Figuring out what product improvements will have the biggest bang for your buck can be pretty labor-intensive. Digging into usage stats, bug reports, experiment results, and everything in between takes time, and time is money so you need to move fast đ” đš. To move fast, insights need to be quickly accessible, and our latest improvements to Continuous Heatmaps make finding those nuggets of gold a whole lot easier.
Here are a few of the latest improvements, with lots more coming your way đđ
đĄContinuous Heatmaps are available on Hotjar Plus, Business, and Scale.
With session data continuously flowing into your Heatmaps, you no longer need to set up snapshots and wait to capture data before getting any insights. So to make it easier for you to get started, we added a shortlist of the pages your users visited the most over the past 30 days. The popular pages list makes it much easier to find heatmaps dotted with valuable insights that help you to make your case for product improvements.
When we first launched Continuous Heatmaps, searching for a specific heatmap wasnât smooth sailingâso we dug into your feedback to find a solution that tackled the issues you reported. The new single page search broadens your heatmap search options by showing all activity on a particular page, ignoring URL variations like query strings and fragments.
For example with a single page search for acme.com/products, your results will include:
If you want to analyze the behavior of users who visited a specific URL, you can select the "exact match" checkbox to narrow down the results.
Finding the page you need in Continuous Heatmaps used to mean copying and pasting linksâ or good, old-fashioned guesswork. We know this wasnât an efficient use of your time, so we introduced URL suggestions in Continuous Heatmaps to help you find the page youâre looking for in much less time.
Now, when you select the single page filter and type a keyword into the search bar, a dropdown with some suggested page matches will appearâso you can spend less time searching and more time understanding user behavior. Itâs that easy, take a look:
With Continuous Heatmaps still in Beta, weâre eagerly listening to your feedback so we can iterate on solutions that help you understand how your users behave. Remember, when a feature is in Beta itâs the perfect opportunity for your feedback to be heard and shape the evolution of Continuous Heatmaps đ€.
Continuous Heatmaps are available on Hotjar Plus, Business, and Scale.
Read MoreOrganizing and actioning user insights can be challenging, but connecting the tools you use to optimize user experience makes it much easier. With user insights seamlessly connected to the tools you already use to analyze, prioritize, and collaborate on product decisions, getting buy-in and driving results becomes a breeze.
And thatâs exactly why weâre excited to introduce the new Hotjar and Zapier integration đ„ł
What is Zapier? (Skip ahead if youâre already a Zapier pro!)
Zapier connects Hotjar to the apps you already use like Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Miro, Trello, and thousands more so you can automate workflows and eliminate daily tasks that chew up your time. Itâs simple to use, and you donât need to write a single line of code to integrate with the tools you use every day.
It works by combining triggers like âNew Recordingâ with actions like âCreate new Row in Google Sheetâ to complete an action in one app when a trigger occurs in another. Combinations of triggers and actions are called âĄZaps⥠and these are what automate processes and cut out manual, time-consuming tasks.
The Hotjar and Zapier integration allows you to automatically send new Recordings, Survey Responses, and Incoming Feedback into over 3000 apps.
Letâs take a look at some of the workflows weâve automated here at Hotjar. Remember, these are just a taster, you can connect Hotjar with any other app that has a Zapier integration. Here's how!
Spot trends and uncover new opportunities to improve user experience
Quickly spot patterns or discover new opportunities by connecting data found in Hotjar to tools like Google Sheets, Airtable, or Excel. Use the data to create eye-catching and easy-to-understand visuals like charts, graphs, and maps that impress your most critical stakeholders.
Using simple automation, you can automatically populate a Google Sheet with all recordings that contain rage clicks. As rage click recordings roll in, your Google Sheet will automatically update in real-time so you always have the latest data at your fingertips. Use this information to plot a line graph so you can monitor rage clicks over time, making it easier to spot trends and take action when you see a clear spike in behavior. Learn how to set up this zap.
2. Hotjar âĄïž Zapier âĄïž Miro
The userâs voice should be at the core of product decision-making, but sorting and acting on their feedback can be tricky. Building a seamlessly connected workflow gives you the tools you need to easily collaborate on feedback and use the userâs voice to build solutions that delight.
