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How product teams can instantly streamline their workflow with Hotjar’s integrations

As a product manager or member of a product team, you’re responsible for making data-driven decisions that shape the future of your product. But with insights coming from dozens of sources, how do you find the time to sift through them? And how do you home in on the most important data to ensure you don’t miss anything crucial?

Last updated

18 Aug 2022

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11 min

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Product Manager Time Management: Streamline Your Workflow

Here at Hotjar, our product team is perfecting our platform for people just like us: other product teams! So we’ve come up with several smart ways to improve our own Hotjar experience and make our lives a little easier. 

Read on to find out how we use integrations to streamline our workflow—and how Hotjar can help you do the same.

Cut out hours of admin

Hotjar’s integrations help save product teams precious time by automating everyday tasks.

Why time management is vital for product managers and their teams

For product teams, understanding customer experiences and needs is a top priority. But with most teams using dozens of tools—Slack, email, Asana, Jira, Zoom, Miro, and beyond—product managers have data coming from every direction.

This often results in a slow, disconnected workflow when it comes to reviewing data. 

For example:

  • You don’t find out about bugs in your app user experience (UX) until you review session recordings from users who churned

  • You can’t fully understand your A/B testing results until you review your heatmaps

  • A user leaves negative feedback about your website’s UX in a feedback tool, but your UX colleagues don’t see it until they log in to the tool

And that’s just the beginning. 

Without a way to streamline workflows, product managers waste countless hours sifting through thousands of pieces of data. And when product teams are too distracted, they could even let bugs or bad user experiences slip by unresolved.

How integrations help you find the right insights faster

Here at Hotjar, we’re big fans of using integrations to automate our research workflows. Because we have a large product team, we’ve had to learn a thing or two about sharing and reacting to data in a streamlined, organized way.

To help you do the same, we've integrated Hotjar with some of the most popular product tools available. These integrations give you new ways to sync your data sources—and get the insights you need in a flash.

Simplify your tech stack and manage your time more effectively through some of Hotjar’s most popular integrations for product teams.

1. Share the right data with Slack

Slack is a popular messaging app that lets you hold group discussions in dedicated channels for your team. The app also enables you to share files and engage in 1-on-1 chats, making it a practical tool for collaboration. 

hotjar slack integration

With our Slack integration, you get the most up-to-date and relevant insights from Hotjar sent straight to your channel. Receive notifications about feedback, recordings, and survey results as the data comes in to discover and resolve critical issues quickly. 

Hotjar’s Slack integration helps your product team:

  • React to feedback faster. When a user leaves feedback on your website with the Hotjar Feedback widget, it’s automatically forwarded to your chosen Slack channel. Your team can instantly assess any urgent issues and decide what to do next. 👏

  • Share segment-specific recordings. To easily assess new changes to your site or app, get Hotjar recordings sent directly to a Slack channel. You can tell Hotjar only to forward recordings from a specific segment—for example, visitors who exited without completing a payment. 

  • Receive on-site survey responses. Hotjar also forwards responses from your on-site surveys directly to your Slack channels. With your whole team able to see and discuss the latest feedback, you can quickly work together to make improvements and solve issues.

Hussle, Hotjar, and Slack: a true story of fast problem-solving

Hussle is an online marketplace for gyms and spas. The company’s Product Lead, Luke, uses Hotjar Recordings and Heatmaps to see how customers are experiencing the Hussle site.

With Hotjar’s Slack integration, Luke sends every recording containing a rage click straight to a specific Hussle Slack channel, which Luke calls “a folder of absolute pain.”

hotjar-hussle

Next, Hussle’s Customer Experience Manager watches these rage click recordings. She quickly determines whether a problem is affecting all users by reviewing support tickets and analyzing heatmaps to see an aggregate of where users click, scroll, and move.

If the problem is affecting all users, she lets Luke know, and he puts it on a Monday board to deal with the following day.

“I have no idea how many hours we saved or how many users we’ve helped as a result, but we couldn’t spot these issues without Hotjar.”

2. Automate (almost) anything with Zapier

Zapier is a platform helping organizations automate their digital processes. It connects and syncs different software programs—i.e., ones that don’t normally work together—so they perform pre-set workflows after a “trigger” event.

