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.
$39
per month 100 daily sessions
OptinMonster
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
OptinMonster is an ecommerce popup builder and conversion tool from Wordpress plugin specialist Awesome Motive headquartered in Florida.
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.
OptinMonster is a perfect tool for companies that want to convert website visitors that leave without providing any information. Having more email addresses gives you more prospects to sell your products and services. You can use OptinMonster campaigns to generate leads on blog pages that normally lack a call to action, or use them to capture abandoning visitors on important product or service pages. It is generally a pop-up software, so it can't necessarily replace any plugin or software that handles web forms.
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.
Analytics is probably the area for the biggest improvement. Other than showing how the number of visitors, number of conversions, and conversion rate, there isn't much else to the native analytics. It would be nice to see campaign metrics side by side. Otherwise, you have to view one campaign at a time. In the history of conversions graph, it doesn't overlay website traffic or show how the conversion rate has changed over time.
The only other area that may use improvement is their capable integrations. There are a few that are not provided, such as Kartra and Salesforce.
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.
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.
It is very well designed from both a UI and UX perspective. I've never been lost in the tool and building your rule sets is very easy—you'll have no problem hitting your target.
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.
They are very responsive and helpful and courteous. They solve issues quickly. Aside from their tech support staff, they have a great knowledge base and OptinMonster University which has plenty of content about how to use OptinMonster to its full potential and learn digital marketing strategies and tactics. A complete package for sure.
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.
We used to be Justuno customers but their editor kept overwriting a small bit of HTML that we needed written in a certain way to work with a plugin on our site. I contacted their support team who tried their best to help, but their tool just couldn't make it work. When I asked OptinMonster support if my code could be used as-is they confidently said yes. We haven't looked back!
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.
For several clients that we have implemented OptinMonster for, we have had a significant increase in leads, which keeps our clients happy and we retain the business.
Campaigns are quick to set up, so it saves us significant time versus having to go to a web developer to build pop-ups or web forms. We can add something that goes "on top" of the website and turn it on and off with ease or change display rules to adjust how we want to use it.
