According to Datareportal, about 67.1% of the global population currently uses the internet. For many businesses, tapping into the online space is crucial for success.
If you want to connect with your audience online, you need to have a high-quality website. While you can build a site that initially seems good, understanding the experience users have with it is key.
Using a website feedback tool is the solution here, and Hotjar is an effective option that’s becoming increasingly popular. It can provide you with vital data that allows you to optimize your site for your target audience.
AdvertisementSo what is Hotjar, and how can your business benefit from it? Keep reading to find out.
What Is Hotjar?
Hotjar is a user experience tool that you can use to observe and analyze user behavior on your website. It can provide valuable insights and offers more than other analytics tools such as Google Analytics.
Like similar platforms, it tracks several common actions users take. However, it also shows various other specific actions such as:
- Scrolls that don’t become clicks
- Hesitations
- U-turns
- More
While many analytics platforms can be helpful, some provide more information than others. The more data you can gather and assess, the clearer a picture you’ll have of how people are interacting with your site. You can then make better-informed data-driven decisions to help improve the user experience your site provides.
Five Tools in One
There are all kinds of tools you can use to analyze and improve your website, but things can become complicated if you’re trying to use a selection of applications. Hotjar is one of the best solutions available as it has five key tools on one central platform.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps offer information on specific user actions including:
- Movements
- Clicks (including rage clicks)
- Scrolling
With UX design, you can build a site based on how you think users may interact with it, but this may not always be accurate. Heatmaps provide a much clearer idea of what users are doing when they get to your site. Hotjar displays this in a grid-like view that makes engagement zones very clear.
You can determine things like:
- How they move about pages
- What they interact with the most
- What they ignore
You can use this information to determine certain elements that could be changed to improve the overall user experience and make your site more effective.
Recordings
Recordings are a great way to put yourself in your users’ shoes, helping you identify issues that you need to fix. You can’t watch the user journey across multiple tabs and windows. You’ll be able to observe your site to spot any noteworthy issues and deal with them quickly.
Gathering data on user interactions is vital to improving your website, but actually observing what users are doing is a much faster way of figuring out the best and worst elements of your site. It can also help you gain a better understanding of any other data you collect.
If you notice any friction, you can zoom out to an aggregate heatmap or chart with a single click. From here, you can determine if the issue you’re looking at is a one-time thing or if it’s fairly consistent.
Recordings help you save a huge amount of time while giving clearer user insights. Being able to deal with issues quickly can have a huge positive impact on user experience, and users who visit your site often are likely to notice this.
Hotjar features an ‘error’ filter in recordings that will show you specific sessions of users who hit JavaScript errors on your website. These allow you to quickly determine what might be causing such issues so you can make the necessary changes.
Surveys
Even the best business analytics tool may not get the full picture when looking at user experience. One of the best things you can do is actually ask your customers what they think about what your company offers.
With Hotjar, this comes in the form of surveys. They’re a great way to get clear customer feedback so you can see how users feel about your website.
With this in mind, surveys also don’t need to be overly expensive and time-consuming. By reaching the right users at the right time, you can get quality feedback with ease. You’ll get fast responses and informative user insights that you can act on.
Hotjar provides survey templates you can use, or you can create your own. Alongside your standard data, this helps provide an excellent idea of the feeling users have towards your website and your brand as a whole.
Hotjar has also recently implemented AI features to go with surveys. You can use AI to create surveys based on your goals. It will build these and send them out in seconds, then automatically generate summary reports when the results come back so you can see an overview of the information gained.
Feedback
Gathering feedback is crucial to understanding user sentiment and making improvements. While surveys can help with this in a way, the one potential drawback is that they gather information after a user has been on your website.
Another approach is to gather this information in real-time while customers are actively using your site. By capturing in-the-moment feedback, you can get to the root of user behavior and gain an idea of how they feel about:
- Your website
- A certain page
- A specific element
Collecting this data from users as they’re experiencing it will help you gain more organic responses regarding how they feel at that specific time.
You can collect and compare feedback scores to see which pages users are enjoying the most as well as those they’re not too happy with. Consider the elements that get the best responses and replicate or build upon those. With the elements users don’t seem to like, you can either edit them or get rid of them completely.
AdvertisementAn effective way to do this is by embedding the feedback widget. Users can offer responses that will give you actionable insights. This works across different devices, so you can make improvements for both desktop and mobile users.
You can customize the feedback widget to match what’s on a specific page. For example, you could set one up for a new video that you’ve just posted asking a specific question about it. Combine a floating and embedded widget if you feel it’s more suitable for your site.
