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How to use Hotjar to improve alignment across your entire team

Gone are the days of scrolling through endless lists of user data, all while navigating frantically between analytics platforms to make sense of the information you’re looking at, not to mention worrying about how to communicate findings to your team.

Whether you’re A/B testing new designs or researching areas to improve the user experience, Hotjar enables you and your team to understand and adapt to your users’ evolving needs by connecting product metrics to qualitative insights on a single platform.

Last updated

29 Jan 2024

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5 min

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Summary

With Hotjar’s team-focused tools, features, and integrations, you can effortlessly share insights, get a second (or third) set of eyes on interesting user behaviors, and deliver user-led improvements that really move the needle. We go through some common use cases that highlight how Hotjar sets your team up for success, with virtually no set-up required:

  • Marketing teams: assess campaigns and optimize your landing pages 

  • Product teams: ensure your checkout flow runs smoothly for your users

  • UX teams: discover any blocks in the customer journey and A/B test your changes 

Furthermore, a single Hotjar account has no user limit—all of our plans, including our Basic free forever plan, accommodate unlimited team members. 

Hotjar for marketing teams 

Let’s say you’re on the marketing team for an ecommerce site and you want to evaluate the performance of a recent sales campaign. Your goal is to assess the campaign’s main landing page and identify how it performed, what customers thought about it, and which areas to improve for future campaigns.

To start, you could use a traditional analytics tool like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track traffic data, click-through rate, and exits. But these numbers will only get you so far when it comes to optimizing your landing page, and they require some technical expertise to interpret. 

Use Hotjar’s user behavior tools to get a more well-rounded, visual view of web performance and what users are doing and saying, in one place. (This doesn’t mean you need to abandon GA entirely—simply combine its capabilities with Hotjar insights using our GA integration.)

After getting an overview of drop-offs and other conversion metrics with the Hotjar Funnels tool, tab over to Heatmaps to see where people click, scroll, and move on your landing page. You might discover that a key element on your landing page has low engagement or is broken for certain users (a rage click heatmap is great for that). 

#Each type of heatmap gives you different insights into how users behave, including which areas they engage with the most
Each type of heatmap gives you different insights into how users behave, including which areas they engage with the most

💡 Pro tip: as a marketer, you might not be able to solve the issue on your own, but in just a few clicks you can save a heatmap highlight of the problematic page and share it with your UX or devs team—the solution could be as simple as repositioning your call-to-action button above the average fold so people don’t have to scroll down the page to see it.

This enables your team to make important marketing decisions based on visual user data that anyone in your company can understand and work with.

Save and share relevant user insights with Highlights in Hotjar

Hotjar for product teams

Hotjar is designed to help product teams reinforce a customer-centric attitude across the board: the strength of our tools lies in their ability to capture user data visually, in ways that anyone in any company role can understand. 

For example, if you’re a product manager (PM) working at a SaaS (software as a service) company, you need to evaluate how your subscription checkout flow functions, so you can increase conversion rates.

As with our marketing team example, heatmaps are a great place to start when assessing how users behave during a checkout flow. To gain an even deeper understanding, zoom in on individual user sessions with Hotjar Recordings, which captures the entire user journey, from the moment people land on your site to the point of purchase, so you can identify any pain points or u-turns along the checkout flow.

#Hotjar Recordings captures impactful visual evidence that shows what is and isn’t working for your users
Hotjar Recordings captures impactful visual evidence that shows what is and isn’t working for your users

You can then catalog the evidence that backs up your findings by saving snippets to a collection using Highlights, which helps you prioritize fixes based on prevalence and align them with your product roadmap. 

Hotjar also makes it easy to alert your team to time-sensitive issues affecting your checkout flow: we have a built-in console tracking feature that lets you monitor and filter for Javascript errors. You can then create an issue ticket directly in Hotjar and send it to your developers with our Jira integration

#Creating a Jira issue when console tracking in Hotjar Recordings
Creating a Jira issue when console tracking in Hotjar Recordings

We really love Hotjar. I share all the insights I find with the team. We get the customer success manager to watch recordings, the UX person to watch recordings. Even devs watch recordings. It’s a team effort. It’s democratic learning. 

If you don’t spot any errors or red flags while watching session recordings, try placing a Feedback widget on your website. This gives users the opportunity to react with an emoji, leave a comment, and even highlight specific elements on your pages. 

And you can easily loop in the entire team by forwarding feedback to tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Trello. Get your team in the habit of monitoring incoming feedback to keep a customer-focused mindset and immediately start brainstorming ways to optimize your checkout flow.

Communicate and collaborate with your team directly in Hotjar, and make quick decisions on what user-led product updates to prioritize next. 

Hotjar for UX teams

User experience teams can find many uses for Hotjar, too. For example, if you’re a UX designer working for a mid-sized online travel organization, you need to create a seamless customer journey for your users—from beginning to end and all the granular interactions in between.

Hotjar's tools give you high-level site performance metrics and knowledge of small-scale user behaviors and sentiments to validate and get buy-in for your ideas.

For example, Hotjar Trends lets you use filters, events, and user attributes to create custom metrics, so you can uncover pages that have the most issues (e.g. rage clicks or errors) and monitor your site’s performance over time. Then, zoom in on those metrics to reveal the ‘why’ behind the numbers by going to relevant session recordings and heatmaps directly from your charts.

#Use Hotjar Trends to identify user behavior patterns and access visual evidence to back up insights
Use Hotjar Trends to identify user behavior patterns and access visual evidence to back up insights

Once you identify where users lose focus or become frustrated, work with your team to A/B test more effective designs. For example, your marketing team might want to experiment with different sales funnels for travel bundles to see how new variants perform for certain customer groups. 

After spotting correlations in user data and sharing findings with your wider team, use Hotjar Surveys to dig deeper into why users exhibit certain behaviors. 

With our pre-built survey templates and AI-powered survey generator, easily create a survey centered around a specific goal in a matter of seconds, embed it anywhere on your site, then sit back as AI auto-generates a report summarizing key findings, quotes, and suggested next steps.

Fast-tracking your UX research with Hotjar AI saves you hours of manual work, so you can focus on aligning with your team on solutions

📊A dashboard for every occasion

Hotjar’s user behavior tools—Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, Feedback, and Engage—bring a wealth of information individually. Together, they reveal precisely what your customers are thinking and doing. 

And with Hotjar Dashboards, your whole team can access and share insights gathered from each tool, all in one place. All Hotjar users, regardless of plan, can create unlimited dashboards to fit their needs, from marketing teams looking to optimize conversion rates to product teams monitoring the adoption of a new feature.

#Use Dashboards to monitor the performance of your site’s homepage, measure feature adoption, and keep track of issues on key pages of your sign-up flow
Use Dashboards to monitor the performance of your site’s homepage, measure feature adoption, and keep track of issues on key pages of your sign-up flow

Make Hotjar a group activity

With team-friendly features and multiple ways to alert collaborators to new information on all our plans, Hotjar ensures your entire team is aligned on the most important matters. 

Consider the suite a communal space to gather with teammates and check the pulse of your customers, together. Get the whole gang on the same page and inspire one another with countless new ideas to improve your product and grow your business.

Align your team with Hotjar

Communicate and collaborate with your team directly in Hotjar, and make quick decisions on what user-led product updates to prioritize next.