Soo, you have a website that receives a certain number of visitors every month. Like every good marketer or a company owner, you made a decision to increase your sales the smart way – by investing in website conversion optimization.
And since you’ve made an educated background check on a number of top CRO tools and chosen a great all-in-one Hotjar marketing tool, let’s continue and find out how to understand your users using Hotjar.
Hotjar is a complex Conversion Rate Optimization solution with a large number of separate tracking tools each requiring a close consideration. This is why we’ll review Hotjar marketing tools and right next to it a piece of advice on how to use Hotjar to understand your users.
Hotjar Heatmaps
Okay so to make simple to understand, heatmaps are exactly that – they showcase the compound behaviour of users on a certain web page. The more the users interact with the element, the more “heated” it will seem.
There are 3 different types of heatmaps:
Scroll maps
Most of the modern landing pages are using scrolling, which means that the user has to scroll to see the rest of the website content besides the welcoming him hero image.
And that’s when hotjar heatmap scroll maps come into play. They show exactly where most of the users stop scrolling and navigate away from the page. The warmer the colour the bigger percentage of the people got to a certain scroll depth.
Tip. Place your most interesting deals closer to the top of the page, so the majority of the users get to see without scrolling too much down the page. If you see your users move after a certain fold element consider removing it or changing it for something completely different.
Click maps
Hotjar click maps allow you to see how many people clicked, tapped (on mobile devices) or toggled your page elements, again, using the hot-cold gradient.
Tip. Click maps are an incredibly useful tool, as it not only allows you to see how many people interact with your website but directly improve it. For instance, using click maps is an excellent tool to test out your new CTA button. Use hotjar a/b testing to see if people interact more with the old or the newly-designed button.
Move maps
Now Hotjar move maps are quite interesting, as they showcase all the ecommerce store owners would want to see – how users actually move on your website. The red colours indicate where the users pause, while the blue ones indicate where the users show a less active mouse movement.
Tip. Hotjat move maps are an excellent tool when it comes to troubleshooting. Say, you can see a lot of action happening around a certain image, but it is a non-clickable page element. Or say they get stuck on a certain page without being able to move forward – this, too, will get indicated in the move maps.
By paying attention to how visitors move, you can eliminate your newly-arrived users’ confusion and fix the discovered bugs and design misleadings instantaneously.
Hotjar Session recordings
Hotjat Session recordings are a real goldmine when it comes to understanding your users. If hotjar scroll maps, click maps and move maps allow you to see the aggregated movement on the page and adjust your page elements accordingly, the hotjar tracking session recordings let you in on the psychology behind the actions.
Hotjar session recordings allow you to see the way an actual user interacts with your page – how he scrolls, where he clicks and what’s happening meantime.
Tip. You can use session recordings to understand your users in a number of ways:
1. Get into your website visitors’ shoes and watch for yourself where they find the instructions not clear, a design a little not so intuitive, and even web elements that inspire them to convert into buyers.
2. Hotjar session recordings allow you to see each element under a microscope – how do users react to it, do they interact or leave without notice. Zoom in to your key page elements like the menu area, contact info, deals, CTA button and see how users really react to those.
3. Contact the InsightWhale team to track, monitor and discover high-value Hotjar behavioural insights for you 🙂
4. You can start by watching 10 to 20 session recordings and based on the common denominator move towards decreasing your bounce rate. Watch the end & what foretells the end of each session and find out what plays an influential role in making your users leave. Whatever it is a lack of the product info or a long checkout process, you can clearly see the correlation and fix the pitfall, increasing your conversion.
Hotjar Feedback polls
Website analysis can be done using multiple tools, yet the best feedback you can get on your website comes from the visitors themselves. Hotjar feedback polls allow your customers to give you a review of your page not after the session is over, but right in the middle of it!
Feedback polls come in two types – type-in, where the users can leave their opinion in any word form they wish, and the visual rating system, called Net Promoter Score, where they can rate how satisfied they are with the content or how likely to recommend it to the other users on a scale from 1 to 10.
Tip. Once you receive an answer below 6 on your visual feedback score, ask a follow-up question like “What could we do to change your rating?” or “What would have made your experience more satisfactory?”.
Another tip you can utilize when using the Hotjar analysis is to visualize your text responses by keywords. It will end up looking something like the example on the right, highlighting which areas like speed, design or, say, professionalism require the most attention.
There is also a number of things, according to Hotjar, you should watch out for to understand your users better regardless of which map you are using:
- What elements visitors use to navigate from one page to another
- How visitors interact—or fail to—with buttons and clickable elements
- Unusual mouse activity, for example, wild scrolling or repeated clicking
- If it takes too long to complete an action
- How visitors move around on the page and where they stop
- Page(s) that load incorrectly across different devices and/or browsers
- Functionality that doesn’t work as it should (example: login not working, search bar not returning results)
- Elements that render incorrectly, are missing and/or broken
Conclusion
Hotjar marketing tool is a great Conversion Optimization Tool if your goal is to not only get the right numbers and increase your sales at the moment but to get deep insights into why your users behave a certain way and develop a long-term strategy based on that understanding.
To get an expert opinion on your Conversion Optimization and a custom-designed solution for its enhancement contact our agency 😉
