Your website is one of the most important tools in your small business arsenal. For most customers, it marks their first interaction with your company.
As a business owner, you know how important it is to have a great looking, well-functioning website. The question is: do you actually know what users do when they land on your home page? There could be hidden traps which are driving them away but how will you find out if you’re not tracking their actions?
Google Analytics is one way to see how many people come to your site. This free tool shows you where they came from, which pages they visited and how long they stayed for. It even shows you where they live.
What Google Analytics doesn’t do is show you the journey your users take on each page. This is where HotJar comes in.
What is HotJar?
HotJar is a tool we have used at Business Blueprint for a long time.
This software allows you to see exactly how users engage with your site. It gives you interactive heatmaps of where they scroll to and where they click. Once you have it installed, it also records users’ sessions. You can use the data collected by Hotjar to discover what parts of your site are working and the areas people are skipping, avoiding or becoming stuck at.
By using HotJar, you may realise that the most important information on your page is at the bottom. If your aim is to get registrations but people have to scroll to the bottom to do so, how many are giving up and leaving your site? It makes sense to bring the information higher up the page to increase your conversions.
When you view a few recorded ‘user journeys’ on your website, you may notice people pause in a certain area. Is this because it is confusing? Perhaps a link is broken or the text doesn’t make sense. Seeing exactly where a user gets ‘stuck’ can help you identify areas which need attention.
How businesses use HotJar
At Business Blueprint, we have used HotJar to optimise the 52 Ways website, rearranging modules so the layout is more user-friendly. The following are some of the ways you can use this software:
Heatmaps
Heatmaps share a visual representation of your customers’ clicks, taps and scrolling behaviour. With this technology, you can visualise behaviour to understand what users want, care about and do on your site.
Visitor Recordings
Eliminate guesswork with recordings of real visitor behaviour on your site. By seeing each visitor’s clicks, taps and mouse movements, you can identify usability issues. Recordings are shareable, and you can tag sections and make notes.
Conversion Funnels
This is very important, no matter what industry you’re in, because the longer a user stays on your site, the more likely they are to buy (and the higher ranking you will get on Google).
With HotJar, you can see where your visitors are dropping off and find the biggest opportunities for improvement by identifying on which page and at which step most visitors are leaving your site.
Form Analysis
If you have a lot of forms on your website, you can use HotJar to improve completion rates. The software shows you which fields take too long to fill, which are left blank, and why your visitors abandon your form and page.
It could be one question which puts people off. Identifying this can improve your profits overnight.
Feedback Polls
Take HotJar one step further and engage with your users by targeting questions to specific visitors anywhere on your desktop or mobile website. You can also give your users an easy way to leave instant feedback about their experience.
As the saying goes, ‘The more you learn, the more you earn’. This really counts when it comes to understanding your users so you can give them what they want.
