Hotjar Review: Free Digital Marketing Tool

You have to love this online generation where you can use so many things for free because they're digital. No exception in the world of digital marketing where some of the best tools are free, or at least have free options. Hotjar is one of those tools.

(And their free account is so generous, it will be adequate for most small businesses. So if you have a website, sign up for free! My links are referral links but they don't pay me anything. I might get a t-shirt or something. ;)

Coming out of beta on April 1, 2015, Hotjar has pretty much exploded onto the scene of website UX analysis and feedback because of the quality and depth of what it offers. For short, I'll refer to this sort of system as "UX analytics," and if that sounds technical and snooze worthy, it just means "understanding user experience." How are people using your website? Where are they getting stuck? What are they looking for? Are they getting confused by part of a form you've asked them to fill out? Etc.

If you only get three people a month to your site, this kind of feedback won't have a lot of meaning and you'd better focus on building traffic. But once you have traffic, it's important to know what's working for real-world users and what is not. And that's where UX analytics help out.

Frankly, there are two basic levels of this sort of software. One takes a ton more data and is "enterprise expensive." And while that level may have its use, systems like Hotjar can still be used on websites of any traffic levels. In fact, Hotjar's proprietary algorithm provides extrapolated data to keep costs low despite high traffic levels. This is one of the ways they set themselves apart, and also why they can offer so much for free.

In fact, at this price level, the only real competition I see to Hotjar is Lucky Orange, which doesn't offer a free account. (So if you like free, you know where to go.) Honestly, the two services offer almost the same service suite with two big differences:

•  Lucky Orange has a built in chat feature. But you can already get an awesome, full-featured free chat software from tawk.to, so there's no need to have that built into your analytics.
  ​
• Hotjar has a built in "user recruitment" process, explained below.

So while Lucky Orange is popular and offers a nice UX of its own, Hotjar will actually offer the better value for many businesses. Let's take a look.
​

Hotjar Heat Maps

Heat maps gather information from many visitors to a single web page and show you the hot and cold areas of that page. They can show you how far people are typically scrolling down on the page (do you need to get some critical points higher up so people will see them?). They can show you  where people tend to hover their cursors, which gives you an idea of the content they're focusing on. And it can show you where people are clicking the most.

Now the fact is, many websites already have Google Analytics installed and, with a Chrome extension called "Page Analytics," to somewhat see what people are clicking on in your websites. (The site needs GA installed and you need to be logged in.) I say you can somewhat see where they're clicking because it will show you clickable elements that have been clicked, but it won't show you (for example) if people are clicking elsewhere on the page, which might indicate that they're confused and think something's clickable when it isn't.

The latter type of insight is something you can get from a true heat map like the one from Hotjar. And Google's tool doesn't give you the extras of cursor hovers and scrolling depth, which tells you a whole lot more about how you may want to restructure your site.

In my work with Lighting Supply, we used a heat map to test an element on the web page that a former marketing vendor had recommended. In the image below, you can see the "3 simple ways to search!" box -- we wanted to know if people were using it, since we were considering design alternatives. As it turned out, almost all of visitors used the search bar at the top or the navigation bar near the top. Almost no one touched the tested element. So we removed that and the ads next to it in favor of a rotating banner that could showcase the company's most important deals.

While a lot of marketers make decisions from guesses and assumptions, professionals test those assumptions. That's where heat maps (and the other tools discussed here) come into play. They help you see what you need to keep and what you need to change in order to boost conversions.

---

​Hotjar Visitor Recordings

This feature can be addictive, because it allows you to watch recordings of people actually using your website. As you can see in this image, it traces their mouse movements so you can see where they are and where they've been, and it highlights the moments when they've interacted with something on a page. This also moves with them between web pages (assuming you've installed Hotjar on your entire site rather than just certain pages). So you can truly see what a session is like for them.

Like many of Hotjar's features, this is not unique to their service; but again, it's free and carries a ton of value.

To speed things up, you can choose to skip past pauses in their mouse movement, though in some cases you may want to see the whole recording so you get a better sense of hesitations, depth of reading or watching something, etc.

