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How to use website feedback tools for improved UX, conversions, and business growth
If you really want to get inside your website visitors’ heads—to know what they actually think about your site, and how they think it could be better—you’re in the right place.
But we’re not here to give you just another list of tools to choose from because you already know there are plenty of user-friendly website feedback tools out there to help you understand your customers. Their effectiveness comes down to one thing: how will you use them?
We're going to help you figure that out.
Summary
Start making the most out of website feedback tools by familiarizing yourself with the basics:
How to use website feedback to improve UX and increase conversions: unlike traditional analytics, website feedback gives you qualitative insight from real users in their own words, helping you understand how they feel about your site throughout their journey
What you need to know about customer feedback questions: before setting up a feedback tool on your site, it's crucial to identify the types of questions to ask to get the answers you really need
We also look at three popular types of feedback tools:
On-site website feedback survey tools: get feedback from real website visitors in their own words to measure customer satisfaction and uncover website issues
Customer feedback forms and surveys: ask a series of questions to gather detailed insight about users’ impressions of and experience on your site
Website feedback widgets: get in-the-moment feedback with an always-on widget that lets people rate their experience and share their thoughts on specific page elements
And dig deeper into six of our favorites:
Hotjar gives you multiple tools to gather website feedback and get valuable context behind every response.
As an online business, you need people to have a good experience when they visit your site because they expect nothing less. Traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics give you clues about what is or isn't working for your users. You can find out how people arrive at your site, which web pages get the most traffic, and how long they stay before they exit your sales funnel (more on this later).
But most web analytics tools can’t tell you how your visitors are actually experiencing your site, or why they behave the way they do. They also can’t test your website against other factors affecting UX, like
Functionality
Ease of use
This is where website feedback tools come in.
How to use website feedback to improve UX and increase conversions
Website feedback gives you insight from real users in their own words, so you have a better understanding of the customer journey. Depending on when (and how) you ask for feedback, you'll gain insight into how users feel about your site from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave.
Feedback tools help you understand where your users are coming from (i.e. their likes and dislikes, their wants and needs, and why they feel a certain way about your site). Feedback also points to trends in user behavior so you can make well-informed decisions on how to improve the user experience and increase conversions.
📈 How Matalan used feedback tools to improve ROI
Fashion and homeware retailer Matalan required a feedback tool to survey their customers in a non-intrusive way. While undergoing an ecommerce website migration, the Matalan team used the Hotjar Surveys tool to understand customers’ reactions to the changes.
"We didn't really understand exactly why things were happening. So we knew that we needed a tool that would help us understand what our customers think, and understand the why behind everything we do.”
- Karl Rowlands, UX Manager at Matalan
Feedback from customers revealed holes in the checkout process. By combining surveys with insights from other complementary Hotjar tools, like session recordings, the Matalan team resolved a bug that improved checkout conversion by +1.23%.
Asking the right customer feedback questions is key
As you see in Matalan's example above, website feedback tools provide qualitative data based on real customer feedback for a better understanding of the customer journey from their point of view. In other words, it lets you move beyond what users are doing on your site, to why they’re doing it, addressing questions such as
Why does our new landing page have such a high exit rate?
Why are visitors abandoning their shopping carts?
What’s bringing people to my site in the first place?
But like we said, it’s not just about the tools you use—it’s how you use them. In the words of Hotjar’s former Senior Editor, Fio Dossetto:
I really believe that you can have the best tools in the world, but if you’re asking the wrong question you’re always going to get a useless answer. So regardless of the tool, what we need is a good mental framework first.
So before you set up a feedback tool on your site, identify what sort of answers you’re looking for:
Is there a problem you’re trying to solve? Maybe you have a landing page with a high bounce rate and you want to know what’s causing people to exit without taking the next step in your funnel.
Do you need to change something on your site to reach your goals? Maybe you’ve experienced a drop in conversion rates and you want to know what needs to be done to reverse the trend.
Do you have a specific question for your customers? Unless you can read minds, the best way to find out what your customers really need from your site is to ask them directly.
Ecommerce agency Electric Eye has a Hotjar survey on its 'Contact Us' page to ask prospects exactly what prevents them from becoming customers
Once you’ve settled on your goals and identified the questions you need answered, you’re ready to take the next step. 👇
3 types of website feedback tools (and how to use them to improve UX)
Depending on the kind of feedback questions you want to ask, where and how you want to ask them, and what you’re trying to achieve, you can use different tools to gather the insight you need.
