hotjar was mainly used by the marketing department since we were responsible for the global and local websites. Hotjar tackles the problem a lot of companies struggle with; "How is my website being used." Step one is to build a consumer friendly, inviting or really professional website, step two is getting traffic and step thee is to keep the visitors there. Google Analytics does a fantastic job at showing the traffic flow, but it fails to show which parts of the website are looked at or clicked at the most. This is where Hotjar steps in.
- Hotjar is a very "visual" application. This made it easy to show our data to other colleagues in order to discuss the future of the website.
- The application makes you see the website through the eyes of an unknowing consumer. This souds a bit cheeky, but it's easy to make false assumptions about a project you have been working on for a long time.
- The 'heatmap' really shows what's important on your website and what needs improvement. For example we had a large front page but we noticed people stopped scrolling after a while. We decided to make the page smaller in order to make the page load faster.
- While the data is really interesting, the amount of data can get huge over time. If you don't prepare this you'll be stuck with a big load of heatmaps and videos that all look a little bit different.
- It's quite hard to organize the aquired data. There is no easy way to leave notes or integration with organisational applications.
We have been using Hotjar for many years, mainly in marketing and product departments but heatmaps and users recordings are useful for everyone in the organization. We use Hotjar to diagnose onsite and UX issues and to identify conversion gaps. The tool helps us also in the CRO department as we are able to fine-tune our experiments and speed up the review process.
- The ease of use, heatmaps and recordings can be set up in seconds, and then shared with the team using a link
- The feedback and data gathered can provide great insights that help to optimize our website.
- When running experiments with any A/B testing tool you only get quantitive data and there is very limited insight into how or why users engage with one variation over another. Hotjar gives a fuller picture of our customers and their motivations for engaging with our site.
- Not all the website traffic is captured.
- The amount of data gets huge after a dozen or so heatmaps and hundreds of videos. There is no good way of categorizing those.
- The feedback tools are quite simple and not as customizable as I would like them to be.
March 16, 2018
Great tool to track user behavior in your website
We use Hotjar both on our website and our web platform. I'm personally using it and find it very useful. Although there are some other alternatives in the market, I like what the team behind Hotjar has built and continues building. Session recordings and heat maps are the tools that I use the most, as they help me understand how our website visitors browse the website, how they navigate and what we can improve to increase the conversion rate. Also, we use funnels feature sometimes to track completion rates for some essential flows.
- Hotjar does pretty good session recording which helps us understand how visitors browse our website
- Heat maps feature is also very useful
- Surveys are another feature that Hotjar has and we used to get some feedback from our users
- Would be great to have the ability to add filtering to the funnel analysis
- Support for native mobile apps would be a fantastic addition
March 09, 2018
Go from data to context in just minutes.
Hotjar is used to understand how prospects and customers interact with websites and landing pages. It's used by marketing and web development, primarily. It solves the problem that metrics can be misunderstood. A conversion rate is low... but why? It's a guessing game if you're just going off Google Analytics data. We use Hotjar to see detailed heat maps and screen recordings to give context to the data.
- Powerful freemium model. A small business can use Hotjar for free while web traffic is low. Most features are included in the free version. Even a large business with a lot of traffic can experiment with it for free on a subset of pages.
- Simplicity. Installing takes just a few minutes and a simple copy and paste of a script. Viewing and understanding heatmaps and recordings is really straight-forward.
- I LOVE the ability to watch recordings at 2 to 4x speed and skip gaps of no movement or activity. It really helps me get more insight in less time.
- I wish there were an easier way to look at the charts and recordings by paid traffic source. There's some more manual ways to do the latter, but streamlining would be nice.
- The polls and surveys are interesting, but I don't love the design. More control would be great.
- Alerting me of significant changes in KPIs or behavior would be cool.
March 01, 2018
Hotjar is free and useful.
Hotjar is my go to source for capturing user feedback within our site. It makes it easy to automate surveys, trigger polls based on specific user actions, record user sessions so that you can observe behavior, and analyze where users are dropping off of your forms. Best of all, it's completely free to try and fairly cheap to purchase.
- Surveys - you can create surveys and trigger them automatically within your app. Hotjar will collect and visualize the data for you.
- Session Recordings - you can record whole sessions or trigger them when a user visits a certain page to see how people really behave on your site.
- Polls - you can ask your users a question at any point in their journey. Particularly useful when combined with tag manager.
- Regex targeting - use regular expressions to target groups of pages.
- Forms could be easier to target.
- Incoming feature is slightly redundant with polls.
- Branching surveys would be nice.
We use Hotjar to record Heatmaps and Recordings of all our websites and apps. It provides invaluable feedback on actual user behaviors and has led us to make improvements and changes to our websites and apps on an ongoing basis directly based on actual user behaviors.
- Extremely easy to set up. Easy to monitor, and share. The user interface is wonderful.
- The heatmaps are excellent and provide easy navigation and sharing capabilities to share with other users in the organization, even if they aren't active product users
- The recording filters are useful for filtering through large volumes of recordings based on time on site, locations, etc.
