Hotjar is a useful tool
March 28, 2019

Hotjar is a useful tool

Sarah O'Donnell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Hotjar

We use Hotjar within our agency on our client's websites. We mostly use if for heat mapping and session recordings. It is a good place to start if you are want to know what your users are doing on your website, and it is a good visual aid.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Hotjar doesn't always render correctly. For instance, on heatmaps, not all elements will show, as it takes a snapshot of the first user's screen, and if elements haven't loaded, it does not show for any of your heatmap data.
  • There is no way to exclude URLs when watching session recordings; for instance, if you specifically don't want to see users who are looking at careers, you have to skip through the videos manually.
  • Hotjar has the ability to track forms; what fields users are completing, how long it takes, where do users abandon the form etc. Although this is highly dependant on how the form is built on the site, so it doesn't work for all forms.
  • Hotjar has been positive as we have been able to back up other pieces of insight and recommendations for clients using the data from Hotjar.
  • Hotjar is positive as it is a reasonably priced tool.
I did not choose Hotjar but would recommend it.
Hotjar is suitable for tracking data. If you know a certain page isn't being visited on a site, Hotjar may provide extra insight into how many users are clicking CTAs to that page for instance. So Hotjar is a good tool to know the 'why' if something is going wrong on your website.

Hotjar is less appropriate for use on its own; it should be used in conjunction with other data. This is because it can be unreliable. For instance, a heatmap may be unreliable if it hasn't rendered correctly.

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