Hotjar for Website Analysis

Here at IronPlane, we recently began using the tool Hotjar for our website.  We’re always looking for new ways to improve our onsite engagement, and Hotjar is a strong tool in this arena.  We decided to give it a try for ourselves to see how it worked for our business.

What is Hotjar

If you haven’t heard of Hotjar, let us fill you in.  Hotjar is a relatively new tool to the market.  It combines both analysis and feedback tools to give you the big picture of your site’s health.  After identifying the online behavior and voice of your users, you’re able to use the information to improve your site’s performance and conversion rates.

As mentioned, Hotjar uses two main tools to assess your site.  Analysis tools allow you to measure and observe user actions and behavior.  The Feedback tools allow you to hear what your users have to say.  Using these two different methods will allow you to more fully understand your customers and, therefore, know what changes your site needs to be more successful and improve conversion rates.

Analysis Tools

Hotjar’s Analysis tools are broken down into several different areas:

• Heat Maps:  Heat maps allow you to see visitor clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior.  This will help you to understand what your users care most about on your site.
• Visitor Recordings:  Eliminate guesswork with recordings of real visitor behavior on your site.  Seeing your visitor’s behavior on your site can help you to easily identify usability issues.
• Conversion Funnels:  This tool allows you to identify the step in the purchasing process when most visitors leave your site and the page on which it occurs.
• Form Analytics:  Improve online form completion rates by discovering which fields take too long to fill, which are left blank, and why your visitors abandon your form and page.

Feedback Tools

Hotjar’s Feedback tools are broken down into different areas, as well:

• Polls:  With polls, you’re able to target questions to specific visitors anywhere on your mobile or web site.  This allows you to better understand what your visitors want and how best to deliver upon those needs.
• Surveys:  With an easy editor, you can build your own surveys.  You can collect response in real-time from any device.  Distribute your surveys using web links or emails, or invite your visitors just before they abandon your site to leave their objections or concerns.
• Incoming Feedback:  The incoming feedback feature allows you to get instant visual feedback.  You are able to see what people most like (or not!) about your site, identify issues, and find growth opportunities.
• Recruit User Testers:  This feature allows you to recruit the best possible participants for user research and testing directly from your site.  You have the ability to collect profiling information, contact details, and offer a gift in exchange for their help.

Our Experience

As you can see from the breakdown above, Hotjar offers a lot of bells and whistles.  While we’re looking forward to in-depth testing of all the features on our site, today we are focusing on the heat maps tool.  Here, you can see what Hotjar’s heat maps tell us about our site:

Where people clicked:

Where people scrolled:

As you can see, few visitors ever scroll to the bottom of our page.  Most are focused on the top section of our site, which lets us know how important it is to keep our most valuable information there.  It also tells us that we may want to work on making the lower portion of our site more inviting.  Additionally, we can see that the majority of visitor clicks are right in the header, primarily on the Portfolio, Services, and About pages.  This information helps us plan our next steps toward maximizing our client satisfaction and conversion rates.

We really like how Hotjar allows us to be so actionable.  In fact, we like it so much that we’ve already set it up for many of our clients.  If you’re interested in learning more about how we use Hotjar or would like help installing the script, drop us a line.  We would be happy to help you get started.