What Is Hotjar & What Is It Used For?

Hotjar is quickly becoming one of the essential tools in a modern marketer’s toolbelt. It offers a comprehensive suite of features to capture customer insights, track journey performance, and optimise website experiences.

Its features allow users to capture direct customer feedback, track user journeys, understand content requirements, identify issues in the user experience, design and optimise websites, test hypotheses, choose the right calls to action, and determine the effectiveness of landing pages. By utilising this data-driven approach, businesses can focus on creating experiences that result in improved customer satisfaction and increased conversions.

In this blog post, we’ll answer the question “what is Hotjar & what is it used for?” to grasp why it’s an invaluable asset for organisations looking to understand their customers better and drive growth.

Firstly, What Is Digital Customer Experience? 🌟

Digital Customer Experience (DCX) covers all the phases of a customer’s journey when they interact with your brand digitally, such as visiting your website or engaging with you via social media. It can also extend to other channels like mobile apps, chatbots or email campaigns. Companies that invest in their customer experience reap the benefits of increased loyalty and higher sales figures.

DCX is an essential building block of any successful business, as providing customers with a seamless and enjoyable online experience is becoming increasingly important.

With the rise of digital customer experience, businesses need to keep track of their customers’ perceptions and make sure each interaction with them is positive. Whether through email exchanges or mobile app visits – every touchpoint matters when striving towards a successful brand image.

It’s especially important for online companies as they don’t have physical locations where people can physically interact with the brand – making it all the more critical to deliver an engaging experience. Hotjar is a behavioural analytics solution for just that!

What Is Hotjar? 🔥

Hotjar is a powerful product experience insights tool and website visualisation software that businesses can use to significantly improve their customer experience. It collects user and website data to help companies gain insight into how their audience interacts with the website or app and how to improve the User Experience (UX) and conversion rate.

It’s no wonder why freelancers, small businesses, mid-size businesses, and even large enterprises use Hotjar. According to Web Technology Surveys, Hotjar is used by 3.4% of all websites as of January 2023. This includes popular sites such as Zoom, WordPress, Opera, IBM, and Business Insider.

👨‍💼 What Hotjar Does For Businesses

To quickly run down how Hotjar helps businesses, it provides detailed heatmaps so businesses can visualise areas where customers spend the most time or scroll through pages quickly without clicking anything. This helps them identify potential problems and make improvements to create a better overall customer experience for their digital platform.

Additionally, Hotjar also offers survey tools for businesses to get feedback directly from customers about what they think about the products and services offered by the company. This helps them identify areas that need improvement to better meet customer needs and preferences while ensuring they deliver the best service possible.

With its array of tools for measuring user experience metrics combined with its ability to capture direct customer input via surveys & feedback widgets – Hotjar is an invaluable tool for today’s modern product teams seeking to understand how users interact with their products & services so they can fine-tune their products & maximise engagement & conversions.

🐢 Will Hotjar Slow Down Your Site?

Hotjar takes site performance very seriously and optimises everything in the process. This is done through asynchronous loading of the Hotjar script, the use of a content distribution network to allow for faster loading, and maximum utilisation of browser caching. All of these work in tandem to ensure fast deliverability of their service with as little impact on site performance as possible.

5 Hotjar Benefits To Consider 🎖️

💸 Cost-effective

Hotjar helps you get past assumptions and unlock crucial insights about your audience. Connecting recordings to specific triggers or experiments gives invaluable feedback on user sentiment that can help refine your testing roadmaps for improved user experience and client conversion rates. These are some ways it helps ensure a maximum return on investment for every action taken by improving the overall user experience, which is highly cost-effective in the long run!

💁 Gentle Learning Curve

With its simple navigation/UI and organised dashboard, Hotjar makes it easy to gain and accurately study insights from visitor data. You can even set goals to measure performance across different channels or campaigns, allowing you to make the most of your efforts by optimising designs for maximum results. Furthermore, Hotjar offers various short courses, has plenty of documentation, and has a flourishing community to help you on your journey.

🤝 Customer-friendly

Hotjar is customer-friendly, both to you as their customer and to your customers. For instance, with the device type identification feature, you can gain valuable insights into visitor behaviour and device preferences. Learn which marketing channels are a hit for your site by tracking key metrics such as page views or bounce rates across various devices- from mobiles to tablets – so that you can optimise the user experience on each one. And if you’re stuck with anything, the support team always seems to be on hand to assist.

