Website analytics tools are essential for marketers since they help them know what works for their strategies and what doesn’t. Although these tools weren’t that important in the past, there are more analytics tools each year.
HotJar has been active for more than five years, and its popularity has increased over time. Regardless of that, not everyone is sure if investing in this brand is a good idea. If you wonder if using HotJar is a good idea, read below the advantages and disadvantages of doing it!
In this review…
HotJar Summary
As we mentioned before, HotJar is meant to be used by marketing teams looking forward to increasing sales and boosting productivity. The best way to improve how you interact with your customers is by understanding what they do and think when getting to your website.
HotJar aims to help you with that, so you can use it to map the user journey and understand why they do what they do. Apart from that, it includes recordings and incoming feedback of your work and the benefits it brings your company.
This brand also lets you send surveys to your customers. Those surveys give your marketing team direct answers to what they can do to increase sales and catch more leads. The best thing about HotJar is that, before it came along, you needed many software platforms and programs to get a complete set of analytics features.
Fortunately, apps such as HotJar give you a complete CRO toolkit in one app, so you don’t have to worry about paying for many subscriptions. Its main features include heatmaps, visitor recordings, form analysis, feedback polls, and recruit tests.
Nonetheless, this brand also offers some other interesting functions to the ones that pay for it.
HotJar Pros & Cons
Any product ever released has its pros and cons, and HotJar is not the exception to that. Using this brand to boost your productivity and give more information to your marketing team is excellent, but there are still some things that would have room for improvement.
Here are HotJar’s pros and cons:
Pros
- It has great behaviour analysis features
- It’s easy to set up and understand
- Anyone could use it
- Heatmapping is innovative and highly useful
Cons
- Its prices could be better for start-ups
- Some features need more development
HotJar Features
As we mentioned before, HotJar’s features focus on helping marketing teams to get information that can help them outrank their competitors and make their sales increase like never before.
Although HotJar’s developers could improve some of the platform’s functions and their performance, many of them are already excellent for users all over the world, so you can use them with no problem.
Despite that, these features are decent enough to help your marketing team have more information about what leads, prospects, and clients do when they get to your website.
Understanding how to use those functions is not difficult at all, so you don’t have to spend any time teaching others how to use HotJar.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps are the most important feature of this platform and the one that made it popular among marketing teams. What heatmaps do is show users where webpage readers scroll and click after getting to your website.
Many people would think that information is useless and can’t help marketing teams with anything, but that couldn’t be further from reality. When someone scrolls down your page, it could mean two things: they don’t like what they are reading or they want to read more of that.
How can you know that? You just have to see where they clicked and tapped to see if they were interested in another thing or tried to get into a hyperlink. After getting that information, marketing teams can adapt their marketing campaigns and change how they write content in a whole new different way that helps them get more leads.
Visitor Recordings
Several websites and platforms have tried to implement this feature, but the first one to do it was HotJar. While heatmaps tell you where they clicked or scrolled, visitor recordings show you everything your users did after getting into your page.
Getting to know that information is priceless since you can learn what works and what doesn’t with your webpage. Apart from that, you can then share those recordings with your teams for you to analyse them in a conference call or team meeting.
Conversion Funnels
As you may have noticed, all the features this platform offers complement each other and aim to give you all the information they can about the user’s journey after they get to your website. Conversion Funnels focus on telling you where they stop reading your site.
Studying that part of recordings and heatmaps is essential since it tells you where the page lost the reader’s interest, which means that’s the part of it you need to change to get people to buy your products. Some people recommend adding customized pop-ups to keep people from leaving.
Form Analysis
This feature only helps you if your website asks your clients to fill out forms or if your website has a sign-up form itself. As its name suggests, Form Analysis tells you how users interact with your forms and what they do while filling them out. You can use that information to reduce the number of failed completions your form gets.
Feedback Polls and Surveys
Feedback Polls and Surveys are similar to the last feature since they only work if you tend to send polls and surveys to your customers. However, if you don’t, you can start doing it with HotJar! What’s the best way to know what your customers like about your marketing strategies? Ask them yourself.
HotJar allows you to create, customize, and send polls and surveys to your customers for them to fill them out and tell you everything they like and dislike about your company. When customers submit their answers, the information is automatically updated to your HotJar account, so you can analyse it right away.
However, the system itself shows you valuable information about those polls and surveys. An example of that is that you can see how much time readers took to fill them out and if they rewrote some of their answers.
Incoming Feedback
Following up with a similar feature, we have Incoming Feedback, which instead of sending surveys to your customer, it allows them to leave feedback on your website before leaving. They can use that tool to tell you what they love, hate, or recommend you change about your business or marketing strategies in general.
Recruit Testers
Recruit Testers is one of the most advanced features of this platform. Using this feature makes your customers feel like they are doing something to improve the company, and they are! This feature allows you to choose participants who can then test website changes you want to make in the future.
HotJar – Prices and Plans
HotJar is an overall excellent platform for everyone who uses it. The app offers everything you need to understand what your customers like and dislike about your website and helps you create new and better strategies to keep your target audience engaged with your content.
However, one of the things that customers dislike about this app is its pricing.
Plus Plan
The Plus plan, which is the most basic paid plan in the company, costs £39.00 and offers insights to small team teams and companies that are just starting to become successful.
This plan includes automatic data capture, unlimited heatmaps, and up to 35 daily sessions. The only problem with this plan is its price since it’s too much for a small company to pay. It’s difficult for people working on a budget or who need to invest that money to improve other things about the company to get this plan.
Business Plan
The next plan available for customers is the Business plan, and it costs £99 more than the previous one we mentioned. However, the reason it costs that much is that it includes way more features than the Plus plan. You have, for example, access to 500-2,500 daily sessions, seven custom-built integrations, rage clicks, and u-turns.
Scale Plan
At last, you have the Scale plan, which costs £389 a month. Regardless of that, this plan offers you all the features HotJar has. Using those features gets you enough data to manage big sites with no problem.
Other companies, such as SmartLook, offer similar deals but don’t have heatmaps and many of the features that clients love. Lucky Orange, on the other hand, is more affordable for everyone by far, but only gives you basic features for you to work without investing that much money on it.
If you don’t have enough funds to pay for a HotJar plan, we recommend you just stick to the free version and use everything it has for you.
HotJar Review Summary
We consider HotJar to be one of the most effective SEO tools. Not many websites give you the amount of information HotJar offers you, so making this investment can represent a wise move in the long run.
If this HotJar review helped you, please recommend DigitalSupermarket.
