Hotjar is your best buddy when it comes to improving the UX of your marketing website (and product)!
November 21, 2019

Hotjar is your best buddy when it comes to improving the UX of your marketing website (and product)!

Veronika Baranovska | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Hotjar

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).
  • We've been able to quantify the success of a copy update on our website (which was very hard to do otherwise).
  • We've been able to identify blind spots in UX when it came to our key pages, which helped improve conversions.
  • We've also been able to collect feedback on some of our product features that helped inform our road map.
I used Crazy Egg ages ago but never got into it! I'm sure the tool is much different now.

Google Optimize is not a direct competitor, but tests can be run, and with funnel and events tracking in Google Analytics, you can get a lot of the data that Hotjar is also telling you it could do. This is the only area where I think Hotjar could be improved.
If you're at the stage where you'd like to pursue CRO (conversion rate optimization) and improve UX (user experience) for your website visitors, then Hotjar is one of the tools you should have in your toolkit! Here are a few ways we use Hotjar that has been useful:
  • Set up heatmaps on crucial conversion pages on your website (if you're in SaaS, that's your /pricing or /features page).
  • Create a space where you can record your findings (we use a project management tool to do this, but you can create a Google Doc if you wish).
  • With the heat maps, track the data about the fold, how far people scroll, # of clicks, and others.
  • Come up with tests/experiments to run on a bi-weekly basis, and record them in the same space.
  • Then, compare your data from two weeks before with the current averages, make observations.
  • Rinse and repeat until you've exhausted test ideas! :)

P.S. I'd also recommend setting up the recordings on key pages - this feature is most useful for product teams, BUT, by seeing where people click (when there's no link) and how they move through the page, you can make quick adjustments to help your website visitors discover more useful content.