With conversion rate optimization it is important that we understand the entire visitor journey. More importantly, we need to understand how our visitors interact with our site, paying close attention to what they are paying attention to and what they are ignoring.
We are in the trenches daily working on dozens of optimization campaigns and one of the best tools we leverage for our clients is Hotjar. It can be difficult to cut through the clutter of the vast amount of tools out there that claim to help improve your conversions, but we find Hotjar to basically be invaluable to the success of our optimization strategies.
Hotjar Platform Review
There isn’t much that Hotjar doesn’t do. In addition to their survey, user polls and user testing capabilities they have some powerful features that are sure to help you better understand the visitor journey. Features like…
1. Heatmaps
Hotjar provides intuitive heatmaps, clickmaps, scroll tracking and taps (mobile) so you can identify just what your visitors are paying attention to and what they are ignoring. We have found this particular option to be crucial in identifying key problem areas. The information also helps us create better test hypotheses and sets things up to achieve bigger results improvement.
2. Visitor recordings
With Hotjar you can quickly identify usability issues by recording visitor sessions on your site. See where they are moving on the site, what areas they are looking at most and find areas that may be a hangup for them. It’s completely confidential but an extremely valuable tool that can lead to crucial engagement issues on your site.
3. Conversion Funnels
You can find out the biggest areas of opportunities for improvement and testing by identifying which pages and steps in your process visitors are falling off. Basically this gives you a glimpse of the overall visitor journey and so areas you may want to focus your testing efforts. Maybe you find out that the majority of your visitors are dropping off on your product detail page or your registration page. Imagine the possibilities for improvement.
4. Form Analysis
This feature is a great addition especially since the majority of online actions involve a signup form of some kind. You can easily figure out what actions are causing visitors to abandon your forms without a completion. We have conducted many experiments on signup forms with improvements as much as 75% and this form analysis solution definitely helps us get the big wins from our testing.
Of course, what would a good review be without addressing how easy the tool is to use? Well, we have found Hotjar to be extremely user-friendly. Their user interface is comprehensive but not overwhelming. Plus it all operates by simply installing a basic script on your site and all the functions work with just one install.
Bottom line is we highly recommend Hotjar if you are looking to gain insights into your visitor behavior on your site.