Hotjar – All-in-one Analytics and Feedback
Website analytics are a massive business -- the more data you can collect with regard to your users' behaviors on your site, the more you can increase and maximise conversion...and increased conversion is always good. Sometimes increase conversion means more money, improved user experience, viewer retention, or anything else you may want. And since this is a common desire, there are loads of tools that promise to help you get the analytics you want; sometimes those tools are good and others they aren't. I've recently had the pleasure of trying out Hotjar and I'm happy to report they're definitely one of the good, if not best.
So What's Hotjar?
Hotjar was released to the public April 1st after 7 months in beta with over 20.000 beta users. Hotjar provides both analytics and feedback utilities in one app, so you get a mix of indirect user interaction observation as well as direct Q&A. These analytics and feedback utilities include:
- Heatmaps
- Recordings
- Funnels
- Forms
- Polls
- Surveys
- Recruiters
An awesome mix of methods to get user feedback about a website! I'm used to seeing heatmaps and recordings in all analytics apps but the mix of polls and surveys integrated into the indirect methods is a huge bonus -- no need for two services.
Hotjar allows for free accounts whose limits are going to be more than enough for most sites. Hotjar also has paid accounts with much higher limits to provide a larger data set to collect!
My Use Case
Since I don't run an eCommerce website, I don't have a metric as easy as orders to base my goals on. Sure, I want to see if my users are interacting with advertisements but my primary purpose for wanting better analytics is to see how visitors are using my site. Are users reading full posts or simply turning around? Are they clicking on demos or on related posts or any of my sidebar links? These are important questions because I want David Walsh Blog to be as useful for you as possible.
Installing Hotjar
Once you sign up for a free Hotjar account, Hotjar provides you a JavaScript snippet to add to your page, much the way that Google Analytics and other statistical services do. That's all for install!
Heatmaps
I find heatmaps incredibly useful -- they can't scan eyes, obviously, but they provide great insight as to where the user is moving their mouse (an indication of possible intent) and which parts of the page they interact with. Here's a sample heatmap from Hotjar:
Want to see an interactive heatmap from my homepage? Check it out:
I got some great insight from this:
- People are actually using my hamburger menu, something I was worried wasn't happening
- People are also using my search bar, sweet!
- My "Popular Demos" and "Popular Features" blocks in the sidebar don't appear to be a hit, I may have to move or even remove it
- People do seem to be scrolling through all of the articles on the homepage, which is awesome
- "htaccess" is a more popular topic than I thought it was, and JavaScript and jQuery are less popular than I'd hoped
With the information provided by the heatmap, I can now make changes to improve DWB. Nice!
Recordings
Heatmaps provide an awesome summary of data from multiple users but the ability to see how individual users browser and interact with my site is an added bonus. A sample video recording looks like:
All I need to do within the HotJar admin panel is click "Start Recording" and boom -- come back five minutes later and I have a number of recordings I can play, like this one:
The recordings are higher quality than I had expected and they provide awesome graphical detail about scrolling and clicks, as you could see in the video above.
Funnels
Funnels are a great way of knowing if your conversions are hitting, and those conversions from page A to page B can be the difference between major success and crying into your keyboard. My site is mostly recreational so I don't look too far into funnels, but you can see how easy a funnel is understand here:
I set up a few sample funnels for myself and they're actually incredibly simple to create and easy to understand, unlike the times I've tried playing around with Google Analytics.
Forms, Polls, Surveys, Recruiters, Oh My!
I've covered heatmaps, recordings, and funnels to this point because they speak to me -- and they're really well done. Some other awesome tools provided by Hotjar include:
Forms
As users we know that filling out long forms can really suck, so Hotjar can observe forms on your site and tell you how much time people are spending in each field and how complete the form is before the user bails. This seems valuable and I don't know of another service that does it.
Polls
We all know what a poll is and we all know that we can learn a lot from them. If you don't want to add polling capabilities to your core site, you can use Hotjar's polls widgetry and then view answers within the Hotjar admin panel along with your other stats:
Surveys
Surveys are also very helpful and allow users to speak to you directly. If your site doesn't provide survey capabilities, you need a third party site, but Hotjar lets you embed surveys right in your site!
Recruiters
Recruiters is an outside-the-box thinking feature which allows you to ask your visitors for their help directly on your pages. Invite them to a live user test via screen sharing (e.g. via Skype) to see how they use your pages and what they are thinking.
Summing it Up
I was pleasantly surprised by what Hotjar provided. Hotjar doesn't try to do dozens of things just OK -- Hotjar has chosen a select offering which it does very well. Their tools are intuitive, functional, and their user interface makes Hotjar easy to use. Hotjar: easy, simple, and impressive!
