In this Hotjar review let me tell you all about my experience of using Hotjar for years. What stands out about Hotjar is its simplicity. For fairly low monthly pricing you get access to heatmaps, click reports and scroll tracking across your site. You can also record your visitors anonymously and actually watch how they interact with your site.
Finally there’s the option to include feedback widgets so your visitors can report back any issues to you directly.
However, the real value of Hotjar is in the aggregated data – how much of a page are people viewing and which buttons are they clicking? These are the types of insights that can significantly increase your bottom line.
Nevertheless something so valuable should not be underestimated. While Hotjar is a useful and affordable tool, there are better options available to transform your business. One of those is Oribi Analytics – a full suite of tools designed to replace Google Analytics and Hotjar which includes features like heatmaps and more advanced systems.
Marketing analytics software is great, but you need to know how to interpret that data and apply it effectively. That’s where Oribi comes in. With Oribi you are actually told what to do – not just a load of data you then need to comb through for hours. Set up is fast and easy – no need to get a developer or agency involved. And you have premium support available when you need it.
Hotjar pricing
Hotjar offers very varied pricing tiers starting with a free plan that gives you:
- Create on-demand, manual reports (snapshots)
- 2000 pageviews per day
- Create up to 3 snapshot Heatmaps
- Snapshot Recordings, up to 100 per day (store up to 300)
- Send and store up to 3 surveys
- Create and store up to 3 Incoming Feedback widgets
- Store heatmap and recordings data for 365 days
- Unlimited team members
The Plus plan at 39EU per month then upgrades to continuous recording of up to 100 full user sessions per day, not just page views. These benefits include:
- Hotjar automatically and continuously captures data
- 100 full user sessions per day
- Continuous Heatmaps across all your pages
- Continuous Recordings, up to 100 per day (store unlimited)
- Send and store unlimited surveys
- Unlimited Incoming Feedback widgets
- Store heatmap and recordings data for 365 days
- Unlimited team members
The more premium business plans then start at 99EU for 500 daily sessions and the Scale plan of 389EU for 4000 daily sessions.
At this higher end of the spectrum, you may want to consider more advanced Hotjar alternatives like Oribi to take advantage of 24/7 live support and instant notifications.
Hotjar Review – Features
Visitor Recordings
Hotjar was one of the first analytics tools to offer visitor recordings, a feature that records the screen of user sessions so you can see exactly what’s going on. CrazyEgg and other tools have since added similar features to their own platforms but Hotjar still edges it.
HotJar is uniquely positioned with its ability for visitors to record themselves as they navigate your website or app while also providing rich insights into how users interact with different elements in real time using heatmaps, scroll maps, form analysis & more!
Hotjar is an amazing tool to understand how users interact with yoursite. For example, you can record and watch videos of real people using your site! You could even filter by pages viewed or browser types- for a deep dive on certain parts of the website that might be targeted to specific customer segments.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps are like a map of your site. They help you see how people interact with it, and where they’re spending the most time on certain pages or features; giving you valuable information about what is working well for them and what could be improved to make their experience better.
Feedback Polls
Incoming Feedback is a great tool to have if you’re looking for valuable feedback from your users. You can ask them which parts of the site they like and dislike, and get an instant response without any guesswork on whether anything needs changing or not.
Not only does it give you straight-up answers but also provides information about demographics such as age group, gender; this way there’s no bias whatsoever!
The Incoming Feedback widget has flexible placement options with easy customization features in case that doesn’t suit your business requirements just yet – so all bases are covered when it comes to getting the most out of this gem!
Speed
The biggest issue for this Hotjar review has to be speed. Hotjar is a pretty hefty plugin for recording user behaviour in such a comprehensive way. Even though it’s designed to be a constant monitor gathering data across your whole site, it is usually best to only activate it on pages you are actively testing.
Those scripts take time to load, and users are always demanding more from website speeds. That also means traffic sources like Google place huge value on speed. Pagespeed has had some impact on SEO for a while now, but the Core Web Vitals update now means a blazingly fast website is essential. Similarly slow pages will bring down your PPC quality score and thus increase your cost per click.
Is Hotjar GDPR compliant?
Hotjar values user privacy which is why they went through the extra effort to be GDPR compliant in 2017 well ahead of the GDPR deadline. Some of their work included
- Researching how important this was and understanding all aspects that needed to comply.
- Appointing a Data Protection Officer, who helped with rewriting an agreement and developing strategies + requirements based on affected areas in product usage.
- They made made changes/improvements throughout our entire system so everything could remain secure while also ensuring compliance with regulation.
Hotjar Alternatives
Hotjar vs Oribi
Hotjar is a popular tool and has some great functionality. In terms of recording details, you currently can only choose between recording everybody who comes to your site or only the ones who stay for more than 30 seconds. You cannot track users according to more detailed criteria, such as only the ones who visit your store or come from a specific channel.
For the ultimate conversion rate optimization you need qualitative data from a tool like Oribi. A clear advantage of Oribi is that it focuses on events rather than traffic. Let’s face it, our hearts might jump by a traffic increase but in the end, those numbers are irrelevant if your site isn’t bringing you leads. Tracking events with this system provides insight into what really happens and we love its breakdown section which lets us see detailed information about clicks for content from where visitors were referred to how they surfed around within your website using their browser or device!
Hotjar vs CrazyEgg
When comparing Hotjar to CrazyEgg, it’s clear that the former has more information about heatmaps than its rival. For example; in addition to showing you where your visitors are clicking and mousing over their activity on a page, Hotjars also show mouse movements as well!
CrazyEgg provides an additional view that breaks down clicks into different categories – something we’d like to see added to Hotjar.
Hotjar vs Google Analytics
If you came here thinking you have to choose between Google Analytics and Hotjar, let us stop you right there – you can use both.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for driving traffic and increasing conversion rates, but you can’t do everything with it. While Google analytics provides in-depth analysis of your ROI, Hotjar offers a more accurate measure of how visitors interact with web pages through its heatmaps feature.
The data from this overlay enables insights that increase conversions by optimizing the layout and content on each page to best suit customer needs based off previous metrics captured either via surveys or other tools like click maps.