Using Zapier, you can automatically forward negative Incoming Feedback from Hotjar into a Miro board, and collaboratively map and prioritize user feedback. As feedback is pushed from Hotjar to Miro, new cards will populate on your board in real-time. Set aside an hour each week with your team to keep a pulse on user feedback and sort issues into different product areas. As a team, you can put the user at the center of your decisions when deciding what needs urgent attention, and what can be added to the backlog. Learn how to set up this zap.
Recruiting participants for user interviews can be a pretty painstaking task, but itâs certainly worth it. Effort vs. Impact, đ€· right? By automating part of the recruitment drive, you can win back precious time and focus on what matters the most â learning from your users.
If a user indicates in a Hotjar survey that they're willing to chat, automatically forward their contact information to one central Trello board. As users leave their emails and comments through Incoming Feedback and Surveys, a new card will populate in a column on your "User Interview" board, so you can quickly sort candidates. Drive interviews forward in an organized way by moving candidates along your board and tracking them right the way through to sending their Thank You gift. Learn how to set up this zap.
If youâd be willing to share your zaps and workflows, and be in with a chance of featuring in our Hotjar + Zapier customer success series, please let us know here! And if you make the cut, some Hotjar swag will be sent your way. Head on over to our Zapier directory page to start building your own zaps!
Read MoreWeâve added a brand new way to capture visitor feedback throughout the user journey with the newly launched Full-screen Surveys. Now you can roll out the red carpet for your users and give them a seamless, on-brand experience when gathering their feedback.
Full-screen Surveys open up more opportunities for driving engagement and collecting responses, not only on desktop, but on mobile too. đ± With a bigger pool of feedback, you can validate those niggling assumptions even quicker, and focus on creating a more engaging, goal-orientated user experience.
Letâs take a look!
Mobile users are growing hungrier for a great small-screen experience, and Full-screen Surveys can help you achieve just that. By optimizing your surveys for mobile devices, you can collect even more user feedback to help you prioritize issues, or build a business case for your next initiative.
With Full-screen Surveys, now you can place both surveys and chat widgets on your site at once â so thereâs no more flipping a coin to see which one makes the cut. Full-screen Surveys allow you to collect feedback at any part of the user experience, without preventing them from contacting your team.
Full-screen Surveys are fully customizable so you can add your logo, style it to your brand, and pinpoint exactly where it should appear along the user journey â creating a more consistent on-site experience. Learn more about customizing your surveys.
Developing solutions to the problems your customer hired your product to solve requires continuous discovery. Full-Screen Surveys can help you to collect the answers you need â so you can create value for your customers, and not just churn out features.
Enable Full-screen Surveys at a targeted point in the user journey for a defined set of users to continuously collect feedback on how easily they can achieve their goals. Gather feedback from your users or simply request an interview, so you can translate their comments into enhancements. Close the loop by running experiments on your latest updates that aim to improve user engagement, and delight your customers.
Discover, deliver, optimize, and repeat.
We're exploring lots of improvements to Surveys, and we'd love your input: what would you like to see us add to Surveys? Let us know in this quick survey. Hereâs how you can create a Full-screen Survey.
Read MoreCut through the noise in your recordings with these two new features:
1. Donât waste time on recordings youâve already watched
You know that feeling when youâre watching something on TV and youâre not quite sure if youâve already seen it? Sometimes, when youâre on a roll watching multiple recordings in Hotjar, youâll come across one that feels familiar.
Your recordings list used to be a mix of both recordings youâve already watched and ones you havenât. From now on, weâll default to showing you recordings you havenât watched so you can focus on uncovering brand new insights.
You can toggle this setting on or off at any time. So, if youâre struggling to find an interesting recording you watched recently (or youâre just in the mood for a re-run of the classics), you can focus your search on just the recordings youâve previously seen.
2. Only see recordings of ânewâ or âreturningâ visitors
Segmenting by new or returning users is a classic and powerful way of segmenting users in analytics. Youâve now got a new/returning filter in your Recordings. đ
Hereâs how the new/returning filter works, and a bit of inspiration for how it fits with your other Hotjar filters:
New to Recordings filters? Have a read of our guide on how Hotjar Recordings filters work.