Below are three popular website feedback tools and tips on how to use them to improve the user experience (and ultimately increase conversions).
1. On-site website feedback survey tools
On-site survey tools help you understand who your visitors are and what brought them to your website. You can use on-site surveys (also known as on-page surveys, online surveys, or polls) to get feedback from real website visitors in their own words, to measure customer satisfaction, and to find out what (if any) issues users experience on your site.
👍 On-site surveys are best for
Getting quick feedback from website visitors in their own words
Getting visitor feedback on specific pages
Measuring the customer experience with Net Promoter Score® (NPS), customer satisfaction, and customer effort score surveys
👎 On-site surveys aren’t ideal for
Asking a long series of questions
Collecting in-depth answers that require more than a minute of your visitor’s time
🔥 If you’re using Hotjar's on-site surveys: place an on-site survey across your entire site, or trigger it to only pop up on specific pages or after specific actions. For example, you can use on-site surveys on high-exit pages to find out what causes visitors to leave your site, or you can set up an NPS survey to measure customer satisfaction after they convert.
📝 Note: the way you phrase your survey questions will determine the kind of answers you get. One of the first decisions to make is: are you going to ask an open-ended or a closed-ended question? To learn how to ask better questions and get better, more actionable answers, check out these examples of open- and closed-ended questions.
🛫 Using on-site surveys to reach new heights
The team at Ryanair, an Irish airline, uses on-site surveys to understand how customers interact with their website and get feedback on aspects like usability, user satisfaction, and barriers to purchase. Here's their simple, three-step process:
Ask open-ended questions to identify user pain points. When Ryanair first gathered feedback, they didn’t know what their customers’ pain points were—so they asked survey questions to determine how they could improve the user experience.
Ask closed-ended questions to get specific answers. Using a set of multiple-choice questions, Ryanair began running closed-ended polls and NPS surveys for 20% of their visitors at key stages in the buyer’s journey.
Present the data to the stakeholders. The team presented their findings to key stakeholders to show the big picture. They also compiled a report of average monthly NPS scores—listing key factors that played a role in negative ratings—including historical data to show average monthly scores.
"The main stakeholders in our business want to keep track of product performance. We use Hotjar Surveys to see how satisfied our customers are with our products, and we report the larger trends.”
- Rui Pereira, Head of Research and Usability at Ryanair
2. Customer feedback forms and surveys
Some of the best user feedback tools are forms and surveys. These voice-of-the-customer (VoC) tools let you ask a series of questions to gather detailed insight into users’ impressions of and experience on your site.
Because of the nature of this type of survey—you’re able to ask a list of questions that may require more time and space to respond thoughtfully—it can sit permanently on a separate page of your website (commonly known as a feedback page), or you can share an off-site survey link with your users.
👍 Off-site surveys are best for
Reaching targeted customer segments to investigate their experience in detail
Asking a long series of survey questions
Measuring customer satisfaction with an NPS survey
Asking questions that go beyond the website experience alone and extend to the whole customer journey
👎 Off-site surveys aren’t ideal for
Getting quick website feedback with one or two questions
🔥 If you’re using Hotjar Surveys: surveys make it easy to learn what’s important to your users by letting you ask detailed, specific questions (so you get detailed, specific answers). For example, you can email an off-site NPS survey to your customers and ask detailed follow-up questions, giving them a smooth, user-friendly experience—and giving you the opportunity to dig deeper into what they loved (or didn’t love) about their journey through your site.
If your list of questions is getting longer, it’s a good idea to invite your users to an off-site survey. Hotjar Surveys lets you trigger a minimalist invite anywhere on your site in your users’ journey, and it’ll take them to a separate link. This way, you can source user feedback on your site and get their responses on a new screen where more questions and more detailed replies work much better—perfect for market research.
3. Website feedback widgets
Feedback widgets are another easy way to hear from your customers: we like to think of them as the ultimate empathy tool. These widgets appear on websites as an interactive feedback button that lets people rate their experience and give in-the-moment feedback on specific page elements. (See that red tag on the right of this page? That's Feedback!)
