Fio Dossetto

There’s a reason why moving junk food to a hard-to-reach shelf might help us eat less of it: the location is impractical, it’s going to take effort to reach it, and—unless the motivation is really strong—most of the time we end up not actually bothering.

Sometimes, online businesses are exactly like that hard-to-reach shelf: something impractical that requires extra effort and make people lose motivation and leave.

The good news is that there is a simple way to find out if that’s the case with your business: all you have to do is ask your visitors and customers how much effort they have to put into doing business with you. This is the Customer Effort Score (CES), and measuring it can help you make accurate predictions of future business success or failure. 

Visitors flow through your website every day, but somehow all of that traffic funnels down to just a trickle of conversions, sales, and signups. Funnel analysis can help you spot where users are leaving your website, so you can optimize it and increase conversions.

In this post, we’ll explain how you can analyze funnels to identify key traffic sources and spot high-exit pages. You’ll also learn how to combine funnel reports with more analytics insight, so you can send more traffic down the marketing funnel to the pages that matter.

Every time you update or redesign your website, there’s a risk of something unpredictable happening that breaks it—and every second where something’s going wrong is costing you money.

People can't use a website without clicking a mouse somewhere or tapping on a mobile device. Those clicks and taps help them navigate pages and find the products, services, or information they’re looking for.

But do YOU, as a website designer, marketer, or business owner, know exactly where your visitors click and tap? And do you know how to use that information to build a better website and experience?

That's where click maps come in.

Say you’ve built a page, published a form, or sent a newsletter. As soon as they are out there, you naturally want to make sure people interact with them by taking action—the most common one being people clicking (or tapping) on something.

Enter click tracking, which is—literally—about tracking what’s being clicked (and what isn’t), so you can work on delivering more value to your users and get the clicks your business needs to succeed and grow.

In this piece, we give you an overview of the different types of click tracking you can use, examples of how measuring visitor clicks can help you learn more about your customers and increase conversion rates, and how to easily set up click tracking on your website.

Unless you’re a mind reader, the only way to find out what people are thinking is to ask them.

That's what surveys are for. But the way you ask the question often determines the kind of answer you get back—and one of the first decisions you have to make is: are you going to ask an open-ended or a closed-ended question?

Nobody knows more about what your users want than the users themselves. So why not ask them?

Regardless of what type of website you’re working on—be it e-commerce, SaaS (software-as-a-service), blog, or magazine site—surveying users on the page will give you the feedback you need to improve the user experience for your audience and increase conversions for your business.

In this quick guide, you’ll learn where on your website to ask questions, which survey questions to ask, our favorite survey question examples, and how to get started using an online survey tool like Hotjar.

The clue is in the name: UX (user experience) is all about your users. So it makes sense that the more user-focused you are when collecting website data, the better equipped you’ll be to make optimizations that serve your users’ needs.

You probably already have some clues about user behavior from traditional UX analytics data (e.g., bounce rate, page views, conversions). But how do you know what to fix first when you spot a problem? And where do you start when you’re looking to increase conversions?

If you’re a UX designer, developer, or marketer working on improving the user experience, heat maps can help you collect data on how people interact with your website, so you can use those insights to improve UX and the metrics that matter to your business.

Here at Hotjar, we strongly believe that what’s best for your users and customers is best for your business. But how do you know what’s best for your users?

You have to ask them.

Shopify is a leading ecommerce platform, boasting over 1 million stores worldwide. Opening a Shopify store may be simple enough, but consistently driving conversions and sales is a trickier task.

There’s no magic way to make your website better, but we do know of something that can set you on the right path: getting to know your users.

After reading this article, you’ll know exactly how to start using Hotjar’s user behavior and feedback analytics tools (think heat maps, session recordings, and surveys) to give your users what they need and increase conversions and sales for your Shopify-powered website.

There are days when the simple act of getting stuff done requires a lot of effort. We’ve all been there: a deadline is looming, there are too many distractions, burnout is approaching fast. Sometimes, even finding the self-discipline to start work can be... a lot of work.

Back in June we had a team meet-up in Marbella, Spain, to work together in the same physical space for a few days and get to know each other ‘in real life’—we are fully remote the rest of the year! Between a glass of chilled gazpacho and an inflatable unicorn (true story), my colleagues and I shared our favorite techniques and routines to stay focused, organized, and productive. Here are some things that work for us: please let us know of any others that can help! 

Wherever you are in the world, you may be experiencing remote work for the first time or getting ready to do so.

When we first launched Hotjar, success was anything but guaranteed. We were completely unknown, didn’t have a cent of outside funding, and were facing some well-known competitors.

Five years later, we’ve gone from €0 to €17 million in Annual Recurring Revenue and Hotjar has been installed on over 670,000 sites. And a huge factor in reaching this level of growth has been our commitment to staying close to our customers.

In this article, we share the exact methods we use to stay in touch with our customers year-round, and how we collect and measure user feedback to constantly improve our website and product experience.

✏️  Note: we are a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, but the techniques we cover in this post are highly applicable to your e-commerce and/or lead generation business.

We know what it’s like to have pressing questions about a website—Who is really visiting it? What are these people looking for? Why are they not converting? What can we do to improve their experience?—and not having a clear sense of how to go about finding the answers.

There are things that never change—not even during this very (insert your preferred adjective here) time. If you have a business selling online, the best way to grow it has always been to really understand your customers: what is driving them to your website, what’s convincing them to stay on it, what’s stopping them from finding what they need.

