Hotjar is an analytics tool that allows you to gather qualitative data and feedback that allows you to have a greater understanding of how visitors engage with your website. Using Hotjar's terminology: they are an "all-in-one analytics and feedback" tool, which provides several essential analytics features and user feedback tools within the one platform.
Hotjar can be used to visualise what users do on your website so that processes can be optimised for a higher conversion rate. Hotjar also allows you to collate feedback in a report format that is quick and easy to understand. Hotjar is flexible enough to provide quick access to simplified reports to beginners who are just starting with their website in addition to well-established companies looking to optimise their existing website. In short, Hotjar can complement and enhance the data and insights that is provided by Google Analytics.
Some of the key analytics features that Hotjar offers, which will be discussed in more detail include heat maps, video recordings, conversion funnels and form analysis. Also, some types of feedback provided include user polls, incoming feedback and surveys.
Setting Up Hotjar
Setting up Hotjar is quick and easy. When signing up with Hotjar, they will provide a small amount of JavaScript which is the Hotjar tracking code. The tracking code is what Hotjar uses to set up all the analytics features they provide.
We want to add the tracking code to the <head> section on each page that we want to get data for. We would recommend installing the tracking code using Google Tag Manager, as this tool can provide event tracking for your website, with the additional benefit that you can add the code once to Google Tag Manager for your whole website. That said, if you want to install the tracking code for a specific platform you are using, then Hotjar has great help guides on how to do this.
Please note that the tracking code will be unique to each website, so ensure this tracking code is used on one website. New tracking codes can be created later on if additional websites are required to have Hotjar tracking enabled. If there are concerns about Hotjar slowing your website down in the longer term, you can remove the tracking code once the data has been collected.
Heat Maps
One of the ways that Hotjar provides analytical insight is by using heat maps. The heat maps feature allows an additional visual understanding of how the user interacts with the website. The user's motivation and desires are measured using clicks, moves and scrolls. The page elements are colour-coded from hot (red) to cold (blue) to indicate which are interacted with the most. Viewing the data in this manner allows the complex list of several interactions from the user to be understood quickly and easily.
Heat maps have three screens to show the interaction from your users. First, Click allows us to see the areas that the user clicks on, which allows us to see which content is most popular with the user such as a call to action. Allowing the clicks to be illustrated can indicate the motivations of the user on the website and content can be amended to optimise that process. Second, Move is the area of the page that the user moves the cursor over. This can be useful when identifying the areas of the website that the user is focussing attention in, without necessarily clicking on. Third, the Scroll view shows the area of the page where the users view when scrolling down the page, which can be useful for deciding the order of content on a page and stacking the most important above the fold.
Another feature is the data can be viewed per device type. For instance, the available device types are desktop, tablet and mobile. This feature enables the data to be broken down by device type and provides an opportunity to analyse performance for a specific medium. Having the opportunity to analyse each device allows optimisations to be made where the layout of the content will likely change.
Finally, hovering over each of the elements will show how many interactions that specific element has received. Also, the interactions will be shown as a percentage of the overall total for the page, which allows each element to be compared to see which is the most popular. The data can also be downloaded if additional analysis of the data is required at a later date.
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Image credit: HotJar
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