Hotjar is a conversion rate optimization tool for digital marketers. Features include heatmapping, visual session recording, conversion funnel analytics, form analytics, feedback polls and surveys, and usability testing.
The tool is used by digital analysts, UX designers, web developers and product marketers. Hotjar was acquired by Contentsquare September 2021, and is now a Contentsquare brand.
Crazy Egg is great if you have static content and want to be able to easily set up heatmaps and scrollmaps to see how people interact with your webpages across different devices types. Straightforward and reliable. In circumstances when you want fast turnarounds, Crazy Egg isn't the right tool as the visualisations often take the better part of a day to generate. It also doesn't perform well if your site has dynamic content - either AJAX-driven or dynamically expanding.
Hotjar is well suite for organizations that want to get a good glimpse into user behavior on their websites. The tool is easily installed through Google Tag Manager, and then users simply select which pages or paths they want the tool to analyze. After a few days, users can start seeing patterns develop, helping them understand what areas of the user journey flow they need to test out and improve. Hotjar is primarily for web-based experiences, not for mobile applications and other non-web digital applications.
Shows us exactly where users click on a page. Literally, the exact spot. This is useful in many different ways. You can see what links/buttons are clicked the most. You can see if a key CTA on the page IS NOT clicked - maybe you need a new design or the placement of that CTA is poor.
You can see if users are clicking a spot on the page that is not actually actionable. Maybe your treatment of some text or an image makes it appear that an item is linked, but it is not actually linked. You can see that people are clicking on that item, and either go ahead and link it, or else change the design to look less 'clickable'.
You can see what percentage of users actually view the different areas within your page. This is very useful when you run into a key stakeholder that demands certain content be above 'the fold'. Trying to explain to a non-technical person that 'the fold' is entirely dependent upon the user's screen size and resolution can be frustrating for both the stakeholder and yourself. Instead, using Crazy Egg's scrollmap feature, you can visually show that stakeholder that, for instance, 80% of users view the content that appears within the top 600 pixels of page height.
The design of both the heatmaps and scrollmaps is fantastic.
The 'page camera' software they offer works very well once you get the hang of it. This allows you to run tests on pages that include dynamic content (like a shopping cart product category page).
Heat mapping is great on Hotjar. It is a good place to start when you are looking at the UX & CRO on your website. You can see the % of people clicking on elements on a page, how far they scroll, and mouse movements.
Hotjar is great for session recordings. These record the mouse movements, clicks, pages and scrolls of a user in video format. You can watch these to investigate what works well on a site and identify potential roadblocks and bugs.
Hotjar is great as it ensures that users details are anonymous; for instance, if you are watching a session recording, you cannot see what a user types in a form field, as Hotjar blanks this out.
Hotjar has a poll function, so you can have polls on your website.
The video recording feature is very slow to use. I know there is a very powerful process going on (saving your CSS and the DOM movements you make) but anyway it's slow to use.
Hotjar itself is heavy and has effects on your load times. This is a very important issue and I hope they're working on that.
Adding more segmentation would be nice. For example, being able to connect your API or more information to show relevant polls or feedback buttons to certain users. Aggregated info is hard to process.
It's a great tool considering how inexpensive it is. If used correctly and you have a plan for tracking your websites, this tool can make a world of a difference. If you are not going to sit down and take the time to make a plan for how to use this tool, I would say it is not worth your time. Yes, you can look at items on your website that need to be changed, but without a consistent plan, other important items that need changing can be lost in the mix. Make sure you have enough time and energy to invest in this and it will be well worth it
Even though the heat maps and user recordings were useful, our website was significantly slowed down after we installed Hotjar, so much so, that it took over a minute for our blog to load. The data that we gathered was not worth the length that it took our website to load.
It's not clear what features there are. The navigation icon is not labeled. It's hard to know where to start when you're first logging in as a first-time user. It's hard to know how to set up anything and there aren't many helpful tutorials in-product. I don't want to be kicked out of a help center or read the documentation.
So easy and simple to use! Straightforward anyone in the team is able to easily go in and set up anything in Hotjar. The UI is really simple. Whenever you give feedback to Hotjar they continously take on board the feedback and improve the tool.
I think support is an area where Crazy Egg is lacking. I would love to have a quarterly check-in with a Crazy Egg rep to understand what kinds of changes have been made to the platform and what is on the horizon. I also think a quick consulting sessions with a rep could be extremely beneficial, as I'm sure there are ways to use the tool that we haven't even thought about yet that would be extremely insightful for our team.
Hotjar is a SaaS-based company, and as such has a good support service. Users can quickly submit support tickets through Hotjar's online portal. Enterprise customers get access to additional support members and have SLAs to support their larger, more complex needs. Overall, Hotjar is extremely reliable and I've never had to reach out to customer support.
There are a lot of tools with similar feature and closely equal pricing- This factor is the most confusing. As we need something for our website and not every tool has everything and it took time for us to understand this. We choose Crazy Egg for its ease of using and anyone can be trained to use it. The main reason to chose Crazy Egg is the ease of creating snapshots and downloadable features. For me personally -the "confetti" feature helped a lot and its the main feature which is like a ALL IN 1.
Compared to Sprig and Usabilla, Hotjar has robust functionality. Again, as stated earlier, the ability to summarize rage clicks, trigger recordings for a/b experiments, and run intercept surveys on mobile is very useful. Hotjar is also noticeably more intuitive to use than Usabilla, with a cleaner interface and navigation.
Its reliability (not scaleability, as the question asks for, sorry) is pretty good but through our testing we know that some clicks do not get recorded. It doesn't bother us a lot because we look at the aggregate of thousands of visits, but we do know it misses things. As for scaleability, it's about right. You really don't want zillions of clicks per snapshot - the screen just turns to 100% dots and you lose the ability to differentiate different screen areas. We find that 25,000 clicks for a page gives us a really good view.
Positive Impact: Answering questions that analytics cannot. i.e. Are people seeing the PayPal button? We can measure how many people start the PayPal process on our site. However, its hard to know if low numbers are because of low interest or because our customers are missing the option.
Positive Impact: Measuring user engagement for page types to determine what elements on the page are most important to our customers.
Positive Impact: Lower cost than competitors to use helpful engagement tracking software. Currently, we're not consistently using Crazy Egg for user engagement so the $50 a month is perfect for our current needs.
Our UX team can now use hard data to back up and validate design decisions that we make. Our role as usability experts is becoming more respected and integral to business objectives because we now have data that can back up our field of study and prove that our roles are demonstrably useful and necessary.
HotJar allows our small team of 3 UX designers to get research data as if we were a much larger team. Instead of painstakingly using our time to do guerrilla research, endless user observations, and other types of manual testing, we can now get a significant portion of our data from HotJar.
Using HotJar is actually giving our team a sense of excitement and enjoyment in our day-to-day usability work. Instead of seeing UX as a chore, HotJar is making data gathering and analyzing more fun, because we can see tangible results from a much larger pool of user/user-data than we could in the past.