Because Hotjar integrates with Zapier, you can use Hotjar to “trigger” automations with 3,000+ different web apps. 😎

For example:

  • Hotjar + Google Sheets: Automatically add a new row in a Google sheet when a new Hotjar recording contains rage clicks. Use the data to plot a line graph and monitor rage clicks over time, making it easier to spot trends that could indicate a bug.

  • Hotjar + Miro: When a user leaves negative feedback about your website using the incoming feedback widget, automatically send the comment to your Miro board. Your teams can then see the latest visitor comments in Miro and collaborate on improvements.

  • Hotjar + Trello: Make user interview recruitment a painless process. If a user indicates in a Hotjar survey that they're willing to chat, automatically forward their contact information to a central Trello board.

3. Dig deeper into test results with Google Optimize

Google Optimize is a website conversion optimization tool. Ideal for sites with high traffic, it allows you to test different combinations of content on your site and see which one performs best.

As well as helping product marketers improve conversions, Google Optimize gives product teams insights on which designs their audience segments prefer.

How does Google Optimize integrate with Hotjar?

When you’re running an experiment with Google Optimize, the tool gives you raw numbers about how the pages are performing. However, it won’t tell you why one page performs better than another.

Using Hotjar’s integration with Google Optimize gives you a fuller picture of what’s happening. Set up an experiment in Google Optimize, and Hotjar will automatically “mark” recordings that correspond to the pages you’re testing.

Then, watch these recordings to see how users interacted with the pages you’re interested in. It’s a great way to learn which changes in your content made an impact.

4. Maximize conversions with Optimizely

Optimizely is another website conversion rate optimization (CRO) tool, also made by Google. A more sophisticated and flexible tool than Google Optimize, Optimizely enables you to run a wide range of conversion experiments on your website.

As with Google Optimize, Hotjar’s integration with Optimizely lets you link recordings to experiments you’re running. Whenever a visitor lands on a page you’re testing, Hotjar will “mark” the recording of their journey with the ID of the experiment.

When it’s time to analyze your experiment results, simply filter your recordings to see the ones that are relevant to your experiment. 

Watching these recordings later gives you several helpful insights. For example:

  • If one page performed better than another, recordings may help you understand why. Was there a bug on a page? Did visitors get lost anywhere?

  • If there was no clear winner in conversions, recordings still reveal smaller wins. For example, they might show you if users interacted with new forms and buttons more, even when they didn’t ultimately convert.

5. Get a holistic view of your customers with Segment

Segment is a customer data platform that records how your users behave across multiple channels and platforms. It lets you pull all your customer data together, giving you a holistic view of users and visitors.

Segment can be extremely helpful if your product team uses a range of analytics tools that don’t sync with one another. It gets everyone using a single, consistent data source to make informed decisions when building your product.

What you can do with Hotjar and Segment:

Hotjar’s integration with Segment enables you to run Hotjar alongside other analytical tools, like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Google Analytics. The result? Better insights about your users and the ability to create personalized marketing campaigns. 

What’s more, Segment helps you:

  • Debug website issues faster. Picture this: a user comes across something on your site that’s not working, and they report it via your chat app. Because both Hotjar and the chat app are connected to Segment, your team finds the recording of that user’s session—fast. From there, your team identifies and solves the website issue in record time.

  • Discover how to increase spending from your users. Thanks to User Attributes, Hotjar recognizes repeat visitors from specific segments. This can include customers with a lower-than-average customer lifetime value (CLTV). 

Set Hotjar to send these users a custom survey so you learn how to appeal to them more using personalized marketing campaigns. With the Segment integration, other tools you’re using will recognize the audience segment you create in Hotjar.

6. Build and optimize your entire user journey with ClickFunnels

Clickfunnels is an all-in-one marketing funnel builder. It allows businesses to build landing pages, sales pages, email automations, and more, creating an end-to-end journey for their customers.

Because ClickFunnels provides a fast and flexible way to create funnels, it’s the perfect tool for testing out marketing strategies. Its drag-and-drop editor enables teams to A/B test new versions of pages when optimizing their funnels.