🔗 Easy Integration

Hotjar has high compatibility with various customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and tools, such as WordPress, Hubspot, Optimizely, Slack, Zapier, and Segment. Additionally, integrating it with other highly beneficial tools like Google Analytics allows you to analyse data more comprehensively and better understand user behaviour.

⚡ Swift Installation & Action

With no prior experience in web analytics or data science, you can quickly set up a funnel and gather vital insights into your users’ habits. You can set Hotjar up fairly easily and quickly; no developer resources are necessary. Results are instantaneously available once the integration is complete — all within minutes. You’ll be off prioritising, testing, and implementing data-driven actionable insights in no time!

Due to such benefits, Hotjar has become an invaluable asset for businesses looking for new ways to maximise customer satisfaction whilst keeping up with ever-changing trends. With its unique set of features, it’s easy to see why Hotjar has quickly become one of the leading tools in helping improve customer experiences worldwide!

Drawbacks Of Hotjar ⛔

🛠️ Lacks Customisation Options

Hotjar lacks proper customisation options in some of its features. For instance, you won’t be able to simultaneously track numerous sessions on different areas of your website; you can’t create custom reports that summarise data from multiple elements or one that focuses on a single page element; and you can only change some of the basic UI elements, such as font colour and your logo, on surveys.

📊 Lacks Predictive Analysis

Hotjar offers a great range of digital analytics tools, but for those who want to make predictions about their audience, Google Analytics is still the go-to. It leverages existing data to provide insightful projections to guide customers’ actionable steps towards success. This sort of predictive analysis feature is lacking in Hotjar.

📱 Limited Compatibility

Hotjar is a fantastic platform for gathering website feedback, but it’s unsuitable if you’re hoping to get user input on your mobile app. Fortunately, other solutions can help capture valuable comments and insights from users via their phones or tablets, so make sure you research the options. Also, you can’t integrate Hotjar with ticketing platforms such as Github, Bugherd, and Jira natively but must integrate with platforms like Segment and Zapier first.

❌ Needs Quality Of Life Improvements

According to users, there are a few quality-of-life improvements that Hotjar can benefit from at the moment. Aside from those listed above, it would be highly convenient if you were allowed to download session recordings, which is not the case right now. Also, the ability to track ROI is missing.

All of these drawbacks are important to consider when choosing an analytics platform for your business. While Hotjar can provide valuable insights into user engagement on websites, it’s crucial to weigh up the pros and cons of this product against any alternatives before committing.

What Is Hotjar Used For? ⚙️

Let’s now run down the various features you can access in Hotjar and what you can use it for in your business.

🌡️ Heatmaps

Image Credit: Hotjar

One of Hotjar’s most valuable features is its Heatmap capability, which is particularly powerful for understanding how visitors engage with your website. Heatmaps provide visual insights into how users interact with each page on your website, including where they click, scroll or hover. This information has numerous applications, such as finding out what content and page elements are popular or overlooked by users, understanding which parts of a page are most engaging, or determining if visitors have difficulty navigating a particular page.

📽️ Session Recordings

Image Credit: Hotjar

Recordings of anonymised visitor sessions provide invaluable user behaviour data, such as mouse movement, scrolling, and clicks across various web pages as they navigate your website. This includes links they click on and when they abandon certain tasks. Hotjar’s Session Recordings also enable businesses to pinpoint problems in the customer experience so they can be quickly rectified, ensuring customers have an enjoyable journey when using your product.

🔆 Highlights

With Hotjar’s Highlights feature, your team can coordinate and communicate better than ever – one location provides access to powerful insights from session recordings and Heatmaps, allowing you to spot trends, identify patterns, validate assumptions quickly, and prioritise tasks brilliantly. Plus, with user data easily accessible in the same space as all other decision-making elements, it’s a breeze for teams to take that extra step towards elevating their design process!

📝 Surveys

Image Credit: Hotjar

Hotjar offers surveys to get direct feedback from your users regarding their experiences with your product. With surveys, you can find out what aspects of your product people enjoy most and any issues they may have encountered during usage. Further information such as age group and geographic location can help you better understand who is using your product and tailor it more specifically towards them if necessary.