Read MoreIn a product update back in August, we gave some insight into the evolution of Hotjar and how weâre building a sharper set of tools to help you better understand your users. As part of that update, we shared an unprecedented look at our real business data with you: Hotjar Forms accounts for 2% of monthly activity, and Hotjar Funnels accounts for 6%. As a product-led company, weâre facing the music and confronting the fact that these tools donât add significant value to you. So we announced that we would retire Hotjarâs Forms & Funnels in the spirit of doubling down on where we can add value through our flagship tools, and giving us long-needed space to build entirely new tools that better solve the problems you face today.
As of December 14, Forms & Funnels will be retired for all Hotjar users. For those who have been using these tools, this will mean that the tools and the data previously collected in them will no longer be accessible.
But we donât want to leave you hanging, and we absolutely want you to be equipped to create experiences your users love, so we have curated a list of alternative ways to get the insights you might previously have gleaned from Forms & Funnels.
We are so excited about the opportunities that this renewed focus on both sharpening our core tools, and freeing us up to build new ones will bring. We canât wait to bring you even more powerful insights in the future.
As always, you can check out what weâve added recently and what weâre working on here in our public roadmap.
Read MoreExciting changes are coming to the way Hotjar captures data and provides you with user insights. Itâs all kicking off the week of November 30 - just two weeks from now - so read on and take note. đ©đœâđ«
First up - why are we making these changes? In short: to make Hotjar smarter and easier to use. You can see our VP of Product, Megan Murphy, run through it in under 4 mins (in the video below), or dive deeper into the blog post we put out in August.
Now to the questions youâre asking yourself...
If your site is on Hotjar Business, from November 30:
If your site is on Hotjar Plus, from November 30:
If your site is on Hotjar Basic:
Now that youâve got the highlights, letâs look at each of the changes in a little more detail:
Let's face it, starting (and restarting) snapshots in order to generate recordings and heatmaps isn't a natural step in your workflow. It can be confusing. You stop seeing new recordings, you get frustrated when you realize you need to manually restart a recording snapshot to avoid gaps in your data. Weâve learned from your feedback and built a new way of capturing recordings data in Hotjar, automatically and continuously.
Visit our docs to learn how to get started with Continuous Recordings.
Just as in Recordings, Continuous Heatmaps will mean that Hotjar automatically and continuously captures data. With session data consistently flowing into your Heatmaps, you'll be able to analyze user behavior with less hassle and you'll find more opportunity for insight across your entire site. Previously, when you wanted to view a heatmap of a particular page on your site, you had to go into Hotjar, create a snapshot, and wait for the snapshot to capture data before getting any insights. With Continuous Heatmaps, itâs as easy as opening Heatmaps, entering the URL of the page youâre interested in, and hitting âGoâ.
We're still working on making our new Continuous Heatmaps experience top-notch. So while we're busy fine-tuning it with features like better date filters and list views, you can either opt in to the new Continuous version (with a "Beta" label) or stick with the previous âsnapshotâ version of Heatmaps until the new one is up to snuff đ. We'll keep you posted on when that is after the holiday season.
Until now, when youâve come to Hotjar to get to work, youâve had to grapple with understanding how we measure your traffic in pageviews, i.e. an instance of a webpage loading. Hereâs the verdict from across Hotjarâs customer base: you donât tend to think in pageviews. The more common (and complete) measure of your traffic is sessions, i.e. the unique period of time your user is actively interacting with your site. If you count yourself among the folks who have been confused by our pageviews approach - this update will be a welcome change.
Session-based continuous capture is replacing pageview-based snapshots as the core way in which Hotjar captures data. This means that the pageview allowance in our Plus and Business plans will be replaced by a session allowance. For 98% of Hotjar customers, the new way of session-based continuous capture will mean that they will capture more data and generate more insights than ever before.
With data continuously rolling into Hotjar, youâll need a place to manage how you target the visitor sessions you care about most. The place to do that is now in Site Settings. These rules will determine which session data Hotjar captures for both Recordings and Heatmaps. The end result = more consistent data in both tools. đȘ
See our Site Settings & Configuration Guide to learn how to optimize your Hotjar setup to get the data you need.
Weâre really excited about bringing you these changes - to give you a better understanding of your users, to help you build better experiences, and hopefully make your job just a little easier along the way. As always, our support team is here to help if you have any questions.
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