The SEO world is filled with tools and gadgets, tips and tricks, and all sorts of software that promise to show you valuable data and give important insights into your online business. There’s so many of these services, that it can be overwhelming. What services should I use? Is it worth my money? How do I keep up with all these services?
Enter: Hotjar
Hotjar is a web service that lets you see user behavior on your website. Big deal, right?
Well, yeah, actually. Unlike other tracking services that spit out more data than most people would know what to do with, Hotjar allows you to gather data and easily visualize user behavior in one place. It also allows you to set up easy-to-use customer polls and surveys to get instant feedback on your site.
Hotjar’s mission is to create a big-picture overview of your site using relevant data and does so in a visual format that anyone can understand.
What data can you collect with Hotjar?
One of the most important features of Hotjar is Visitor Recordings. This feature lets you see the actual journey a user takes on you site through a video recording of their behavior. You can track clicks, scrolling, and mouse movements this way. It’s almost as if you were looking over your user’s shoulder while they explore your website.
Similarly, Heatmaps lets you visualize clicks and mouse movements from all users, showing you which elements are grabbing users’ attention and how they tend to interact with your site. They’re designed to mimic those thermal cameras you see on TV, with the “hot” areas being places with high interaction, and the “cold” spots areas that don’t get a lot of interaction.
Hotjar also makes tracking conversions very simple with their Conversion Funnels reports. With this, you can see which pages people are dropping off from on their journey from landing to checkout.
How do you use Hotjar?
Like most of the good marketing tools out there, Hotjar requires a payment plan, which ranges from $29 a month for personal plans all the way up to $589 for businesses with a lot of traffic. The service does has a free trial however. With just your name and an email address, you can try Hotjar for free for 15 days. After the trial is over, you can still use Hotjar Basic, which has most of the same features, but limits the amount of data you can track.
After creating an account, you’ll need to install a tracking script on your website. Once this is properly installed, you’ll be able to log in and begin monitoring user behavior, set up recordings, etc.
Hotjar is even compatible with WordPress, Google Tag Manager, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
How can Digital Marketers use Hotjar to improve a website?
Getting all this data is great and all, but there are hundreds of services out there that can compile lots and lots of data for you. So why is Hotjar any different? What makes this data so important?
With Hotjar, you don’t just get a lot of fancy numbers to look at. The service gives a real insight into how users are interacting with your site, and it does this visually, making it easy to use. Using this service, any digital marketer or business owner can easily visualize the user’s journey and take steps to improve it.
