Incoming Feedback by Hotjar
Analyze website user behavior with visual heatmaps, session recordings, and user feedback tools. Understand how visitors interact with your site to improve conversions.
What is Hotjar
Hotjar is a behavior analytics software that helps you understand how users interact with your website. Its main purpose is to provide visual insights into user actions, complementing traditional analytics data like page views and bounce rates. The platform combines several tools, including heatmaps, session recordings, and user feedback widgets, into a single service. This allows website owners, marketers, and UX designers to see where users click, how far they scroll, and what issues they encounter. Hotjar was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Malta. It aims to make it easier for businesses to empathize with their users and build better online experiences.
Hotjar Features
Hotjar offers a suite of tools to analyze user behavior and gather feedback.
- Heatmaps: These tools create visual representations of user activity. Click maps show where users click most, move maps track mouse movement, and scroll maps show how far down a page users scroll. This helps identify which elements get the most attention and which are ignored.
- Session Recordings: Watch anonymized recordings of real user sessions. This feature allows you to see a user's complete journey on your site, including mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling. It is very useful for identifying bugs, usability issues, and points of friction in the user experience.
- Feedback: Collect instant feedback from your users with on-page widgets. Users can rate their experience and leave comments about specific parts of a page, giving you direct insight into what they like or dislike.
- Surveys: Create and launch surveys to ask users specific questions. You can display surveys on your website, send them via email, or share a link. This is great for gathering structured feedback, measuring customer satisfaction (like NPS), and validating new ideas.
- Interviews: The Engage feature allows you to recruit and schedule one-on-one video interviews with your users. This provides a way to have deep conversations, test prototypes, and get qualitative feedback directly from your target audience.
Hotjar Pricing Plans
Hotjar offers several pricing plans designed for different needs and company sizes. The plans are typically structured around the volume of data collected, such as the number of sessions or survey responses.
- Basic Plan: This is a free plan designed for individuals or very small websites with low traffic. It includes access to all core tools but with significant data limits.
- Plus Plan: Aimed at small teams and growing businesses, this plan offers higher data limits for sessions and responses, allowing for more continuous analysis.
- Business Plan: This tier is for established companies that need to track a larger volume of user interactions. It includes much higher data limits, advanced features, and integrations.
- Scale Plan: The top-tier plan is for large enterprises and high-traffic websites. It provides the highest data allowances, dedicated support, and advanced features for managing data across large teams.
Hotjar Free Plan
Hotjar offers a free forever Basic plan. This plan is not a trial and can be used indefinitely. It provides access to all of Hotjar's core tools, including Heatmaps, Recordings, Feedback, and Surveys. However, the free plan has limitations on the amount of data you can collect. For example, it might limit the number of user sessions you can record or the number of survey responses you can receive per month. Data is also stored for a shorter period compared to paid plans. It is a good option for personal projects or for testing the platform's capabilities before upgrading.
How to use Hotjar
Getting started with Hotjar is a straightforward process.
- Create an Account: Sign up for a free or paid plan on the Hotjar website.
- Install Tracking Code: After signing up, you will get a unique JavaScript tracking code. You need to add this code to the
<head>section of every page on your website you want to track. You can do this manually or by using a tag manager like Google Tag Manager. - Verify Installation: Once the code is added, go back to your Hotjar dashboard to verify that it is installed correctly. Hotjar will detect the code on your site.
- Configure Tools: Start by setting up your first heatmap. Choose a key page, like your homepage or a pricing page, and set the number of pageviews you want to capture. Turn on session recordings to begin collecting user sessions automatically.
- Gather Feedback: Create a simple feedback widget or a pop-up survey to ask visitors about their experience. You can target specific pages or user behaviors.
- Analyze Insights: After a few days, check your Hotjar dashboard. You will see heatmaps showing user behavior and a list of recordings to watch. Use these insights to identify areas for improvement on your website.
