Item: Hotjar
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Hotjar

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Heatmaps.
Session recordings.
On-site polls.

Cons

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).

Return on Investment

Hotjar allows us to sell a more in-depth, expensive package to clients.

Alternatives Considered

Hotjar has much better heatmaps than offered via VWO. Its polls functionality is also better than VWO.

VWO offers heatmaps linked to AB test variations, but these are not very in-depth, and you cannot get scroll maps like you can with Hotjar.

Other Software Used

Google Analytics, Qubit

Likelihood to Recommend

Hotjar is well suited to seeing how actual users of your site behave on a page, rather than user research which can be quite artificial. It also allows you to poll your users. It's good for top-level, brief overviews of behavior, rather than in-depth analysis.

Hotjar is less suited to very specific targeting of polls/heatmaps, as URL targeting is quite limited. It's also unsuitable for in-depth user research via the polls, as many users find the pop-ups annoying and don't answer properly. Focus groups/moderated user research would be better for gaining deeper insight into what users think about your website.

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