Hotjar Review: Everything You Need to Know

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Wouldnโ€™t it be great if you could compare your results with Google Analytics with an even better web analytics tool?

Certainly, Google Analytics is a key player when it comes to website tracking, but itโ€™s not the only game in town.

Look:

I am not debating that itโ€™s the market leader boasting an 85.7% share. My point is, even though some consider Google Analytics the standard, itโ€™s vital to get a grasp of issues that may be out of view if you focus on just one tool.

As an ecommerce business owner, you have to make better decisions faster based on accurate metrics. You canโ€™t afford to let some metrics slip through your fingers and risk getting crippled by your competition.

That is why you have to supplement Google Analytics with Hotjar to cross-check for accuracy and redundancy.

Keep reading to find out what Hotjar has to offer, how it has helped other brands and more importantly, how it can help your business too.

 

Hotjar Review: Whatโ€™s It All About?

Hotjar is a powerful tool that online businesses can use to optimize the conversion and usability rates of their websites. Its most sought-after features include conversion funnels, heatmaps, and visitor recordings.

It also combines both feedback and analysis tools to help users discover where visitors are clicking, how much time they spend on each page and their scrolling patterns. All these help you pinpoint areas that need improvement.

With more people hesitant to share personal information, Hotjar provides an easy way to truly understand your mobile and website visitors without asking them to fill out a form.

Hotjar Review: The Best Features

Letโ€™s dig in to find out what Hotjar has to offer.

1. Visitor Recordings

Hotjar garnered its fame from being the first analytics tool to offer visitor recordings. It records the screen of user sessions for you to see how web visitors interact with different elements of a page such as how they scroll.

As an online business owner, you get a behind the scenes look at how web visitors consume your content. This helps you get a better understanding of what issues are getting in their way to make a purchase.

StudentCrowd is a platform for university students in the UK to review courses, accommodation, and part-time jobs. They used visitor recordings and saw successful and half-completed reviews.

The results showed that students struggled to answer two parts of the review criteria and the โ€˜Submit Reviewโ€™ button wasnโ€™t visible in some mobile devices. Fixing this led to a 55% increase in conversions on the review form.

2. Heatmaps

This feature helps you to know where visitors click. This provides relevant information about which sections of the webpage is clicked the most and which receives the least attention.

You can therefore include a strong call to action (CTA) buttons in spots with the most clicks. Even go a step further to add a hook to spots with the least attention and reduce bounce rates.

Trampoline Plezier is a good example of heatmaps in action. The company started a blog to address the need for information on customizing trampolines for backyards. After reviewing a scroll heatmap, they noticed that the CTA was too low.

To fix this, they added the primary CTA button at the top of the page. And boom! It led to an 11% increase in clickthrough rates.

3. Conversion Funnels

Conversion funnels allow you to see where your visitors are dropping off from turning into customers. Hotjar provides a visual overview for you to see where site visitors leave your site and reduce bouncing rate.

So how do conversion funnels actually work?

Letโ€™s find out:

Netguru wanted to grow their website traffic. They soon realized that they needed more than guesswork to know why users landed on their site. The software and design agency set up funnels in Hotjar and started collecting data.

A few months later after fixing issues highlighted by the tool, Netguru was able to:

  • Drive up โ€˜Servicesโ€™ page traffic by 30.93%
  • Drive up โ€˜Careerโ€™ page traffic by 58.76%
  • Decrease bounce rate by 50.45%
  • Increase the number of users in the sales marketing funnel by 17%

4. Feedback Polls

Hotjarโ€™s unique selling point is combining analytics with user feedback features. Feedback polls help you to ask web visitors why they do or donโ€™t take specific actions such as filling out a form or clicking the โ€˜Buyโ€™ button.

There is also the incoming feedback feature that adds a widget on your page. This provides an outlet for users to leave feedback if they experience any problems.

If youโ€™re wondering how this works, hereโ€™s one companyโ€™s story:

Hubspot Academy used Hotjarโ€™s feedback polls to understand why visitors abandon the course registration page and how the team acted on such feedback. After fixing issues the poll revealed, the brand was able to boost signups by 10%.

5. Recruit Testers

Hotjar allows you to call on users to participate in user testing. To achieve this, it helps you add a widget on your site that asks people to take part in the exercise. Users then fill out basic information to sign up and can also minimize the widget.

