Running a business online requires lots of research, investment and effort.
With the right information though, you can ensure your business is offering what’s best for your users and the business itself.
An analytics tool that gathers important numbers such as bounce rate or page traffic, that doesn’t help much if you don’t understand why users behave a particular way.
You need to know exactly where your users are experiencing issues on your website that drive them away, why they don’t convert, which ultimately affects your bottom line.
One of the best ways to get such useful and important data for your business is by using a website tracking tool.
This guide looks at Hotjar, one of the best software for behavior analytics and website tracking, which has proven itself an effective way of measuring website user experience among other critical applications.
What Is Hotjar?
Hotjar is a behavior analytics, website optimization, and user feedback software that can track how users interact with different aspects and areas of your website. It also delivers their feedback in multiple ways using tools like session recordings, form and funnel analysis tools, surveys and heatmaps.
The software is designed to help user experience professionals and marketers easily get user feedback because it’s easy to use, and offers more in-depth, granular data analysis and flexibility to split test changes on your webpages.
It complements the insights and data you get from Google Analytics and other similar web analytics tools so you can understand what’s happening on your site, what users want and what they have to say.
Benefits of Using Hotjar
There are several reasons why you should be using Hotjar for your site especially if you own one and/or you’re trying to improve it. Among these reasons include:
Provides visually clear data points about what’s happening on your website
If you already have an analytics tool, you can see the overall picture of your website’s ecosystem, including traffic data that helps you understand conversions. However, Hotjar goes further to show why users behave the way they do and exactly what they’re doing on your site.
It puts you on the same level as your users so you can experience the site through their eyes through tools like:
- Heatmaps: These show an aggregate of user behavior on each page, where they scroll and click, their interests, and whether or not they’re seeing and/or interacting with the important page elements.
- Recordings: These let you watch user sessions (anonymized) all over your site so you can see where they get challenges and leave the page(s).
Gives you some context about user behavior and why they do it
If you spot a recurring pattern on some pages that show where users get frustrated, Hotjar lets you validate your assumptions about what’s happening via different tools. These include:
- On-page polls: that popup and asks users quick questions, which if answered give you the feedback you’re looking for. This way, you can know what’s going on in their minds and why they behave the way they do on your site.
- Incoming feedback: is a widget on the side of the webpage that expands for users to share their feedback about the page. This way, you can get specific feedback about their experiences, collect ongoing feedback to build better experiences on your site and products, and get tips or growth opportunities.
- Hotjar Surveys: allow you to collect user feedback once they visit your site and interact with it. They’re sent out asynchronously and users respond when they want, and write what they really feel.
Gives an easy way for you to get buy-in and show value to stakeholders and business owners
Hotjar works for small startups and worldwide enterprises alike, so it’s easy to get the buy-in and approval of business owners and stakeholders.
This is because of its powerful tools that you can access immediately, and it’s free to use its Basic plan for a lifetime but also has affordable paid plans.
Plus, you won’t have issues getting it cleared with your legal department. The software is GDPR-ready and is built on privacy and maintained with the same approach.
Doesn’t require a steep learning curve as it’s easy to use
Unlike other analytics tools that are complex to use and understand, Hotjar doesn’t require a high learning curve. Its insights are straightforward, and there’s no heavy investment in terms of resources or setup time.
You also don’t necessarily need lots of support from your tech support or development team to implement the software.
How To Setup Hotjar Tracking And Use It Wisely
As we’ve already seen, setting up Hotjar is easy as it doesn’t have a steep learning curve.
All you need is to install one tracking code snippet on your website, in a quick and painless process. From here on, you can start looking at the analytics and feedback tools without needing a data science qualification to interpret what you see.
Here’s how to set up Hotjar Tracking on your website.
- Sign up for Hotjar and get the Hotjar Tracking Code that you need to install on your website. The Tracking Code helps you collect data from your site, and you can install it manually or use guides depending on the platform you’re using.
The Tracking Code is a JavaScript snippet available from your Site Dashboard or in the Sites & Organizations page. To get it, go to your site URL and click on the Tracking Code button next to it. You can add different sites to your Hotjar account, each with its own unique Tracking Code that you’ll install into every site.
- Manually install the Tracking Code, the first step is to check if your platform is compatible with Hotjar. Go to your Sites list and click on the Tracking Code button for the specific site you’d like to track.
- Click Copy to Clipboard and then go to the <head> section of your website and paste the Tracking Code there. It’ll be more accurate and effective when pasted on every Head tag of the pages you want tracked.
You can add the Tracking Code to your website template so it can go to each page of your site automatically.
- Next, verify the installation by going back to your Hotjar Site Dashboard. Hotjar takes a few minutes to check whether the installation was successful, once your site is loaded with the code on it. Sometimes there can be delays before it shows an Active status, but once it detects the code on your site, you’ll see a notice on your dashboard’s Recent Team Activity section.
How To Use Hotjar Tracking Code Wisely
Once you install the Hotjar Tracking Code, the next step is to start using its features, which include heatmaps, recordings, funnels, forms, surveys, polls and Incoming feedback. Here’s what you can do next:
Create and set up your heatmaps so you can see how users click, scroll or move through your webpages.
Run recordings to see how different users browse, navigate and interact through your website so you can improve the user experience, and in turn increase your conversions.
Collect feedback by creating polls, which help you gather data from users during crucial interaction moments like when they first arrive on your landing page or they leave in the middle of a conversion flow.
You can also collect feedback by creating forms, funnel reports, surveys or using Incoming Feedback.
Wrapping Up
We hope you now know how easy it is to set up its Tracking Code and how to use it wisely to make important business decisions for growth and profitability.
Hotjar is a great complement to other analytics tools, because it gives you deeper insights and user feedback than what you’d get with other software.
If you’re looking for a tool that’s simple, easy to use and still powerful enough to deliver the important data you need to better understand user behavior and why or how things happen on your site, Hotjar is your go-to software.