How Hotjar works with ClickFunnels

Our ClickFunnels integration makes it super simple to add Hotjar to your funnel and start using Recordings, Heatmaps, Surveys, and Feedback. 

Combined with the A/B testing and built-in reporting capabilities of ClickFunnels, Hotjar becomes an even more powerful way to get insights about your customers. For example, product marketers might use this integration to:

  • Analyze A/B test results. When you’re unsure why one variant performed better or worse, take a look at your recordings and heatmaps. You’ll see where visitors get lost, which content they focus on, and what elements they click on. 

  • Find out why visitors aren’t buying. Are visitors getting close to the sale but leaving before they complete the purchase? Set up an exit-intent survey on your checkout page and ask what’s stopping them from buying.

7. Set up Hotjar easily with Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager allows organizations to manage “tags” inside their websites—in other words, the codes that allow digital marketing applications to work. 

In the past, organizations had to manually hard-code these tags into their websites. Now, with Google Tag Manager, they simply add one master tag and then manage the rest of their tags from an intuitive dashboard.

This convenient system opens up the door for product-adjacent marketers to use the latest analytics and marketing tools—like Hotjar!

How does Hotjar integrate with Google Tag Manager?

The Google Tag Manager integration lets you easily set up Hotjar on your website without manual coding. Add the Hotjar “tag” to any page on your website to start using Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, and Feedback.

Looking for other ways to set up Hotjar?

Google Tag Manager isn’t the only integration that helps you set up Hotjar easily. Try our Shopify and WordPress integrations to add Hotjar to your tech stack in minutes.

Improve your product experience

Integrate Hotjar with thousands of platforms made for product teams, and put your customers at the center of every decision.

How Hotjar uses integrations to streamline our workflow

Having a huge product team here at Hotjar, we rely on our integrations heavily for effective product management time management. They help us get the right data into Hotjar and also extract thousands of pieces of data from Hotjar in a simple, practical way.

Streamlining these processes helps support our culture of continuous discovery and improvement. But what does this actually look like for the Hotjar team?

Using Hotjar data to understand our customers

Our users are front and center of everything we do here at Hotjar. So, to ensure we’re meeting their needs, we use surveys and feedback to gauge how users feel about our tools and features.

hotjar survey

To see the big picture of our data, we feed our user feedback into Mixpanel through Hotjar’s integration with Zapier. This allows us to create a helpful visualization of one of our most important metrics: customer happiness.

hotjar-mixpanel integration

Hotjar’s integrations also help us send user feedback to the right teams. For instance, feedback allows users to comment on specific things they dislike on our website and app. When a user leaves negative feedback, Hotjar’s integration with Zapier automatically sends the feedback to Miro.

With all of our negative feedback in one place, our UX team then easily groups the comments into themes to prioritize changes and address the most pressing issues affecting our user experience.

Using Hotjar to evaluate and optimize our website experience

To help give users an excellent experience across our site and app, we run conversion experiments with Optimizely. Through Hotjar’s integration with Optimizely, we A/B test new variants of content and then use recordings and heatmaps to better understand the results.

We recently used this process to optimize our new pricing page: announcing a change in pricing was a big step for Hotjar, so we wanted to give visitors a smooth journey on our pricing page.

hotjar updated pricing

After launching the new page, we used heatmaps to ensure the elements we included on the page would be discoverable enough and to assess the scroll depth of the page. We also checked recordings to discover whether users were having a positive experience overall.

Because Hotjar gets a lot of traffic, we have mountains of recording and heatmap data to sort through. The integration with Optimizely allowed us to immediately filter the recordings and heatmaps that were related to our experiment, ultimately speeding up our evaluation workflow.

By analyzing how users explored the new page, we could identify bugs and opportunities for improvement. The combination of Optimizely and Hotjar made it painless to tweak our site for the people that matter most—our visitors and users.

Discover how Hotjar integrations can streamline your product workflow

Product manager time management doesn't have to be complicated. Hotjar is designed to help product teams make data-driven decisions in less time. With handy integrations that connect your teams and tools, you can build your product around up-to-date, relevant insights. Get started for free to see for yourself how Hotjar integrations speed up and streamline your research workflow.

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