To motivate your users to take action, offer an incentive such as a gift voucher or discount. Remember, people are reluctant to share personal information online.

6. Surveys

Existing customers offer the best resource for conversion optimization because they have valuable insight into your companyโ€™s barriers and drivers. Hotjar provides user-friendly surveys to help you get to know your audience.

Some questions to ask your existing customers include:

  • What led you to look for product type or service?
  • Reasons you stopped using our services?
  • Why did you  buy or signup?
  • What could we have done to make your decision easier?

Remember:

Ensure that all of your questions are open-ended.

7. Form Analysis

So how do readers use your forms?

Hotjarโ€™s Form Analysis helps you to visualize form and field engagement. It achieves this by allowing you to view drop-offs and submission stats.

You can therefore discover the fields that took too long to fill and those left blank. You will also see why visitors chose to abandon the form altogether. All these will help you improve your online form completion rates.

Hotjar Review: Pricing

This is where Hotjar outshines its competitors. Instead of paying for different services separately, you end up paying a few dollars for a combination of three to four services.

Hotjar even emphasizes its competitive pricing on its homepage.

Take a look:

 

So letโ€™s take a look at the plans available for you to choose from with Hotjar.

Basic Plan

The Basic Plan is absolutely free. Itโ€™s ideal for users with low traffic volumes or for those who prefer to sample the tool first before settling on it.

The features that come with this plan include:

  • Heatmaps-3 snapshots of 1000 page view each
  • Video recordings- 300 recordings of 100 at a time
  • Funnels- 3 funnels collecting unlimited data
  • Forms- 3 forms of 1000 sessions each
  • Polls, Surveys, Recruiters, Incoming Feedback

Hotjar avails data for Recordings, Heatmaps, Funnels, and Forms for 1 year but the rest are availed indefinitely. When traffic exceeds 2000 daily page views, it automatically distributes data collection.

Plus plan

The Plus Plan costs $29 per month and offers unlimited use to all of its tools. This helps you to track the following:

  • Heatmaps- unlimited for 2000 page views each
  • Video Recordings- unlimited for 2000 recordings each
  • Funnels- unlimited funnels for unlimited data
  • Forms- unlimited for 2000 sessions each
  • Polls, Surveys, Recruiters, Incoming Feedback-unlimited for unlimited responses

Additional features that come with the basic plan include:

  • Adding notes to recordings
  • Recordings for specific pages
  • Using JavaScript Triggers for targeting

Once traffic exceeds 10,000 pageviews, data collection will be distributed through sampling. When you reach your plan limits, you can either delete items or upgrade to Hotjar Business.

Business Plan

The Business Plan costs $89 per month and itโ€™s best for business owners with traffic exceeding 300,000 page views each month. It also comes in handy when you want to remove the Hotjar branding for visitor-facing tools.

The features offered here include:

  • Heatmaps- unlimited for 10,000 page views each
  • Video Recordings- unlimited for 5,000 recordings each
  • Funnels- unlimited funnels for unlimited data
  • Forms- unlimited forms for 5,000 sessions each
  • Polls, Surveys, Recruiters, Incoming Feedback- unlimited for unlimited user responses

Some additional features that come with the plan include:

  • Removing Hotjar branding from shared Recordings, Heatmaps, and Feedback tools
  • Optimized integration
  • Changing the style of Incoming Feedback with emojis
  • Showing feedback tools such as Polls, Survey Invites, Recruiters and Incoming Feedback to a percentage of web visitors.

When traffic exceeds 20,000 daily pageviews, Hotjar automatically distributes data collection through sampling.

 

Hotjar Review: Who Should Consider Hotjar

Hotjar caters for all types of business websites regardless of traffic volumes. You may have noticed the diversity of the brands from the examples given above that make up their customer base.

Bottom line:

Hotjar is a valuable asset for online brands that want to improve the siteโ€™s user experience and increase conversion rates.

Do you have any questions about this Hotjar review? Let us know I the comments section below.

Belinda Kendi

Belinda Kendi is a talented content marketer, ghostwriter, and an e-commerce copywriter who produces relatable and valuable content that woo customers to subscribing. Why don't we start a conversation? Visit www.belindakendi.com or email me;[email protected].

Comments 1 Response

  1. Gesano says:

    Would be great to have a couple of other heatmapping tools also. Consider making comparison review to Hotjar, Plerdy, CrazzyEgg and Mouseflow

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