An Incredible Value That Raises the Bar in Website Optimization
Updated August 04, 2016
An Incredible Value That Raises the Bar in Website Optimization
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hotjar
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.
- 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.
- Qualaroo Insights,Google Analytics,Crazy Egg
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.
Using Hotjar
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.
Using Hotjar
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- 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.
Integrating Hotjar
- 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.