The Hotjar blog

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.

You already know it: what’s best for your users is best for your business.

But do you have the information and insights you need to build and create products that your users will love?

You may have important numbers like churn rate, page traffic, and drop-off rate from a product or web analytics tool. But do you know why your users are behaving a certain way? Where specifically in your product they're having issues that cause them to churn? Why they aren't converting?

Hotjar helps you answer these questions. Let's show you how: 

Whether you’ve just launched a new product that isn’t selling as much as expected or you’re wanting to sell even more of one that’s already doing great, here’s one thing you should try: survey your customers to get some insight about what’s working and what needs improving.

I don’t mean ‘spend thousands of dollars on customer panels’ or ‘research an industry-defining report on customer expectations’: I mean take 30 literal minutes out of your day to get on a call with an existing customer, or create a quick survey and email it to people who have already bought one (or more) of your products.

In this piece, we take you through 5 of the best questions to ask your customers about the products and services you’re selling. To pick them, I spoke to two business leaders, Brian Dean (founder of Backlinko) and Sarah Doody (author of UX Notebook), who experienced a few snafus in their business and bounced back by reaching out to the only people who could help them figure out what to do: their existing customers.

Working as part of a remote team comes with plenty of upsides.

We Hotjarians get to work from wherever we want, choose our own work schedules, and spend more time with friends and family. But remote work isn't always easy; for example, building a shared and inclusive culture with a distributed team takes a conscious effort.

Language plays a big part of that. Whether we realize it or not, our words can affect the people we care about, including those we work with. With team members from all over the planet, the way we address and talk to each other is important to make everybody feel included.

A few months back, we realized that a four-letter word we used a lot had the potential for making some team members feel excluded from the conversation—and this is the story of how we worked on gender-inclusive language at Hotjar and learned to say 'guys' less. 

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.

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.

A record number of people are leaving their jobs. It’s a phenomenon being called ‘The Great Resignation’, where more workers are planning to leave their jobs than ever before.

Some are pointing to the slow move to flexible or remote working as the main culprit. While on the other hand, some businesses have ignored this entirely and adopted the tactic of moving everyone right back into the office and returning to business as usual. (As a remote business, we don’t comply with this!)

Nevertheless, businesses are currently experiencing an exodus of talent. And on top of that, they’re having just as much trouble filling those empty seats.

Hotjar was always going to be a remote company, long before the coronavirus pandemic. In 2014, when Hotjar began, our three founders all lived in Malta, yet they didn’t know how long they’d be there and where life would take them next.

So, they set out to create a remote company, and what better way to practice than by working from different corners of the island? It could’ve been easy to have a Meetup and work alongside each other, but David, Marc, and Jonathan started as they meant to go on.

Now, a few years and over 100 employees later, and in the spirit of one of our values—build trust with transparency—we’re ready to share some tips with the world. We asked Hotjarians about their experiences of working remotely and we’ve summarized them below.

"Today marks an important milestone in the history of Hotjar. On behalf of the Hotjar co-founders and team we are delighted to announce that Mohannad Ali, our Chief Product and Technology Officer, is taking on the role of CEO."

We’re extremely ambitious - our goal is to have Hotjar installed on 10 million sites. Having such a bold vision whilst taking a freemium approach presents huge technical challenges. How does an engineering team build a platform that can handle hundreds of millions of requests per day, knowing that most of that traffic comes from free users? Early on, we knew the key was to do things differently and focus on building a platform that could scale.

NOTE: This article was originally published in 2018.

Are you using the best tools for your job? It’s a trick question. Because there’s rarely a hands-down best tool for any job. What matters is that you find the ones that work for you and your team. 

As part of a product team, you design and build products that customers love. How do you do that? By putting the customer first, and translating their needs into your product. So you need ways to interact with customers, gather all the research you’ve done, prototype and design solutions, and to keep track of progress along the way.

With 17,385 users in Hotjar and only a small team to build and support the product, as well as run the company – we quickly realized we have to be smart and efficient in the way we communicate with our users. We're also obsessed about delivering great service.

So how do we deliver top-notch service with limited resources? Here is the setup we use:

In June 2016 the Hotjar team flew in from all over the world to spend a week together on the gorgeous island of Malta (click here in case you’re wondering where it is).

Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep! That's the sound of your alarm going off. Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep!

Oh come on, one more minute! I need to sleep a bit more... I really don't want to go to work...

Have you ever felt this way before? Most certainly. There are always days when it's tougher to wake up than others.

Let me ask you another question: have you ever felt like this day after day?

Some Hotjar team members did, for months and even years, because they weren’t in the career of their dreams. The good news is that they managed to turn their careers around thanks to sheer persistence, tough decisions, and individual introspection.

These are their stories.

They say no one steps in the same river twice—just like no user takes the exact same journey on your website twice. But how do you get front-row tickets into that journey? This is where website session recording software comes in. 

Businesses use website recording software to deeply understand how their customers move through and experience their site. But, with so many tools that suit different purposes out there, how do you pick the right software for your business and customer needs?

What does it take to be a great product manager? You’ve got to speak the language, know the territory, and develop the skills. Do you check these boxes?

Best product management books. Great product managers never stop learning. Here are 10 top books on every PMs reading list. 

Do you know the product manager (PM) lingo? Make sure you can talk the product manager talk with these PM acronyms.

Hotjar's Saskia Everard shares her insights.

There’s no clear-cut path to becoming a product manager. In this guide, we share how product managers at Hotjar broke into the field and how you can too.

Being a product manager can feel like being on safari. You’ve planned the route you want to take and you have your backpack full of tools ready—but changing environments and unpredictable creatures can derail your plans at any moment.

Imagine you could sit behind your users looking over their shoulders as they interact with your product. How valuable would that be to your product team?

Well, that’s effectively what session recordings let you do.

The work of a product team never ends. There's no 'completion date' for growing revenue, reducing churn, increasing product usage, improving task completion, lowering the number of support tickets; and the list goes on.

But at the core of it lies the ultimate goal: to improve the user experience and create customer delight.

Let’s take three product teams:

Team A ignores conversion metrics and focuses only on KPIs related to active users (MAU and DAU), retention (CRR), and customer satisfaction (CSAT).

Team B is fixated on product conversion rates, using the numbers as a North Star for understanding features or pages that trigger or block user actions.

Team C pays close attention to conversion rates, but as a springboard for diving deeper, getting inside users’ heads, and understanding why they do or don’t take actions that lead to conversions.

There’s a clear winner here.

You already know it: what’s best for your users is best for your business.

But do you have the information and insights you need to build and create products that your users will love?

You may have important numbers like churn rate, page traffic, and drop-off rate from a product or web analytics tool. But do you know why your users are behaving a certain way? Where specifically in your product they're having issues that cause them to churn? Why they aren't converting?

Hotjar helps you answer these questions. Let's show you how: 

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.

As a product manager, your job is to deliver a product your users love.

It seems simple when put that way, doesn’t it?

When you think of analyzing your ecommerce site, you probably think about ecommerce tracking data like bounce and exit rates, average order value, checkout flow, and conversion rates, and maybe running an SEO audit and/or checking your site against competitors.

“Product managers work with their peers to build products that people love.”

This is a very broad statement. As broad as the role responsibilities itself. And probably why I get so many questions along the lines of ‘So, what does a PM actually do?’

If you want your visitors to keep returning to your website—to increase traffic, improve conversion rates, and ultimately grow revenue—you need to understand what’s happening when they reach your site.

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.

Either as a consumer or an online business owner, you’ve experienced the ecommerce customer journey.

As a consumer, you came, you saw, you purchased.

As an online business owner, you watched prospective customers come, and see, and purchase—or you watched them exit your site, leaving you with burning questions, like:

Why did that customer abandon their shopping cart?

Did this person not find what they were looking for?

What changes do I need to make to my site to increase conversions?

How can I learn from these customers’ actions on my site?

In this piece, we show you a few quick ways to help you find some of the answers. To keep this practical, we’ll use real examples from designer furniture store MADE.com, whose Head of Digital Experience, Spencer Wong, wanted to improve the experience for MADE customers across each stage of their online journey.

If you’ve come here to learn more about Google Analytics heat maps, we have both good and bad news for you.

The bad news: Google stopped supporting its heatmap add-on in 2017, and recent reviews confirm that it doesn’t work anymore for a lot of users.

The good news: there's another way for you to get a free heatmap using Hotjar, and we guarantee it will work.