🗣️ Feedback Widget

Image Credit: Hotjar

In addition to capturing data about how customers use your product, Hotjar also has features designed to capture direct feedback from customers themselves. The Feedback Widget enables you to ask your visitors questions at any point in the customer journey and display surveys on specific pages, such as essential landing pages or after key actions taken by the user. This helps product teams gain valuable insights into customer mindsets around critical points in their journey since customers often express ideas that would not come out organically during traditional analytics measurements or testing processes.

👥 User Interviews

Using Hotjar Engage, a user-testing and interview platform, you can gather valuable customer feedback and first-hand data quickly and easily. Engage makes it simple to organise and execute user interviews. You can invite your own testers or draw from Hotjar’s expansive network – you’ll always have access to the ideal participants for testing out your product.

How To Install Hotjar 👨‍🔧

📦 Choose A Product Package

To install Hotjar, you first need to create an account and add your website to their Sites & Organisations page. Their product packages include:

• Basic: This is Hotjar’s free tier that offers access to 35 daily sessions, automatic data capture, and unlimited heatmaps.
• Plus: For US $32/month, this gives you access to 100 daily sessions, the ability to filter and segment data, the Events API for tracking custom user actions, and everything in the Basic package.
• Business: For US $80/month, this gives you access to 500 daily sessions, custom-built integrations, the Identify API for tracking custom user attributes, frustration and confusion signals, and everything in the Plus package.
• Scale: This gives you access to unlimited daily sessions and full access to every Hotjar feature. You’ll need to book a call with their team to discuss the pricing for this.
• Custom Package: This gives you access to as many daily sessions and features as you need, with the pricing adjusted accordingly.

Get started for free and try out Hotjar for yourself right away!

#️⃣ Add Tracking Code

Once you’ve created your Hotjar account and added your site, you can retrieve the Tracking Code from their Sites & Organisations page and copy it into the HTML code of your website. It should be placed right before the closing </head> tag to ensure it loads correctly.

✅ Verify Installation

After pasting the code onto your website, verify if you’ve installed Hotjar correctly by returning to the Sites & Organisations page after a few minutes. You can then view reports on user behaviour, such as heatmaps, recordings, form analysis and surveys, once enough data has been collected.

For a step-by-step explanation, check out how to install your Hotjar tracking code.

💡 Bonus: Hotjar Alternatives & Competitors

In case you’re not really impressed with its capabilities or simply want to try something else, here are a few Hotjar alternatives and competitors you can test out:

• Glassbox
• LogRocket
• Plerdy
• Smartlook
• Mouseflow
• Contentsquare
• FullStory

Summary: What Is Hotjar & What Is It Used For? 📋

Hotjar provides a range of methods to gain actionable insights into user behaviour. Its heatmaps allow you to visualise where users are clicking on your website or app pages, providing valuable insight into how user interactions with your site compare to your goals. Session recordings also provide further qualitative analysis by showing you what individual users are doing on your site, which can help identify weaknesses in design or usability issues that could lead to poor conversion rates. And Hotjar’s surveys and feedback widgets enable organisations to get direct customer input—making it easier than ever to collect helpful feedback and respond accordingly.

Hotjar also provides tools for testing hypotheses about A/B tests or landing page experiences. This helps marketers determine whether their changes are making an impact or if they need further optimisation before rolling out new features or designs across the board. Plus, the platform allows companies to learn how customers on different journeys interact with their products and services to further customise experiences.

Overall, Hotjar provides a robust suite of analytics capabilities that makes it possible for organisations of any size to understand their customers better and deliver more effective experiences that drive business growth. You can get started immediately with its intuitive interface and extensive feature set to see for yourself why it’s no wonder many businesses are turning to Hotjar as their go-to product experience insights tool!

Behavioural analytics and website data visualisation tech like Hotjar is a powerful tool for driving success in business. Reach out to us to tap into the potential of such modern technologies and experience personalised solutions tailored to your unique problems with our team’s strategic insight and technical know-how! 

Disclaimer: Keep in mind that we may receive commissions when you click some of our links and make purchases. However, this is no extra cost to you and does not impact our reviews and comparisons. We strive to always do our best to keep things fair and balanced in order to help you make the best choice for you.