Get Better Analytics and Insights into User Behaviour with Hotjar

One of the things webmasters and bloggers should always track is: what visitors and readers do at their website. The web has a couple of tools which help you observe and know reader behavior and Hotjar is one of them.

Hotjar is a powerful tool that combines a variety of features such as; Visitor recordings, Heatmaps, Form analytics, Feedback polls & Conversation Funnels.

Of course you can use and pay for these tools separately, however, Hotjar avails all these amazing features in a free plan that can support upto 2,000 visitors!

Even though some features are limited, the ones provided are efficient enough to meet your needs. You can sign up for free today, and a credit card won’t even be required.

Beyond 2,000 visits if you want to track more, you can go for the pro or business plan.

What Is Hotjar and Why Go For It?

Hotjar is a powerful tool designed for webmasters to analyze and observe their traffic better. In other words, it is a complete mobile and website analytics tool enabling analysts, web developers, digital marketers, UI developers & more, to optimize the conversion and usability rate of their websites.

Hotjar combines both feedback and analysis tools to give users understandings into how visitors interact with their website, how they could enhance that visitor experience and finally, what they can do to increase conversion rates.

Webmasters can find out what it feels like to be an actual site visitor, identify UI problems that annoying to them and understand their mindset with this important analytics tool. Through its variety of features, Hotjar allows users to visualize the interaction of visitors on their website, understand where issues occur and pinpoint areas for improvement.

In addition, more direct and clear visitor feedback may be garnered from visitor facing features like customized polls and surveys that come with support for more than 20 languages.

These “Voice of User” features enable developers to directly hear from visitors what they have to point out about their user experience.

Here’s a list of features provided by Hotjar:

1. Visitor Recordings

Visitor recording is one of the best features that Hotjar provides and they because famous for this. They were one of the first in the market to provide full visitor recordings.

Hotjar records user’s behaviour on your website as if the entire screen of the user was recorded and transferred to you. Of course, they do not record a video, but they track the mouse movements and clicks using a javascript code.

Using this data they recreate a video recording kind of playback that we can use. By looking at this data you will get a better idea about how the user is behaving on the website and you can improve the usability of the website if you find that the user is not finding what he/she is looking for.

2. Heatmaps: Know Where Visitors Click

Heatmaps is an analytics feature used to keep track of the webpage where users most scroll past or click. This makes it quite easy for webmasters to know which parts and sections of the webpage get the least attention and which are clicked the most.

You can also get to know how far visitors scroll on your pages, and this can be really useful when you are writing quality blogs and wondering if people read it completely or not.

Indeed, this is the best part of Hotjar’s heatmaps feature; you come to know what parts of your webpage are clicked the least and most. Using this feature, you can therefore place ads in the spots that receive most clicks. Placing ads on the spots that receive the most clicks will increase your “Click through rate” (CTR) and thus increase your earnings as well.

You can place up to 3 heatmaps in the free version of Hotjar, which are then extended to unlimited upon upgrading your account to premium from basic.

3. Conversation Funnels

It is quite essential to monitor which pages receive most traffic and also the ones after which visitors leave your site. The reason for this is in order for you to reduce the bouncing rates at your website.

You will be able to act wisely and better your pages, upon getting to know where visitors leave your website.

4. Form Analytics

With Hotjar forms you can have in-depth form analytics. You can observe where people are dropping off and why they are not filling up the forms.

If you notice that users are dropping off in a particular field, you can look into it and improve the question or even remove the question to improve the form conversions.

With the basic Hotjar plan you can create up to 3 forms.

5. Create Polls

It literally takes minutes to create an amazing survey with Hotjar. All you require to do is visit your dashboard, go to the polls under feedback part, and simply click on the “+NEW POLL” button. You can also select your background color, apart from the theme and position.

You can also choose between options present and response box. Once you are done creating the poll, you can then switch it to active mode and enter all the pages where you want it to appear.

The best and most ideal option is to really focus on the pages that are receiving most traffic on your site. Like the heatmap feature, you can include up to three polls on your site with the basic account, which can also be upgraded to premium in order to include more.

Final Words

There is much more at Hotjar.com, and among the most sought after features include; Video Recordings, the Funnels and Heatmaps.

I would give a 4/5 rating because of its range of amazing features that have proven to be among the best today.

Using this tool can widely increase your audience conversations, traffic and whole lot of other exciting things that directly impact on your website’s revenue.

A good alternative to Hotjar is LuckyOrange. You can read my review of LuckyOrange here. Another tool which just focuses on Heatmaps is CrazyEgg.