User Interviews
When conducting a call with users, it can be easy to miss things. Hotjar Engage can do the following:
- Host
- Record
- Transcribe
You can then easily look back over the details of any user interview to gain further insights. You can also involve your team to compare notes and make collective decisions.
Talking directly with your customers can be incredibly valuable. Direct interviews help you stay up to date with users’ behavior and needs.
In an ever-changing business landscape, continuous research is vital, and Hotjar Engage makes it easier than ever. You can quickly set up interviews and schedule calls with specific users to gather informative insights.
When doing these, you can either recruit users from your own network, or you can take advantage of Hotjar’s pool of participants, consisting of over 175,000 users. It’s ideal to have some key focus points for the interview, and as Hotjar will automatically transcribe the call, you don’t have to worry about missing anything.
This tool lets you include team members as silent spectators or interview moderators if you want them to see the call in real time. Alternatively, you can share time-stamped notes which is ideal for any stakeholders who aren’t able to join at the time of the call.
Additional Features
All of these tools are great for effective customer journey analysis. Hotjar also has a selection of features, and you can use these to get the most out of each tool on the platform.
Funnels
Funnels are a good way to make connections between the numbers you gather and real user behavior. They allow you to find conversion pitfalls and determine how you can fix them.
With a full overview of funnels, you can see where users churn and why. Filters and user attributes provide richer insights here, and you can break funnels down by segment to make conversion-rate comparisons between things like marketing channels and countries.
Integrations
It’s never ideal to start using a new platform that doesn’t work alongside other tools you’re using. As such, Hotjar is designed with built-in integrations to make it easier to work with. Some of these include:
- WordPress
- Shopify
- ClickFunnels
- Google Tag Manager (GTM)
It also allows for automation to simplify workflows and improve efficiency. The team behind Hotjar is continuously working on new product integrations, with several already available, such as:
- Google Analytics
- Unbounce
- Mixpanel
- Optimizely
- ContentSquare
- HubSpot
- Slack
- Jira
- Segment
If there are any tools you use that don’t currently integrate with Hotjar, the Hotjar API offers various automation processes that allow you to export data to other tools. Your team won’t need to spend time doing this manually, so they’ll have more time to focus on other important tasks.
Trends
Trends are an effective way to visualize a range of metrics. They make it easy to observe patterns in user behavior and get a better idea of the ‘why’ behind the numbers.
You can see charts of your custom metrics over a set time period to observe different trends. Zoom in to see individual recordings or zoom out from specific errors in recordings with a single click. Comparing data across segments will help you identify problems and highlight improvement opportunities.
Highlights
Depending on the structure of your business, you may have several team members who can benefit from the insights that Hotjar helps you gather. Highlights offers simple team collaboration, allowing all members to share key insights with ease. All of this data can be organized in one central location.
Your team can focus on the important information and filter out anything that isn’t needed. Everyone can add context to highlights to make the information clearer, and you can sort insights into collections for better organization. It’s often worth creating information banks based on different metrics and KPIs as this can make it easier to get buy-ins from stakeholders.
Dashboards
All of the information Hotjar gathers and provides can feel overwhelming. To make things simple, it offers a Dashboard feature that gives you a high-level view of user data. It provides a clear overview of data, and your team can use this to quickly spot issues and deal with them before they grow.
With all of your key metrics on one page, you can see what’s happening at a glance. You can easily:
- See how users react to product updates
- Prioritize tasks
- View Trends reports, Heatmaps, Recordings, Funnels, and more
- Customize your dashboards
If you need any information quickly, heading through your dashboards is the way to go.
Benefits of Using Hotjar for Your Website
Any business operating online can benefit from gathering data on user behavior. Hotjar offers various specific benefits that make it a great platform for a company that’s to grow and improve as it:
- Provides holistic insights
- Saves time and money
- Replaces multiple tools
- Integrates with other platforms
- Automates processes
- Is a trusted industry leader
While it’s not the only product experience insights platform available, it is one of the most in-depth and comprehensive, making it an ideal solution for any business.
Achieving Your Business Goals With Hotjar
Now you’re no longer asking “What is Hotjar?”, and just need to determine if it’s right for your company. It includes several tools and a host of features that will improve your ability to analyze the user experience your website provides. The insights you gather will allow you to make improvements that will help your business grow and succeed in the long run.
Real Busi is dedicated to helping all kinds of organizations achieve effective growth through knowledge and quality management. We regularly post business articles on a range of topics to help educate our readers and give them information that can help them achieve their business goals. Subscribe now to join our mailing list and stay up-to-date.
