How To Know What Users Are Doing On Your Website With Hotjar
Understand your users to improve your website conversions
You just launched a new website. Or you added a new feature to your web application. You eagerly expect feedback, inquiries, applications.
However, nothing happens. You don’t get emails, nobody is signing up to use your product and you ask yourself why. After all, you are sure that some people visited your website.
Well, it turns out the contact form is broken which is why you won’t receive emails. In addition, few people visit other parts of your website since the navigation is confusing to use on mobile devices. There can be many potential issues ranging from runtime errors to UX issues.
I have published a post which focuses on tracking runtime errors in your websites:
However, in this post I want to focus more on uncovering UX related issues which cannot be caught through error tracking. To prevent such situations, there are professional tools which can help you to identify issues like these much faster. We will use a tool called Hotjar which is used by companies like Ryanair, Unbounce and Adobe. It has a basic free version which is great to get started.
What features does Hotjar provide?
- Heatmaps: Understand what users want, care about and do on your site by visually representing their clicks, taps and scrolling behaviour
- Recordings: By seeing your visitor’s clicks, taps and mouse movements you can identify usability issues on the fly and issues they encounter
- Feedback polls: Target questions to specific visitors anywhere on your web and mobile site
- Surveys: Build your own responsive surveys using an easy editor.
Of course there are more features which could be useful for you.
Let’s have a look how we can embed Hotjar on a website. Hotjar has specific instructions if you are using a CMS (Content Management System) like Wordpress or Drupal. In this post, I want to show you how to use Hotjar on any website via a script tag: whether it is a static landing page, a CMS or a SPA (Single Page Application).
How to use Hotjar on your website to
- Create a Hotjar account. You can choose the free version for getting started.
- Include the Hotjar script on your website which you get from Hotjar (Hotjar should send you this script via email when creating an account). Hotjar recommends to put the script into the
<head>section but you can also put the script into the<body>section. - Check your Hotjar dashboard to verify the installation. Try to disable your ad blocker if the verification doesn’t work.
- Optional: Follow these instructions if you want to use Hotjar on a Single Page Application.
Some handy tips for getting started with Hotjar
- By default, Hotjar enables the “Incoming Feedback” feature for you: you’ll see a feedback button on the right side of your website. You can customize or hide it in the settings.
- You can use your own logo in the Hotjar dashboard.
- You can select which forms should be tracked by Hotjar to see how users deal with them. This way, you can measure how many people interact with your forms.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading. As you can see, it is easy to embed Hotjar in our websites. Hotjar provides a lot of value for its money and helps you to build better websites which your users will use more effectively. While error tracking & monitoring helps you to identify and fix actual bugs in your websites faster, tools like Hotjar help you to fix UX issues and understand your audience better.
Are you using other tools to understand your users better? Let me know in the comments.