👍 Website feedback widgets are best for
Getting targeted visual feedback in the voice of the customer
Identifying UX design problems with elements or features on pages of your website
Narrowing down UX issues and prioritizing what needs to be worked on next
Measuring and comparing trends in what customers like/don’t like
👎 Feedback widgets aren’t ideal for
Asking customers a series of questions about your website
Measuring customer satisfaction with an NPS survey
🔥 If you’re using Hotjar's visual Feedback widget: when users click the Hotjar Feedback button, they can rate their experience and give additional context. Users can also attach a screenshot of the page element they loved (or hated), so you know exactly what works or doesn’t, and what needs to be changed to improve UX.
For example, you could put a Feedback widget on high-exit pages to find out what’s causing people to leave without continuing through your sales funnel. Their feedback might alert you to a broken or missing element, or a confusing design that’s tripping them up and causing them to give up on your site.
💰 Using customer feedback to improve conversions for clients
When eShopWorld's conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts notice a change in conversion for one of their ecommerce clients, they Hotjar's user behavior analytics and feedback tools to evaluate. Here's how:
Study customer insights from Feedback. eShopWorld uses the Feedback widget on their checkout page. Whenever there’s a sudden fluctuation in conversion, they look at feedback data first.
Look at data from Google Analytics and Hotjar Recordings. If the team sees a trend of comments from users highlighting an issue, they use Google Analytics and Hotjar's session recordings (video-like replays of real users navigating their site) to dig deeper.
Analyze heatmaps and make changes to the site. The Hotjar Heatmaps tool gives the eShopWorld team an aggregated, visual view of customer behavior at checkout, helping the CRO team articulate any changes submitted to the Product team for testing.
Return to heatmaps to see whether the changes worked. The final step is to see the effect of the changes made, so eShopWorld looks at the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures that heatmaps paint. If their changes don’t have the intended effect, they investigate further.
"We love Hotjar Feedback because it gives us instant feedback from our clients' shoppers. It doesn’t interrupt the checkout flow, and allows us to fully understand the experience in real-time."
- Noelle Smith, Conversion Analyst at eShopWorld
Heatmaps show you how far users scroll and what they click the most
It’s clear that website feedback is an important part of creating a better user experience and boosting conversion rates. But if you’re not using feedback tools strategically—if you’re not asking the right questions, at the right time, in the right way—you’re missing a huge opportunity to understand what’s really important to your customers, which is key to understanding how to give them what they need.
6 website feedback tools to improve customer experience on your site
Website feedback tools give you a deeper understanding of what users love about your site—and what they’d like you to improve. These quality insights help you create better experiences for your customers and empathize with their frustration and needs.
Here are six website feedback tools and how to use them, so you can find the perfect fit for your business and the people who matter most: your users.
1. Hotjar: for the complete package of website feedback tools
Hotjar (hi there! 👋) is a digital experience insights platform that helps you empathize with your users, understand their behavior, and bring the voice of the customer into your decision-making.
You know what users do on your site. But do you know why? With the combined power of Hotjar's intuitive tools and features, you'll find out.
Our suite of website feedback tools is a user-friendly, visual approach to discovering, consolidating, and communicating user needs. Using them together is the ideal way to collect feedback with context and use it to make data-based decisions for website updates, designs, and A/B testing.
Hotjar Surveys: when you want to learn about your website users
If you have specific questions for your users about their interactions with your site, there’s no easier way to collect website feedback than a survey. This tool takes the guesswork out of your website decisions, by helping you narrow down your hypotheses about user behavior.
Plus, creating a survey is easier than ever with Hotjar AI for Surveys. Our AI-powered feature streamlines your customer research process by generating questions based on your unique goal, and even creates an actionable report from your results.
Use Surveys to
Understand who your visitors are and what drove them to your site
Measure customer satisfaction
See how easy or difficult it was for them to complete an action
❓ Did you know? Hotjar lets you embed a survey on any content page. Scroll to the bottom of this page to see what it looks like in action.
Hotjar Feedback: when you need in-the-moment feedback
A website feedback widget acts like a real-time suggestion box on your site: when people click it, they can rate their experience and give additional context. With the Hotjar Feedback tool, users can even attach a screenshot of the page element they loved or hated.