For decades, software developers have been using beta testers to get feedback on products ahead of their official release. For centuries before them, novelists and literary writers used beta readers to get opinions on late drafts before preparing manuscripts for publication. At Hotjar, we are not new to using beta testers for our software, but we only recently decided to learn a lesson from literature and apply a beta reader approach to our content.

As content makers, we want to invest time and effort into content initiatives that our target audiences will find helpful and enjoyable. To do that, we need ways to know that we have really empathized with our readers, instead of simply creating something we think they might enjoy. So here is the behind-the-scenes story of how and why we found 400+ beta readers who helped us write one of our most shared and read pieces of content, The Essential Guide to Growing Your Early-Stage SaaS Startup, and how that one experience has impacted on and changed our entire approach to content.

When the market changes—like it's changing right now—and you suddenly get different online customers than the ones you are used to, how do you make sure your website works for all of them:

It's almost International Women's Day, and here at Hotjar's Content HQ it felt like a good time to celebrate the women who propel Hotjar forward all year round—the ones who write the code that makes our product work, the ones with their noses deep into financial spreadsheets and legal papers, the ones who answer your questions whenever you might need support, the ones who built the website you're on, and the ones who help our 100% distributed team grow.

Back in February, we launched the XAwards for early-stage startups (2 to 5 members) to discover some of the world’s most innovative and exciting teams, and learn about the products and services they are building. We also wanted to give back to the startup community with three XAwards cash prizes: €20,000 for Best Overall Experience, €5,000 for Best Tech Achievement and €5,000 for Best Mobile App Experience.

We selected 10 finalists from 640 entries and invited them to Malta (where Hotjar is headquartered) on May 11th to pitch their projects to our judging panel; we later extended the invite to an additional 8 teams who had impressed us. And because we knew this would be a great networking and learning opportunity for everyone, including Hotjar's remote team, we also decided to organize a 2-day event with international guest speakers from companies such as Basecamp, Pipedrive, PriceIntelligently, Receptive and SaaStock.

Retrospectives are one of our favorite Agile practices. We find incredible value in the act of coming together to reflect on work we delivered after each sprint, share feedback to “determine what succeeded and what could be improved,” and agree on what high-priority action items to tackle next.

At Hotjar we don’t want to be just another company who claims they are ‘customer-centric’ without putting in any of the (hard) work required.

In our quest to learn from the best, we recently turned to Bill Macaitis (former marketing executive for Slack, Zendesk, and Salesforce) for inspiration and guidance on what he’s learned about customer-centricity throughout his career. After interviewing him on our podcast The Humans Strike Back and getting him to conduct a live Ask Me Anything (AMA) screencast on Facebook with us, we are now sharing some of his wisdom with you.

TL;DR: to Bill (and us) a necessary step in developing a ‘customer-centric’ business is “hir[ing] people smarter than you… [people who are] kind, courteous, generous, and have empathy.” In other words, customer-centricity begins with your internal customers: your team.

Here are a few examples of how it works.

See the ‘copy to clipboard’ button below?  It helps thousands of new users a month copy the Hotjar code snippet and get started with our product.

I recently stumbled upon a LinkedIn post from someone who’d just discovered a small but powerful piece of Hotjar functionality (rage clicks in Recordings). I was happy that the discovery will improve the amount of useful data this user can get out of the tool—but I also thought: “What if there are other people who don’t know about it?”

One of the best things about working remotely is the freedom to do your job from wherever you choose. But being part of a distributed team also comes with several challenges: for example, if you're new to the team and you can only meet your co-workers in person once or twice a year, it’s difficult to learn about interesting habits they may have outside of work, spot character-defining quirks, or even just get to know them as people.

As our fully remote team has grown past 100, we’ve made an effort to be intentional and proactive about building personal connections. Face-to-face interaction outside of a video call may be rare, but that doesn't stop our online team from getting to know one another. This blog post gives you a list of five of our favorite strategies for creating virtual spaces to socialize and hang out.

Heat maps are a powerful visual tool for tracking user behavior on your website or app and understanding how visitors interact with pages and page elements.

Reading reviews from real, verified customers is one of the best ways to get an understanding of whether a tool is right for you or not.

Why are visitors abandoning your website? Who are they? What do they think about your product? You can speculate endlessly about these answers—or you can get them by asking the actual people who visit your website every day.

Implementing an on-site survey right after your customers make a purchase is an easy, non-intrusive way to learn what you need to improve the buying experience and overcome potential objections.

Capturing this kind of website feedback is so valuable and simple that we recommend all our e-commerce customers do it—and we put together this quick guide to help you create a simple, post-purchase survey in just a few minutes. We’ll go over exactly what questions you should ask as well as where, when, and how to set it up.

A high bounce rate on your ecommerce site could be a sign that something isn’t quite right for your customers—which will definitely hurt the bottom line. Put on your detective hat and find what's causing your bounce rates with the help of 3 essential tools—heatmaps, recordings, and on-site feedback—and guidance from experts who have done it before.

If I had a dollar for every time someone at Hotjar interrupts my day by asking “Hey, are you busy? Can you check something for me super-quick?”... I’d be pretty poor.

That’s because our team has been making an effort to protect our time and focus by improving the way we collaborate with each other—but it didn’t happen overnight, and we’re still very much learning. Today we want to share a few things we did recently that might help you and your teams, too.

On the day I started researching this article, there were almost 150,000 active Surveys built with Hotjar in the world (149,101 to be precise). That’s how many stars are in the Messier Constellation or how many days you’d find in 41 years—in other words: a pretty large number.