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Ever wanted to understand why your website isn’t performing how you expected?
4 minute read
Maybe you’ve got a high bounce rate, or perhaps you’ve got lots of traffic coming to your site, but none of it is converting. In this blog, we explore how you can use HotJar to gain a better understanding of how visitors engage with your website, giving you actionable insights that can help enhance your site’s performance.
HotJar is a behaviour analytics tool that can be linked to your website to measure user interactions and feedback. The free version gives you access to all of their features at a restricted level. They also have paid plans that give you more options. HotJar can be added to your website using a small piece of code, or if you’re using WordPress, you can link it via a plugin.
User Experience is a critical part of the overall customer experience for any prospects or clients visiting your website. HotJar is one of many tools you can use to enhance this experience by helping you gain a deeper understanding of your users through their on-site behaviour and direct feedback.
Tools like Google Analytics can give you more data-driven insights into what your users are doing on your site, such as what pages they’re visiting, which channels bring the most unique visitors and how many conversions you’ve generated. HotJar can complement this data by helping you understand why certain behaviours might be occurring in a more visual way, such as why you have a high bounce rate or why your pages aren’t converting.
Using the two tools alongside each is key to optimising the user experience of your website. If you want to learn more about the importance of user experience in website design, you can find out more here.
There are several features in HotJar that allow you to interpret customer behaviour. These include:
Below we’ve broken down how you might use each of these to inform your website’s user experience.
Heatmaps give you valuable insights into how a user navigates your website. The Heatmap works by providing you with a visual outline of your page and then using a scale of colour to determine the level of interaction a part of the page has had, i.e. how many clicks or touches it got.
You can breakdown the data by device type, and also switch between click, move or scroll. The latter is particularly useful as it gives you the ability to see what percentage of users reached each section of your webpage.
HotJar provides a recording of each user’s journey on your site, from landing page to exit and every interaction in-between. Recordings are instrumental in determining pain points in the user journey such as broken pages, frustration with your navigation, or difficulties during the checkout process. They also help you understand how users move through your website towards conversion, and which content is the most popular or best at converting.
The incoming feedback tool allows you to collect real-time data from your website visitors by asking them to share their feedback. You can target specific pages or the entire site, and you can tailor each option to suit your requirements.
You can use surveys to target specific areas of your website to gain valuable thoughts or feedback from your users about their experiences using your site. For example, you could include a survey that appears when someone reaches the end of one of your blog pages to ask them if they found the content useful, or before someone exits a page to ask them why they’re abandoning your checkout process or form enquiry.
Once you’ve set up your HotJar account and started gathering insights into the user experience of your site, it’s time to analyse that data and turn it into actionable changes both on your website and across your business.
HotJar can provide you with invaluable information about how your customers perceive your brand, how useful they think your content is and what they do or don’t like about it; so that you can continue to enhance the user experience and increase the likelihood of conversion.
If you would like help adding HotJar to your WordPress website and turning the data into actionable insights, then please get in touch. Or if you’d like to hear more about the latest website and marketing tips and trends, then please register for our weekly newsletter.
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