Pros and Cons of Hotjar
Pros:
- All-in-One Platform: Combines multiple user behavior analytics tools in one place, which is convenient and cost-effective.
- Easy to Use: The interface is user-friendly and easy to navigate, even for beginners.
- Visual Insights: Heatmaps and recordings provide clear, visual data that is easy to understand.
- Direct User Feedback: Surveys and feedback widgets allow you to get qualitative insights directly from users.
- Generous Free Plan: The free Basic plan is very useful for small websites and for evaluating the tool.
Cons:
- Website Performance: The tracking script can sometimes have a minor impact on website loading speed.
- Data Sampling: On lower-tier plans, Hotjar samples data, meaning you don't capture every single user session.
- Not a Replacement for Quantitative Analytics: It provides the 'why' behind user actions but should be used alongside tools like Google Analytics for the 'what'.
Hotjar integrations
Hotjar integrates with many popular tools to help you connect user behavior insights with your existing workflows.
- Google Analytics integration: Connect Hotjar with Google Analytics to send survey data as events, allowing you to segment your analytics reports based on user feedback.
- Slack integration: Receive real-time notifications in your Slack channels for new survey responses or feedback, enabling your team to react quickly.
- Zapier integration: Use Zapier to connect Hotjar with thousands of other applications. For example, you can create a new row in a Google Sheet for every new survey response.
- HubSpot integration: Add a timeline of user recordings and feedback to your HubSpot contacts, giving your sales and support teams more context about user behavior.
- Optimizely integration: Filter Hotjar recordings and heatmaps by Optimizely experiments to see how users behave in different test variations.
- Segment integration: Send Hotjar data to Segment to combine it with data from other sources for a more complete view of the customer journey.
Hotjar Alternatives
- Mouseflow: A direct competitor offering similar features like heatmaps, session replays, and feedback forms. Some users find its session replay filtering more advanced.
- FullStory: Focuses heavily on high-fidelity session replay, providing a pixel-perfect recording of user sessions. It is often preferred by product and engineering teams for debugging.
- Crazy Egg: One of the original heatmap tools. It offers heatmaps, A/B testing, and recordings. It is a strong alternative if your primary focus is on visual reports and conversion optimization.
- Microsoft Clarity: A completely free tool from Microsoft that offers heatmaps, session recordings, and insights dashboards. It is a powerful free alternative, though it lacks feedback and survey tools.
- VWO (Visual Website Optimizer): A comprehensive conversion rate optimization (CRO) platform. While it includes heatmaps and recordings, its main focus is on A/B testing, personalization, and experimentation.
Hotjar API
Yes, Hotjar provides several APIs for developers to extend its functionality and integrate it more deeply with other systems. The main APIs available are:
- Surveys API: Allows you to programmatically trigger surveys based on specific events or user actions within your application.
- Identify API: Lets you pass user attributes (like user ID or name) to Hotjar. This helps you connect session data to specific users in your own database for easier analysis and debugging.
- Incoming Webhooks API: Enables you to send data from other applications into Hotjar to trigger recordings or surveys.
To use the API, you typically need to find your Site ID and API tokens within your Hotjar account settings. Access to certain APIs may depend on your subscription plan.
Here is a simple example of using the Identify API with JavaScript:
hotjar('identify', 'USER_ID', {
name: 'John Doe',
email: 'john.doe@example.com',
signup_date: '2023-01-15'
});
For detailed documentation, developers should visit the official Hotjar developer portal.
Hotjar Affiliate program
Hotjar does not have a traditional public affiliate program where you earn a commission for every sale. Instead, they have a referral program for their customers. Existing Hotjar users can refer new users to the platform. When a referred user signs up or upgrades, the referrer often receives rewards such as free Hotjar merchandise or account credits.
If you are an agency or influencer interested in a more formal partnership, it is best to contact the Hotjar team directly. You can reach out to their support or look for a 'Partners' page on their website to inquire about potential collaboration opportunities. They may have a private partner program for businesses that can drive a significant number of new customers.
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