Have you ever wondered how user behavior impacts your website?
While web analytics like Google Analytics are critical in helping you measure big-picture results, customer experience tools like Hotjar allow you to visualize user behavior and actually see things from the userโs perspectiveโquite literally! Hotjar offers qualitative insights that complement the quantitative data provided by Google Analytics, giving you a well-rounded understanding of user behavior and website performance.
Using Hotjar tools like heatmaps and session recordings, we can validate design changes on our websites with concrete evidence across all devices from desktops to smartphones. These insights provide businesses with the confidence to make changes that will have a meaningful impact on their website and remove any guesswork from the equation.
With heatmaps and session recordings, we gain access to unique insights like:
- Where are they clicking on your website?
- How are they moving through your website?
- Are they seeing important information? What information is being ignored?
- When and where are they losing interest?
- Are there areas that cause frustration? Is the current user experience working well?
Letโs look at how these Hotjar tools help us improve our websites.
Table of Contents
What does Hotjar analytics do?
While web analytics like Google Analytics are critical in helping you measure big-picture results, customer experience tools like Hotjar allow you to visualize user behavior and actually see things from the userโs perspective โ quite literally! Hotjar offers qualitative insights that complement the quantitative data provided by Google Analytics, giving you a well-rounded understanding of user behavior and website performance.
Using Hotjar tools like heatmaps and session recordings, we can validate design changes on our websites with concrete evidence across all devices from desktops to smartphones. These insights provide businesses with the confidence to make changes that will have a meaningful impact on their website and remove any guesswork from the equation.
With heatmaps and session recordings, we gain access to unique insights like:
- Where are they clicking on your website?
- How are they moving through your website?
- Are they seeing important information? What information is being ignored?
- When and where are they losing interest?
- Are there areas that cause frustration? Is the current user experience working well?
Letโs look at how these Hotjar tools help us improve our websites.
Understanding User Behavior
Understanding user behavior is crucial for any business that wants to improve its online presence and increase conversions. User behavior refers to the actions and interactions that users take on a website or application. By analyzing user behavior, businesses can gain valuable insights into what works and what doesnโt on their website, and make data-driven decisions to improve the user experience.
Hotjar is a powerful tool for understanding user behavior. It provides a range of features, including heatmaps, recordings, and surveys, that allow businesses to see how users interact with their website. With Hotjar, businesses can identify areas of high engagement and areas that need improvement and make changes to optimize the user experience.
Heatmaps
One of the main ways we can visualize user behavior on a website is by using Hotjar heatmaps.
Heatmaps are the graphical representation of the aggregate of user activity recorded on your website over some time.
Think of it like having thermal vision goggles on your website for customer experience. If you arenโt familiar with thermal imaging, the colors represent how โhotโ or โcoldโ certain parts of your page are. The hotter colors indicate more activity, whereas the coolers indicate less.
As such, youโll be able to know which areas users are spending their time on a page โ and sometimes, more importantly, where areas they arenโt. The aim is to get users where you want them to go and create a conversion.
We use three types of Hotjar heatmaps to analyze user behavior: Scroll Maps, Click Maps, and Move Maps. Each offers a different type of insight into a websiteโs performance. And when used in conjunction, they become invaluable to determining how users behave with the pages on your website.
Scroll Maps
Scroll maps show a cascade of colors that represent the average of how far down the page your users are scrolling. The colors range from hotter (most viewed) areas to colder (least viewed).
Landing pages are crucial in optimizing user experience and conversion rates. Tools like Hotjar can be leveraged to analyze and improve these landing pages through features like Heatmaps and user feedback mechanisms.
Itโs also important to note that this does not include direct interactions with your website (such as clicking or hovering over elements on your page). A section can be highly viewed but hard to determine physical engagements without the other two maps. Itโs essential to use these tools in conjunction with one another.
You can draw many conclusions based on the gradient of colors on a scroll map. For example, a sharp change from one color to another can indicate users think that thereโs nothing left on the page (also called a False Bottom).
This can also assist you in making crucial decisions about which content to prioritize higher on the page. Most of the time, higher on your page means more views, and lower means less.ย As such, you want to ensure the most important content is placed as high as possible so more people will see it. First impressions happen within seconds of someone landing on your page.ย
This is why it’s advisable to display important information higher up, such as social proof (reviews of your company, testimonials, etc.) or a synopsis of your product or service.
Pro tip: You should not automatically assume a page is performing well if a large number of people are scrolling to the bottom. In some cases, this can indicate that users cannot find what theyโre looking for. People browse most business websites with a specific objective, so itโs always important to cross-reference scroll maps with session recordings to ensure people find what they need quickly.
Click Maps
Click maps are โ you guessed it โ an aggregate of all clicks recorded on a page. It shows exactly where and how many times users are clicking. Click maps are invaluable for tracking what users are engaging with on your site (be it buttons, images, or hyperlinks). As such, theyโre convenient for helping us make inferences about how to optimize CTAs or other relevant information thatโs important for the user to access.
Theyโre also convenient for showing us what users are not doing. As you can guess, any area of the map that has no color whatsoever has not been interacted with. Keep in mind; this doesnโt mean people arenโt using it. For example, itโs not very common for text to be clicked on (thus a colder rating), but this doesnโt mean people arenโt reading it.
But if you notice important links or buttons arenโt being interacted with, you know immediately that something needs to be changed.
