How Gavin increased conversions by 42% with Hotjar

Gavin started Yatter to help marketers improve their Facebook ads. He’s an expert in conversion rate optimization and has helped dozens of companies in a variety of industries grow their business.

Most of Gavin's projects involve using Hotjar. He's been using our tools for years, to gain product experience insights that help him dramatically improve landing pages.

Here, Gavin shares four websites he’s improved using Hotjar. He doesn’t hold back, sharing the all-important details, so read on for tips that you can apply to your site. 

4 significant improvements on 4 very different sites

1. Gavin’s personal site: myfunnelacademy.com

The problem:

Gavin’s site previously sold a membership subscription to his training course. “Previously, I hosted the site on Clickfunnels but eventually made the switch to WordPress for more flexibility,” Gavin told me.

After making the switch, conversions nose-dived, and overnight membership subscriptions went down dramatically. “I had the data telling me something was wrong, but it didn’t tell me why.”

 The solution:

Here’s where Hotjar comes in. “So I started watching Hotjar Recordings of people on the site. There didn’t seem to be a problem on the desktop, but then I loaded up some recordings on a tablet device.”

“Hotjar showed that on the tablet version, the menu bar was 10x larger! It was taking up most of the whole screen, and it had literally zero function!”

Fortunately, Gavin was able to implement a quick fix to solve the problem. The experience taught him a valuable lesson.

2. Ecommerce store for car parts

 The problem:

Gavin helped set up Facebook ads for an ecommerce store that sells car parts. The ads were performing tremendously well, generating a 5x ROI, but Gavin wasn’t sure if the landing page was fully optimized.

The client had no reason to analyze the landing page—after all, the ads were working—but Gavin suspected that something wasn’t right.

He loaded Hotjar Recordings on the page and spotted a problem. “Time after time, visitors would land on the checkout page and click the menu icon. This took them straight out of the checkout flow resulting in fewer purchases.”

 The solution:

This was an easy one. It’s another easy fix, but it had a big impact:

Simply removing the menu icon on the page did the trick. It stopped users from dropping out of the conversion flow and increased sales by 20%.

3. Stem cell therapy website: brainandbodyhealthcenter.com

The problem:

Occasionally, Gavin works on sites that have low volumes of traffic, but seriously high-value visitors.

One client sold stem cell therapy, where the prices start at $7,500 per treatment. Individual customers can end up purchasing plans that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

“On sites like this, I’ll watch every recording of visitors navigating around the page. I’m on the lookout for signs that the page might be underperforming.”

After watching recordings, Gavin noticed that several visitors would diligently read the text describing the therapy but then exit the page.

In Gavin’s eyes, it appeared that the visitors didn’t seem to trust the company enough to go further. So, Gavin got to work, tweaking the page to build trust with visitors.

The solution:

“I had two ideas in mind. The first was case studies. We knew they built trust, so we found the best performing case studies—using Hotjar Heatmaps—and put them to the top of the page.”

“My second thought was that text alone wouldn’t build trust. I wondered if adding a video explaining the process might build trust as well.”

Gavin built these changes into the page and then saw how user behavior changed using Hotjar.

The results speak for themselves. Following the addition of the case studies and videos on the confirmation page, the website's conversion rate went up by 10%.

4. Personal training and nutrition planning: faultlessfitness.com

The problem:

Gavin is well aware that too many options can cause choice paralysis.

Iyengar’s famous study conducted back in 2000 found that supermarket customers were less likely to buy jam when more options were available. It’s a lesson that many marketers learn early on: often more is less, and reducing the number of choices a customer has to make can increase demand.

But choosing what options to highlight isn’t easy.

“I had one client that offered several different options, things like nutritional coaching, personal training, well-being consultation, and a normal gym service. Typically, deciding what to put on top of the page would involve time-consuming customer interviews.”

The solution:

With Hotjar Heatmaps, Gavin could identify the options that visitors were most interested in buying.

“I used Hotjar’s scroll data and click data to find what’s most important.”

“For this client, we found that the vast majority of users picked the structured exercise plan. So, we moved that top of the page, and conversions increased.”

Previously the personal training element was at the top of the page, but switching it out for a structured exercise plan had a dramatic result. The conversion rate jumped from 9.1% to 14% following the change (a 42% increase).

Gavin’s top 3 tips for improving any landing page

1. “Take a look at where people click”

“You’ll always want to see where people are clicking. It’s the easiest way to spot users getting stuck in their journey.”

The first thing Gavin looks at on any landing page is click data. One thing he sees time and time again is visitors clicking on elements that aren’t clickable. “I’ll see users clicking on images that don’t have a link.”

“This disrupts the user journey and can cause bounces, so we’ll add a link on that image to send them to the next step.”

2. “Always check how far they scroll” 

“I’m always asking myself, ‘is there any important data that visitors aren’t seeing?’”

Scroll depth from Hotjar is a crucial feature for Gavin’s analysis: it lets him see how far visitors are scrolling down a page.

“Often, I’ll notice that there’s some important information about money-back guarantees or delivery times placed towards the bottom of the page—we’ll move that up and increase conversions that way.”

But it’s not just ecommerce sites that can be improved this way. Gavin’s seen it with events, too:

“Pre-covid, I worked with a company hosting seminars. They were struggling with sign-ups. Hotjar’s scroll map showed the problem.

The actual date of the seminar was at the bottom of the page. Hotjar showed that very few visitors saw the date, so very few signed up.”

Gavin made a similar improvement to his own website. Back in 2018, his social proof was hidden towards the bottom of the page. Hotjar Heatmaps showed that few visitors scrolled far enough to see this info, so he moved it above the fold.

3. “Don’t touch the site until you’ve watched at least five recordings of users on the page”

 Whenever Gavin logs in to Hotjar, he makes sure he watches at least five different recordings. Sometimes he’ll pick recordings based on their relevance, length, or URL destination, but often he’ll choose them at random.

“I did this a lot when I was selling membership access on my site. By watching random recordings each week, I’d spot little bugs to fix.”

“For example, one week, I found that users were spending far too much time picking their username. I decided to auto-fill the user name box with the user’s email. This way users didn’t need to spend time thinking of a username. It probably only saved 5 or 10 seconds, but it was just another small way of improving the user journey.”

Gavin spends a lot of time thinking of the small ways he can optimize each page, and Hotjar gives him the tools to do that.

“When you’re creating a landing page the number one thing is to test and optimize.

Hotjar allows you to review and optimize the behavior of visitors on your site, down to the granularity of what buttons they click—this makes it so simple for you to make changes. You don’t have to be a data nerd to use Hotjar.”

With Hotjar’s help, Gavin can easily identify what needs improving and what steps to take.

With Hotjar, Gavin has:

• Increased sales by 20% with one tiny tweak

• Spotted a bug that flatlined conversions

• Repositioned content to increase conversions by 42%

• Spotted improvements after watching just five recordings