Back to guides

Combining recordings with other tools for more insight

With session recordings, you don’t need to guess what people are doing on your website: you can actually watch how they browse, interact with, and move across pages, so you can empathize with their journey and spot any issues they encounter—which in turn gives you valuable data to change and fix their user experience.

Better yet: by combining Recordings with other software and tools, you can unlock even more valuable insights to improve your site’s UX and increase conversions.

Last updated

19 Sep 2023

Reading time

3 min

Share

Recordings + traditional analytics

Traditional web analytics tools (think Google Analytics) give you plenty of quantitative data points about large-scale traffic and usage patterns. You can certainly make educated guesses about what’s happening based on numbers and charts—but you’re still missing some crucial context behind them both.  

For example: what do you do after your analytics tools reveal that you have a page with lots of traffic but very few conversions? It’s a great starting point, but this doesn’t tell you why all this traffic fails to convert.

Recordings provide the qualitative insights that traditional analytics software lack. Session replays add depth to the what that tools like Google Analytics provide, by answering why you’re seeing those numbers.

To get back to our example, as a first step, you can find a list of relevant recordings, review 10–20 of them, and start observing what people actually do on the page.

Pro tip: use filters to easily find these relevant session recordings. Filter by “Viewed page” to only show recordings of users who visited the page that recorded a lot of traffic, then further narrow the results down by adding a “Clicked element” filter with the “did not occur” event to identify recordings of users who visited the page but did not convert.

The best part? This is just one way to combine Hotjar with Google Analytics.

Recordings + A/B testing

Recordings and A/B testing are very closely linked: you can use insight that you get from recordings to define test hypotheses, and you can also watch recordings of A/B test page variations to understand what is making a page more successful than the other.

If you're running experiments using Google Optimize, Hotjar has an integration with Optimize that makes this a breeze: simply filter your Hotjar recordings by your Optimize experiment IDs, pick the variant(s) you want to see recordings from, and get busy analyzing.

Recordings + heatmaps

Session recordings are generated for individual users and show you their actions across multiple pages, while heatmaps help you visualize data from page visitors in aggregate.

When you're interested in a specific page, heatmaps (including click maps, scroll maps, and move maps) can give extra clarity to the insights you pick up from a set of recordings. 

For example: if you notice the same behavior across 5 or 10 recordings (for example, users ignoring a CTA button), you might be tempted to generalize and think that everybody visiting the page behaves in the same way. A heatmap will easily help you prove or disprove the assumption.

Recordings + on-page feedback

#A Hotjar churn survey
A Hotjar churn survey

Quantitative (numerical) data is fundamental to making data-informed UX decisions, but qualitative (non-numerical) data is similarly crucial.

After you observe interesting and/or unusual behaviors in your session recordings, you can ask your visitors and customers for direct feedback and learn why they behave the way they do (for example, why they are about to abandon your site). Even a one-question survey can give you powerful insight and lead to business-changing transformation.

Pro tip: check out our survey templates to get feedback from your users in just a few minutes!

Recordings + Funnels

Funnels let you visualize the conversion steps in your product to easily identify where users are getting stuck. Build a funnel of up to six steps, measure conversion rates, and identify improvement opportunities.

Combine Recordings with Hotjar Funnels to watch sessions of users leaving at a specific stage of the funnel. Detected an unusual drop-off rate? Simply click the button next to the number of users who did not convert to see what really prevents your users from converting.

Pro tip

Check out our recordings case study chapter to read success stories from marketers, UX designers, and product & e-commerce managers who used recordings in combination with other tools to improve their sites.

Improve UX with session recordings

Sign up for Hotjar and start building better user experiences today!