Pro tip: Sometimes, a lot of clicks on something is not a good thing โ remember, context matters! For example, users can be Rage Clicking โ this means that they are becoming frustrated and repeatedly clicking on something that is unresponsive or isnโt behaving the way they believe it should. Itโs always helpful to reference session recordings in order to single out these instances.
If the button is unresponsive it means something needs to be fixed. Every customer experience within your site is important.
Move Maps
Move maps may look a bit similar to click maps, but they function entirely differently. In the example above, youโll notice that the main areas users click on and move their cursor line have a similar โtemperature.โ
Instead of clicking, move maps are the recorded places of your userโs mouse movements. So, why is this an important distinction to make? This is because there is some correlation between the location of the userโs attention and where the mouse is pointing. As such, you can make inferences about where users may be looking based on move maps.
Pro Tip: While move maps have their uses, there is no pixel-perfect correlation between where a user’s mouse moves and where they are specifically looking. Be sure to draw conclusions based on the vicinity of where the mouse is pointing rather than the exact location. Additionally, this data is only relevant for desktop use cases, as mobile devices do not use a mouse cursor.
Session Recordings
Session recordings (or session replays) work as expected. Session recordings replicate the mouse and keyboard movements of actual anonymous users on your site.
This is a short snippet of a session recording using Hotjar. It creates a short video of user interactions.
Behavioral analytics tools, like Hotjar, provide deeper insights into user actions beyond surface-level metrics. While heatmaps are more useful for understanding user actions, session recordings provide a granular view of those actions step by step.
It’s the closest you can come to seeing how people use your website in person. And, in some respects, it may be more valuableโbecause there is no user bias from knowing they are being analyzed. Instead, you get an objective, unbiased perspective on a genuine user visiting your website. On the flipside, you cannot offer them instructions or receive a response in real time. Regardless, it is crucial to take note of trends in user behavior, such as
- How long they are taking to complete a task
- Which pages do they visit and where did they leave your site?
- Erratic user activity (wild scrolling or clickingโฆ (Remember Rage Clicking from earlier?)
- Broken or unresponsive functionality
- What elements do they useโor donโt useโon the pages they visit?
Gathering User Feedback
Gathering user feedback is an essential part of understanding user behavior and improving the user experience. User feedback can be collected through various methods, including surveys, interviews, and usability testing. Hotjar offers a range of tools for gathering user feedback, including surveys and incoming feedback.
Surveys: Collect user feedback and opinions
Surveys are a great way to collect user feedback and opinions. With Hotjar, businesses can create custom surveys that ask users specific questions about their experience on the website. Surveys can be targeted to specific pages or sections of the website, and can be used to gather feedback on specific features or functionality.
Incoming feedback is another way to collect user feedback. With Hotjar, businesses can collect incoming feedback from users who want to provide feedback on their experience. This feedback can be used to identify areas of improvement and make changes to optimize the user experience.
Integrating with Google Analytics
Integrating Hotjar with Google Analytics is a great way to get a more complete picture of user behavior. Google Analytics provides quantitative data on website traffic and behavior, while Hotjar provides qualitative insights into user behavior.
How to use Google Analytics and Hotjar together
To use Google Analytics and Hotjar together, businesses can follow these steps:
- Set up a Google Analytics account and install the tracking code on the website.
- Set up a Hotjar account and install the tracking code on the website.
- Use Google Analytics to track quantitative data on website traffic and behavior.
- Use Hotjar to track qualitative data on user behavior, including heatmaps, recordings, and surveys.
- Use the data from both tools to gain a more complete understanding of user behavior and make data-driven decisions to improve the user experience.
By integrating Hotjar with Google Analytics, businesses can get a more complete picture of user behavior and make changes to optimize the user experience.
Small fixes using behavior analytics can lead to huge wins
Using behavior analytics tools gives businesses access to information that is invaluable in understanding their userโs needs and pain points. And sometimes, simple tweaks can be hugely beneficial.
Customer feedback is also crucial in enhancing user experience and making informed decisions for website optimization.
Check this outโa quick lesson in some Hotjar magic!
Using Hotjarโs heatmap tools, Taskworld boosted their conversion rate by a whopping 40% with a 5-minute fix on their landing pageโs sign-up form.
Can you spot the issues Taskworld had with their sign-up form?
From this heatmap, they inferred two issues based on user behavior.
Problem #1:
Form engagement dropped off after the first field, and the fifth field wasnโt even being used.
Problem #2:
People used the โSign Inโ button below the form more than the main โSign Upโ CTA.
The 5-minute fix:
Taskworld simplified their form from five to just ONE field entryโemail address. Next, they removed the โSign Inโ button from the bottom of their form.
Boom. It improved like magic.
Taking those observations from their Hotjar analytics and making an informed decision boosted conversions by a whopping 40%. We think thatโs pretty slick for just 5 minutes.
Start making decisions with valuable insights from real user data
Rome wasnโt built in a day โ and neither is a successful website or digital advertising campaign. Even if they are already looking sharp, thereโs always room for improvement, and as we just found out, sometimes seemingly small optimizations to your customer experience can result in massive gains.
And best of all, thereโs no guesswork. You can objectively compare the performance of a page between different versions before and after, or even make use of A/B testing multiple versions at the same time to test multiple hypotheses at once.
Using different tools, such as surveys, can facilitate direct communication with users, allowing businesses to tailor their offerings based on the feedback received, ultimately improving their understanding of user behavior and preferences.
If your business needs to take that next step and begin using and implementing Hotjar analytics in order to improve your website or digital advertising campaign, the team at Mighty Fine is just a call (or a form) away.