- We have had limited success with some hotjars add-on products such as popups
- Popup customizations and behaviors are not as good as some other products, but this is not the core reason to use Hotjar
- New licensing can be more expensive than in the past if you have multiple sites and apps
February 22, 2018
Very helpful visual analysis tool for websites
Hotjar helped me understand how our website visitors behave on our website. It opened our eyes in terms of how the visitors see things on the website and what actions they perform. I was doing digital consulting for the company and Hotjar helped me with decisions regarding what changes need to be made on the website and why. The features we used the most are heatmaps, session recordings and also some surveys and funnel analysis.
- Session recordings offered by Hotjar are very powerful. It allows us to see what the visitors do on the website and what issues they face on the website so we can make the necessary changes.
- Heatmaps by Hotjar is also very helpful, although when recording some of the heatmaps there was a small issue with the visualization, but then it was fixed with the next heatmap.
- Surveys is a nice way to ask questions to the visitors of your website. Helps a lot.
- As I said, there was a small issue with heatmaps visualization in the beginning, but it was solved when we recorded another heatmap.
- Would be great to see support for mobile apps, at least for iOS apps.
October 11, 2017
Does exactly what it's supposed to do
We use Hotjar to monitor and record user behaviour on client sites, as well as to conduct polls and user surveys. This is a tool for gathering insight into how a site is used, and this data is then used to enable us to more confidently make recommendations to the client for improvements to their site.
- Real-time recordings of user interaction on a site
- Heatmaps and scroll levels
- Delivery of surveys / polls for gathering direct user feedback
- The 'Funnel' functionality doesn't seem to offer anything over and above what can be achieved using Google Analytics
September 29, 2017
Hotjar - one of the best analysers of actual usage
We use Hotjar in the Marketing dept as part of our website analytics. Core problem it resolves is analysis of page layouts to test for usability and to identify 1) any blank spots where users are not reviewing or interacting with content, and 2) if core call-to-action elements are falling into blank spots. We use this insight to guide page redesign and template construction to optimize pages for maximum content consumption and clickthroughs.
- easy to install / implement
- bug-free heatmaps (we struggled a lot with Google Analytics' built-in functionality that tried to do a similar function but would always be misaligned and crash)
- choice of different heatmaps - for clicks, hovers, and scrolls - adds a dimension of understanding that goes beyond simply knowing what's being clicked - we can also see and identify potential issues around misunderstood or confusing CTAs and content not being seen at all.
- I found the time taken to collect data before maps are available difficult - understand it gives more accurate results, but not sure if earlier data cannot be used even indicatively, or later data is not updated.
- Some kind of alerts would be useful - eg. if a single element is receiving a very high percentage of interactions, which could be an indicator of improper page design, or if the bottom section is getting less than 5% scrolldowns (page is too long)
- form abandonment is a major issue - can we track things like fields filled and deleted repeatedly or filled without clickthroughs?
September 27, 2017
Hotjar is best in class in several classes
Hotjar is being used by our marketing department to determine the efficacy of our web design and maximize use of funnels and targets.
- Determines user interaction across platforms
- Shows ease or difficulty users have navigating site and finding funnels
- Gives instant visual usage charts overlaid onto your site
- There should be a way to save filtered searches
August 23, 2017
Great tool to analyse your website
We have been using Hotjar for 1 year to analyse our websites with heat maps, recordings, tracking funnels, forms and tracking feedback from our customers. It helps us to understand how optimize our landing page and the user experience. We can prioritize break points in our customer experience.
- Great heat map: the best user interface and lot of data
- Customer recording: It is extremely practical to understand specific problems
- Easy setup: less than 5 minutes with GTM
- More options for the heat map: to have a list of all clicks, and the possibilities to track element not visible on the page
- Adding an A/B testing tool
March 29, 2017
HotJar is a valuable tool in a digital marketers toolset
Hotjar has been used in my previous full-time roles a well as for my freelance clients. It's being used primarily by my department (marketing) and it helps uncover some UX/UI issues on pages on various web sites; gives a better qualitative view behind website user flow. I have used it for surveying and polling to soliciting valuable customer data points to help better streamline marketing messaging.
- Polling/surveying
- Records user behavior in quick video snippets
- Heat mapping and scrolling mapping
- Implementation is not difficult
- Further customization features on polling / surveying questions (no if/then logic branching)
- No cumulative data or insights for video recording of user behavior (no roll-up)
- Heat mapping and scrolling mapping is a bit too rudimentary but still insightful
January 03, 2017
Hotjar offers the right combination of tools
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Hotjar for heat mapping user behavior on our corporate website, as well as CTA and UX testing and user feedback. It's being leveraged by marketing, as we also control the design and layout of our site, in addition to the content.
- Heat maps: these are great for diagnosing issues with less popular CTA placements, and to optimize content above the fold.
- User session recordings: even the free version of Hotjar provides up to 100 user session recordings, before resetting. I recommend spending time on sessions that are clearly not bounces or "misfires".