Use Feedback to
Collect insights while customers use your website, instead of days or weeks later
Have users rate their experience and get additional feedback about a particular page
Allow users to share their thoughts and opinions and attach screenshots
💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar's user feedback tools along with other behavior analytics tools available in the suite for all the context you need to put yourself in your users' shoes. When a user leaves feedback in a recorded session captured by Hotjar Recordings, you can quickly view all responses for that page to see if others have similar thoughts. See exactly what an individual user did before (and after) sharing their feedback to truly experience your website through their eyes.
Simply click the play icon to view a recording of the user who left feedback
And when you observe any interesting or unusual behaviors, you can ask your visitors and customers for direct feedback and learn why they behave the way they do to make changes that truly matter to your bottom line.
Bonus website feedback tool: Hotjar Engage
Hotjar Engage is a user interviews tool that gives you an extra serving of empathy for your website users through 1:1 interviews. Use it to easily schedule, run, record, and share interviews, and focus on what matters the most—connecting with users.
Use Interviews to
Quickly recruit the right users and get interviews scheduled with minimum fuss
Host moderated user interviews with your product or design team
Focus on spotting key insights while Engage seamlessly hosts, records, and transcribes your calls
2. Typeform: for inquisitive feedback surveys
Typeform is a survey tool that uses a small feedback widget to help you uncover opportunities and figure out what’s working—or not working—on your website.
With Typeform, you can create, integrate, and share text forms into surveys, quizzes, or even polls. The platform uses a conversational tone that adds to the user experience and helps you collect feedback easily. Some of its best features include data analysis, third-party integrations, question branching, skip logic, and mobile surveys.
Use Typeform to
Design conversational surveys to ask new users one question at a time
Easily identify purchase behavior by collecting the demographics of your customers
Filter out irrelevant questions and build personalized user flows for better onboarding
3. Userback: for revealing visual feedback
Userback is a visual feedback tool that uses a browser extension to make collecting website feedback quick and easy.
Visitors can report bugs with annotated screenshots, pinned comments, screen recordings, and even by drawing on the screen. This is a great tool for product managers, software developers, and customer support reps.
Leverage Userback to
Report visual feedback on your website with a website browser extension
Capture complex feedback from interested and engaged users
Push feedback into your favorite tools, like Trello, Jira, and more
4. Crazy Egg: for heatmaps and analytics
Crazy Egg is a well-established website analytics platform, with powerful tools for collecting, managing, and analyzing heatmaps and recordings.
Both Hotjar and Crazy Egg help you better investigate what traditional analytics alone won’t tell you about your users, but there are some key differences between Hotjar vs. Crazy Egg.
Use Crazy Egg to
Identify your best features and the effectiveness of your navigation
Generate data-intensive maps and reports for a treasure trove of customer insights
Track specific users and how long they spend on certain page elements
5. UserEcho: for generous community feedback
UserEcho provides customer support solutions to help you communicate effectively and resolve customer needs.
As a website feedback tool, its efficacy lies in grabbing direct customer feedback and reviews for quality maintenance and upgrades by letting customers participate in ongoing forum discussions, review products and services via educational posts, and instantly contact your support team via live chat.
Engage UserEcho to
Let users post and upvote new ideas, feedback, suggestions, and features on the feedback portal
Manage customer tickets and feedback from apps, social media, websites, and emails
Send customer satisfaction surveys after the issues are resolved
6. Trustpilot: for insightful customer reviews
Trustpilot is a direct feedback tool that also offers solutions for companies to collect feedback and showcase it on their website—increasing user trust and boosting sales.
This type of website feedback tool allows you to collect authentic customer reviews and make the most out of them. By reading customer reviews, you can understand their expectations and align your strategy to help improve conversion rates.
Use Trustpilot to
Automatically invite customers to review your product, service, or business
Collect feedback in the form of customer reviews and showcase it as social proof
Integrate and collect feedback from third-party sources like Zendesk, Shopify, and WooCommerce
The secret to business growth lies with your users
As we've shown, deeper empathy and understanding start with listening to your users, and proactively gathering website feedback is a simple yet highly impactful way to get qualitative insights that foster customer-centric growth for your business. There's no reason to hold off another minute, so choose a tool and start getting right to the bottom of your user experience.
Connect the dots between website feedback and action
It only takes a few minutes to start collecting website feedback with Hotjar and see how real users experience and engage with your site.
FAQ
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