Maximizing the Value of your Hotjar Data: How to apply what you see to experimentation

Making sure you are sorting through the data to get to actionable and valuable insights from your Hotjar data.

Hotjar is a great analytics and user feedback tool to help understand what customers are doing – and what they think. We use Hotjar (or other click tracking software) in our essential CRO tool box. Sometimes clients come to us already using Hotjar, but not getting the most value from the tool. Here’s our guide to making sure you are sorting through the data to get to actionable and valuable insights when using Hotjar.

 

What’s Hotjar?

 

Click Tracking & Click Recordings

  • Hotjar will track what visitors click on and where they hover their mouse. Hotjar provides clear visualizations about what’s happening on your site. We’ve found these visualizations can be a great aid in building consensus to make change on the site, especially as they can communicate with visual learners.

On Site Survey

  • You can gain some context about why people are behaving the way they do using their in-page survey.

And it’s… free

  • They offer a free version which is a great way to get started (especially for small businesses). You can simply sign up for an account on their site (hotjar.com) and drop a tag on your site.

 

What can I learn from Hotjar?

 

With these tools, you can understand:

  • How far down the page are visitors getting?
  • Are they seeing key pieces of information?
  • Why are visitors leaving the checkout?
  • Where are visitors interacting on the page? Are they interacting with the new element I added?
  • Are there certain form fields causing issues for visitors, so they have to keep re-entering their information?

 

Conversion Rate Optimization Use Cases

 

Hotjar is a great tool that needs to be put to good use. A lot of companies have the tag on their site, but don’t translate the analytics data into actionable, high value insights. Here’s where we recommend starting your Hotjar analysis:

 

Scroll Maps

 

These allow us to identify where “extra” content is on the site. If most visitors aren’t seeing it, it is ineffective.

Test Idea: Remove content that most visitors aren’t seeing. It can help focus visitors and simplify the overall maintenance of the site.

Test Idea: Confirm that visitors are scrolling to the most important content on your site. Check that they can see: (1) your value prop, (2) your pricing, and (3) the action you want them to take on this page. If fewer than 80-90% of visitors aren’t seeing this content, test moving it up on the page.

Test Idea: Shorten the hero. On some sites, the scroll map shows that most customers aren’t even trying to scroll. We’ll often experiment with shortening the hero, so visitors can see the content below the fold & be more likely to scroll.

 

Exit surveys

 

Customers abandoning cart can be a real point of confusion (and frustration) for ecommerce teams. You can spend hours discussing what might be the issue for would-be customers. Or you can just ask them! We’ll use the exit intent survey to capture them in this “moment of truth” to understand what they are thinking, looking for, and why they are leaving.

Test Idea: If visitors are leaving to find coupons, consider making it easier to apply the existing coupons from elsewhere on the site. Are your coupon codes easy to copy? Can they be applied automatically? Alternatively, if few customers normally use coupons, consider hiding or delaying the coupon field. If customers see a field and don’t have a coupon, they may leave to go find one (and not come back!)

Test Idea: If visitors say they don’t trust this site, you need to give them reasons to trust you. Consider adding trust badges. You may need to increase the design quality of your checkout. Or you might be asking for unnecessary personal information. If it’s not clear from their responses, run another survey to find out.

 

Wrapping up

 

Hotjar can provide a wealth of information, and it’s up to you to harness it and find value. Have you started using Hotjar yet? How have you applied these insights to improving your conversion rate?

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