- Feedback forms: These are like CTA dialog boxes, and can be a real boon to marketers concerned with website usability and design. I would caution that these should be used sparingly, and for targeted feedback - they can become overwhelming to the user if you add too many, and make sure they apply to initial sessions only.
- I am quite pleased with Hotjar. I can't really comment on an expanded feature set, or any improvements to the current feature set. For the money, it is a great investment.
October 11, 2016
Hotjar - You Decide
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.
September 20, 2016
Powerful tool to provide extra value for your web clients
We create websites for our clients and help them grow their business. Hotjar is essential in this process. We add Hotjar to every website we launch.
- Heat maps - the ability to see where users not only click but the areas they hover their mouse are great insights on the design and offers of the website.
- Video recordings - amazing tool to watch an anonymous user on your site. Real use user testing by just having your site online.
- Easy setup - Hotjar setup couldn't be simpler. Recently they made it even better too. You used to have to add the code to your website, then view your homepage, and THEN verify. Now you just add it to your website and click verify. Turning on and setting up any of the tools are super easy too once the Hotjar code is active on a site.
- I don't use all of Hotjar's features. We stick to more of the main big few. I know Hotjar has corner pops of employees with advice and tips to help you through the process and to use more features. They also send emails about features to help, however I never dove into either too deep. So I can't even say they should do a better job seeking the other features because they do (it seems) but currently I guess I don't see the time to learn/value returned benefit on my end yet.
September 19, 2016
Hotjar is a nessesity when it comes to understanding your users behavior
Hotjar plays an important role within our organization to strategically understand users' patterns on our website (through heat maps and scroll maps), individual user experiences (through the video playback tool), and insight into unknown errors anywhere on the site. We are planning on making a push to use surveys to gather more qualitative data from our users in the hopes of making further improvements to the site overall as well as content we put out.
- Recording data tracking thought the heat maps and movement maps allows us to better understand whether or not our hypothesis are proven true. The fact that they also allow you to break it down into individual devices helps in making the comparison across devices so much easier - a tool other software will lack.
- User sessions allow us to better understand on a individual level what visitors are doing on each page. Targeting specific events that occurred is also possible with the API so you can understand how many users are following these events and whether or not they are behaving as you want.
- Support is fantastic. Every time I've had any questions concerning customization of other events, their response has always been quick and filled with a robust answer. Never has someone responded back seeming to lack knowledge of the software (which will sometimes happen when contacting other software support).
- It would be really interesting to see Hotjar interact with other analytic software so they have the ability to gather further data the software currently lacks. For example, having Hotjar integrate with HubSpot so pages you're editing have the heat maps generated within the page performance.
- It would be nice if there was an easy way to see heat maps or mouse movement behaviors of popups. As the only real way you can view dynamic events like this is through the session feedback.
- Would really love to see Hotjar incorporate A/B testing and some analytics along with it, I think that would really help give people the ability to get a more robust understanding of what works best on their websites for users in combination with the tools Hotjar already has.
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.
December 28, 2015
If you wonder about the utility of your website, this will exceed the limits of basic site analytics
Hotjar is being used by our organization to understand our web and mobile traffic. The specific business issue we needed to address was our near 100% bounce rate, and a lack of conversion of new traffic using our website. Google Analytics was showing us where we were having difficulties with a conversion funnel, and we needed more information that could be shared to improve our UI.
- Hotjar records how traffic is engaging with the site, and from which device and browser. This gives us the 'customer perspective' as we could never expect from other analytics tools, second only to participating in a user study.
- Hotjar allows you to quickly put forms on your website, getting feedback from users, and instantly has made our site more engaging without additional development work.
- Hotjar has an extensive toolkit, and you can access the tools once you have the single script on your website. It's been helpful to collect and visualize visitor data to address unanswered questions about our UI performance.
- Hotjar has a heatmap feature that wasn't informative for us, and in all fairness it wasn't important enough to ask for support in this area.
October 02, 2015
Hotjar provides an ideal suite of tools for startups
As the product manager for Kanbanery.com, I have been using Hotjar for almost a year in order to solicit feedback from our clients (using polls and surveys), to get insights into how design changes affect content consumption (using heatmaps), and to find opportunities for improvement in the sales pipeline (using funnels).
- I get the most value from surveys and polls, but especially from surveys. Our clients are very happy to answer questions about their goals and experience and I use that data to improve Kanbanery and to better understand the people who use it.
- I really like the form feedback. Before I started using Hotjar, I had no idea how powerful simple improvements to web forms could be in order to make the experience better for our clients and to improve sales for us.
- For several months, we experimented with adding, removing, and repositioning elements on our landing pages based on heatmap data in order to learn to make it as easy as possible for people to find what they are looking for in the appropriate order.
- The funnel analysis is useful, but without support for cohorts, it can be difficult to interpret. For example, I want to know how well our landing page converts visitors into sales, but there is no way presently to distinguish between first-time visitors, repeat visitors, and existing clients.