Unsponsored: Unbiased Reviews of Marketing Tools: Hotjar

Edition 2: Hotjar

Heat mapping your website visitors.

Last week, I explored Leadfeeder, a slightly creepy tool that shows you who is viewing your website. This week, I'm looking at Hotjar, definitely a little further down the creepy scale.

Imagine being able to look over the shoulder at the screen of your website visitors. Watch what their mouse does: when it dawdles, when they click, how far they scroll down, what the focus on. Well, Hotjar makes this possible.

Hotjar is a heat mapping and visitor recording tool, originally designed for product managers, designers and researchers. They're missing a trick in their targeting, as I'm pretty sure most business owners and marketing managers would love to what's causing drop-offs and where their visitor eyes are falling on their page.

I run a copywriting agency, so we hold just as much responsibility as a designer when it comes to where the user eye moves and stops on a website, so Hotjar definitely piqued my interest.

Heat Mapping

LinkedIn's newsletter beta doesn't currently let me post images in my newsletters, so here's a link to our home page heatmap.

You'll see the 'heat' generated from more popular spots on the page. For us, that's our blog link, about us page, and particularly our scrolling testimonials at the bottom. I can only see that mice linger more around our SEO section than our copy section.

Visitor Videos

Here is an example I've taken from our home page again. I have no idea who this is, and it certainly feels creepy to just watch them wander, but thanks to one short video, I managed to deduce 3 important points:

• Our pop-up lead magnets come up way too much, I can almost feel the irritation of the user - we can easily remove this
• Our visitors really do read down to the bottom of the page, something I didn't expect to happen - proof our copy is nice and readable
• This particular person is interested in healthcare copywriting, but didn't choose to contact us (yet).

Direct User Feedback

We've all seen them - those "how would you rate your experience of this site?" type pop-ups. The ones with the smiley faces.

They annoy the hell out of me, so I didn't want them on my website. But if you like that sort of thing, and your visitors are the type to fill it in properly, it's an easy add-on tool.

Surely this is an invasion of privacy somehow?!

Nope. They've wisely taken this very seriously, adhering tightly to GDPR, PCI, CCPA and just about every other privacy-related acronym out there.

Pricing

The free version: 'Basic' has been perfect for us, so far. We're only here to tinker and to get a bit of live feedback, so we don't need extensive recording facilities. The Basic package records up to 1,050 monthly recorded sessions, produces unlimited heatmaps and creates survey and feedback widgets.

Pay $31/month for Plus - which seems to mostly involve an increase in sessions for busier sites - up to 3,000 per month, plus some filters for those who are looking a bit more deeply into the data.

$79/month gets you the Business version: up to 15,000 sessions, plus some nifty features such as 'frustration and confusion signals', and removal of Hotjar branding (I presume for white labelling purposes). You're also able to track user attributes here, and check precisely who is doing precisely what.

Overall Review

Hotjar is an easy, insightful tool that can really help you buck up your ideas when it comes to your website copy and design.

If you've got important information in a 'cold' part of a page, it'll show you where is best to put them. If people are dropping off at a certain point, you'll know you've bored/annoyed them and can change that part of the page.

And for most people, the free version will be perfectly sufficient. A no-brainer when it comes to improving your user experience.

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Note:?This newsletter is, as it says on the tin, completely unsponsored. It conveys my own opinion, as the owner of a (reliably brilliant)?copywriting and SEO agency?based in Birmingham.