Even before you enter a recording, you can see where the user is based as well as pages visited, time on site, device, browser, and operating system. You can also tag a recording so you can come back to it later. (You might set up tags like, "Click Confusion" or "Button Not Working" or whatever you're seeing, then later pull up all the recordings with that tag.) And if you're looking for a certain type of recording, you can filter by any of this, as well as things like landing pages and exit pages.

And finally, at the push of a button, Hotjar will give you a link to share the recording with others if you like.

Did I mention that it's free up to a certain (generous) usage level? Check out Hotjar.

---

Hotjar Funnels and Forms

I'll talk about these two features together because they help in a similar way. Both help you figure out where people are dropping out of their interactions with you. With Hotjar funnels, you can set up a series of pages that you expect people to pass through; the tool will then tell you how many people are dropping out on each page. If one page has an especially large drop out rate, you'll know to spend more time improving it. Which takes you back to heat maps and visitor recordings (and takes you forward to the tools shown below).

In a similar way, Hotjar Forms help you to see how people fill out your forms. If they have no problem giving their name and e-mail address, but balk at the required phone number, you'll see the drop off occurring at the phone number, and you'll know whether you need to reconsider requiring a number.

Maybe you do need that phone number, but if you lose people who got that far in your marketing process you want to be able to reach them again. In this case, you might build a form that only captures name and e-mail, placing the person into your mailing list. That form then takes them to another page to fill in the remaining details. Now if they drop out, you can still reach them by e-mail.

​See how powerful this sort of tool can be?

Hotjar Feedback

Sometimes you might know where people are getting stuck and leaving your site. You might watch the recordings and study the heat maps. And you might still wonder what needs to be changed.

Well ... why not ask? Hotjar gives you three ways to do this, two of which I'll cover in this section.

First, you create a "Poll" that shows up on the page. The name is a little misleading to me, because a poll typically has set answers that someone can choose from. Hotjar's Poll feature allows you to ask a question and provide set answers; but it also lets you choose if you want someone to write in their own answer. This means you can really get their specific feedback on a page. You can ask anything you like. You might consider: "Do you have any questions not answered by this page?" Or, "Is there any one reason why you wouldn't purchase this product right now?"

You can also have each answer lead to another question if you like, though I recommend being careful about asking too much of visitors.

Adding to the power of this feature, you can set the poll to only address people on certain devices and you can have it pop up immediately, after a set time, after someone scrolls down the page, or even as they start to leave the page.

You can do something very similar to all of this with a survey, but the survey pops up as a whole page interaction. You'll also get a direct link to a survey, so you can send the link out by e-mail if you want to get answers from your followers, and in this case it can be about much more than one specific page.

Hotjar User Recruiting

There's one more form of user feedback that I think helps Hotjar really stand apart from its competition, and that is User Recruiting. This basically recruits people who are willing to spend a little time with you to discuss your website. I think in many cases, it would be useful to talk with them by phone or Skype and to use Skype or join.me to share a screen.

You recruit them by offering something. Maybe it's a free consultation, or a gift card, or a book, or whatever it is that you'd like to offer. If they're interested in what you're offering, they fill in a short form to be considered. You can then choose any of these people to talk with.

By speaking directly with them, you can really get into details, especially because you can ask follow up questions on the fly when they provide you with answers that surprise you or that you want to know more about. What do they like about your site or product; what don't they like; what were they confused by? And much more. Did they like the product but think it was too expensive? Would a different pricing structure suit them? Or did they just not like the colors you offered? Maybe they did make a purchase -- was it easy?

I haven't seen this built into any similar platform and, for the right business, can see this making a huge difference. And if you really take the time to listen and address their concerns -- while also providing a nice incentive for their time -- I bet you can end up with some big fans, the kind who will be vocal about you and share your business with others.

Get a Free Hotjar Account

​Conclusion

In short, there's a ton of value packed into Hotjar, all for the low low price of ... FREE. Yes, usage is limited on a free account, but it's surprisingly generous because of their algorithmic approach to providing you with data. And because of this, I can see many small businesses getting by with a free account. And many larger businesses happily paying to upgrade because even paid accounts are ridiculously affordable.

The one thing you can't ignore is the need to test what's really happening on your website if you're going to treat it like a business. If it's a hobby, that's fine. But if it's a business, you have to adapt to people wants and needs. That's what marketing is, and it's what Hotjar can help you successfully do. Get a free account today!  ;)