While data analytics tools provide valuable insights into website metrics like clicks, bounces, and conversions, they often miss crucial details about user behavior. Hotjar is a powerful product insights tool that goes beyond traditional analytics, offering a deeper understanding of how users interact with your website. It reveals insights that analytics tools can’t capture, such as hesitations, U-turns, and scrolls that don’t result in clicks. With Hotjar, you can gain a comprehensive view of user behavior and make data-driven decisions to optimize your website’s user experience.
Let’s know more about the various features of the Hotjar AI.
Article structure:
What is Hotjar
Hotjar is a versatile tool designed to track and analyze how visitors interact with your website or product. It allows businesses to step into their users’ shoes, observing their experiences firsthand and identifying areas for improvement. Using Hotjar is like becoming your own mystery shopper, gaining valuable insights to enhance the user experience.
Hotjar offers three pricing packages tailored to different usage scenarios. The “Observe” package provides visualizations through heatmaps and screen recordings, giving you a clear understanding of how users engage with your website or product. The “Ask” package focuses on gathering user feedback, helping you collect valuable insights directly from your audience. Additionally, the “Engage” package, currently in beta, takes it a step further by enabling moderated user interviews for in-depth, in-person feedback.
With Hotjar, you have the tools to gain comprehensive insights, improve user experience, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your website or product.
Getting started with Hotjar: Easy sign-up process
Signing up for Hotjar is a breeze and can be done in just a few simple steps:
- Sign up: Choose your preferred method of signing up, either with your email or Google account.
- Company Details: Provide your company’s name, the number of employees, and your role within the organization.
- Feature Selection: Select the Hotjar feature you want to explore first. Hotjar offers a range of powerful tools to optimize your website or product.
- Website Integration: Input your company’s website URL to initiate the Hotjar installation process.
Once you’ve completed these steps, Hotjar will guide you through the process of adding it to your website. This will enable you to start leveraging the insights and benefits that Hotjar provides.
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Adding Hotjar to your website
To utilize Hotjar’s powerful heatmaps on your website, you need to add a tracking code. Here’s how you can do it:
- Direct Code Placement: Copy the Hotjar tracking code provided and paste it directly into the HTML code of your website. You can place it just before the closing </head> tag or right before the closing </body> tag.
- Tracking Manager Integration: If you prefer using a tracking manager tool like Google Tag Manager, you can set up Hotjar by adding the tracking code through the manager. Follow the specific instructions provided by your tracking manager to add the Hotjar code.
Additionally, Hotjar offers seamless integration with popular website platforms, including:
- WordPress
- Wix
- Squarespace
- Drupal
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
And many more. With these integrations, you can easily add Hotjar to your website without manually adding the tracking code. Simply follow the integration instructions specific to your platform to get started.
Research assistant Hotjar AI
Gathering valuable user feedback through surveys is made easier with Hotjar Surveys. However, the success of your insights depends on the quality of your questions.
With the new survey generator, you can leverage Hotjar AI to define your research goal, such as measuring user satisfaction. Hotjar AI will create the survey for you, ensuring that you ask the right questions to obtain actionable insights.
Exploring Hotjar’s website improvement tools
Hotjar offers several tools that can help enhance our websites. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps are a powerful way to visualize user behavior on a website. Hotjar’s heatmaps provide an aggregated representation of user activity over time. Imagine it as having thermal vision goggles for understanding the customer experience. The colors on the heatmap indicate the level of activity, with hotter colors representing more engagement and cooler colors indicating less activity.
By analyzing heatmaps, we can identify which areas of a page users spend the most time on, as well as areas that receive less attention. This knowledge allows us to guide users towards desired actions and optimize conversions. Hotjar offers three types of heatmaps: Scroll Maps, Click Maps, and Move Maps. Each provides unique insights into website performance, and when used together, they offer invaluable information about user behavior.
Scroll maps
Scroll maps display a range of colors that represent the average scroll depth of users on a page. The hotter colors indicate areas that receive more views, while the colder colors represent less viewed areas. It’s important to note that scroll maps focus on scrolling behavior and do not capture direct interactions such as clicks or hovers. To gain a comprehensive understanding, it’s recommended to analyze scroll maps alongside click and move maps.
Analyzing the gradient of colors on a scroll map can reveal valuable insights. For example, a sharp change in color may indicate a false bottom, where users perceive there is no more content below. This information can guide us in optimizing content placement on the page, ensuring important information is visible without requiring excessive scrolling.
Pro Tip: It’s crucial not to assume a page is performing well solely based on the number of people scrolling to the bottom. Cross-referencing scroll maps with session recordings helps ensure users find what they need quickly.
Click maps
Click maps provide an aggregate view of all the clicks recorded on a page. They show precisely where and how many times users are clicking on elements such as buttons, images, or hyperlinks. Click maps are invaluable for tracking user engagement and optimizing call-to-action (CTA) elements or other important information.
Click maps also reveal areas that receive no interaction. While an area without color doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ignored, it can indicate potential issues if important links or buttons are being overlooked. Monitoring click maps helps identify areas that require improvement or adjustments.
Pro Tip: A high number of clicks on an element may not always be positive. Context matters, and excessive clicks could be a sign of user frustration or unresponsive functionality. Session recordings provide valuable context to identify these instances.
Move maps
Move maps may appear similar to click maps, but they serve a distinct purpose. Instead of tracking clicks, move maps record the movement of users’ mouse cursors. Although not a pixel-perfect representation of their attention, there is some correlation between cursor movement and user focus. By analyzing move maps, we can make inferences about where users might be looking on the page.
Pro Tip: When drawing conclusions from move maps, focus on the vicinity of mouse cursor movements rather than exact locations. Additionally, it’s important to note that move maps are relevant only for desktop use, as mobile devices do not have a mouse cursor.
Session recordings
Session recordings provide a detailed view of user interactions on a website. They recreate user sessions by recording mouse and keyboard actions anonymously. Session recordings offer a close approximation of observing users navigate a website in person, without their awareness of being scrutinized. This neutral perspective provides valuable insights into user behavior, such as:
- Time taken to complete tasks
- Pages visited and where users exit the site
- Erratic scrolling or clicking behavior
- Broken or unresponsive functionality
- Elements that users engage with or ignore on
Hotjar plans and pricing
Hotjar offers three pricing plans for its “Observe” feature, providing different levels of functionality and session capture limits. Here are the available options:
Basic: This plan is available for free and includes unlimited heatmaps, continuous data capture, and allows capturing up to 35 user sessions per day.
Plus: Priced at $39 per month, the Plus plan offers additional filtering and API tools for tracking. It allows capturing up to 100 user sessions per day.
Business: Starting at $99 per month, the Business plan provides advanced features such as custom integrations and user attribute tracking. It allows capturing up to 500 sessions per day. Higher-priced options are available to capture more sessions, with a maximum limit of 270,000 sessions.
Hotjar also offers bespoke pricing for more robust business tools. To explore these options, as well as pricing details for the Ask and Engage tools, and custom packages, you can visit their pricing page.
Hotjar pros and cons
Pros:
- Provides valuable insights. Hotjar offers useful insights into user behavior and interaction with your website, helping you make informed decisions for improvement.
- Solid free features. The free version of Hotjar includes valuable features, such as heatmaps and session recordings, that can provide valuable insights into user behavior.
- Clever design. Hotjar has a well-designed interface that is intuitive and user-friendly, making it easy to navigate and utilize its features.
- Quick and effective. Hotjar allows you to quickly gather and analyze data, enabling you to make timely optimizations to enhance user experience.
Cons:
- Expensive paid tiers. Hotjar’s paid tiers can be costly, especially for businesses with specific needs or higher levels of usage.
- Cluttered web app. Some users find the Hotjar web app interface to be cluttered and overwhelming, particularly when accessing and managing multiple projects.
- Privacy concerns. As Hotjar collects and analyzes user data, privacy concerns may arise. It’s important to ensure compliance with data protection regulations and inform users about data collection practices.
