Emma Ross, Product Marketer at Hotjar
Experienced Product Marketer with over 5 years in the world of SaaS. I love bringing new products to market through adoption-focused campaigns and working cross functionally with Product, Design, Sales, Success and Support teams.
About Hotjar
Your users are more than a dot on a chart. Hotjar helps you surface rich, actionable insights with less effort to deliver better experiences that drive results. Observe how users behave, ask how they feel, and engage 1:1, all from one powerful and intuitive platform. Join the 3.5 million people who already delight their users and convert more customers with Hotjar.
Table of Contents
What Are Session Recordings and How Are They Beneficial?
Who Can Benefit from Hotjar Session Recordings?
What’s the Setup Process?
Why Are Session Recordings Not More Popular?
HubSpot, Session Recordings and Stacks
The Future of Hotjar
Emma, we just caught up about a feature I’m excited about for our clients who use HubSpot, and we’ll talk about that.
But we also shared a laugh about how many “in-the-know” marketers’ minds are blown when our sales funnel audit surfaces the fact that they don’t use session recordings or “website DVR” as we call it at SFP as part of analyzing their customers’ journeys at all, and that capability has been around for a minute or two.
We’re also looking forward to hearing what Hotjar has around the corner to make marketing teams even more effective and helping potential customers discover the value in their firms faster.
So let’s get to the good stuff…
What Are Session Recordings and How Are They Beneficial?
Q: One of our consultants passed on being the first sales dude at Atlanta’s Fullstory (a session recording competitor) way back in 2015. And here we are in 2023 and somehow that capability continues to fly under the radar. For our readers that have never heard of watching session recordings, can you tell us what they are and how they’re beneficial?
A: Session recordings allow you to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You can watch their full journey as they navigate through your site or product. That may sound a bit creepy, but any session recording tool worth its salt is GDPR compliant and makes data security and privacy a top priority from the get-go. Meaning we won’t record any sensitive personal information, and if your users say they don’t want to be tracked, Hotjar won’t track them.
I’d break down the benefits of session recordings into three main categories:
- Find bugs – you will see when things don’t work and what caused it
- Discover opportunities – you can spot friction points, slowing your conversions
- Get buy-in – Sometimes, justifying changes can be tricky; with session recordings, you get a source of real-world evidence to back up your hypothesis
Q: What types of marketing roles or titles should be lusting for access to session recordings?
A: Really, session recordings have an impact across the Marketing team. From Content Marketing checking flows from blogs to resources, to PPC/Paid Ads professionals spotting problems on landing pages, to Product Marketing optimizing the pricing page.
Who Can Benefit from Hotjar Session Recordings?
Q: Using a SaaS company as an example, what other teams (beyond Marketing) can benefit from session recordings?
A: Session recordings are hugely beneficial to product teams. All members, from Product Managers, to Designers, Researchers, and Engineers, will find actionable insights in session recordings. They can really understand how users experience their product, spot opportunities to optimize the journey, identify where users are getting frustrated with their UX, and even get buy-in on their ideas for fixes and improvements.
Professor’s Note:
An expert in upskilling professionals in product owner jobs, please see Jackie Flake’s comments on how agile methodology, PLG, and good product management play into sales funnels.
What’s the Setup Process?
Q: For someone who wants to implement Hotjar’s technology, what’s the setup process?
A: Setting up Hotjar is simple! All you need to do is go to hotjar.com and sign-up for a free trial. Then, to start capturing session recordings, you’ll need to add a snippet of code to your site. We have lots of guides to show you how.
Q: While certainly not the only website analytics platform, Google’s Universal Analytics (UA) became almost ubiquitous before it was sunsetted this year (in favor of its far-less-talented, nepo-baby successor: GA4). What can be accomplished with Hotjar that UA or now GA4 can’t?
Professor’s Note:
Inserting code snippets is usually accomplished either by creating a new tag in Google Tag Manager (or a competing product) or pasting it into the “scripts” module in WordPress or other content management systems.
A: Hotjar is built to give added depth to the insights you get from GA4: using them together, you can answer questions about the behavior and needs of your users that GA4 alone can’t ever answer for you. For example, when your goal is to improve website conversions, you need a clear understanding of opportunities and blockers. There are times when something is obvious from GA4 alone (for example, you could notice that a broken checkout page stops 100% of visitors from completing their order), but other times there’s nothing apparently wrong in GA4 reports, and yet your numbers are still going down. When this happens you can use Hotjar to:
- Watch session recordings of the problematic pages you’ve identified
- Get a better understanding of where visitors get confused and eventually leave the website
- Collect visitor feedback to uncover why people are leaving, what products or services are missing from the site, and what you would need to add/remove/change to make potential customers convert
- Tap into a diverse pool of 200,000+ participants from 130+ countries and 25 industries, or interview your own users to get additional insights on the user experience.
Why Are Session Recordings Not More Popular?
Q: Any guesses as to why session recording software hasn’t become ubiquitous in the same way given it’s been around for nearly a decade?
A: I think it has been a standard requirement of most Product Teams for some time. However, Marketing professionals have been a bit slower on the uptick as it’s a field more interested in presenting numbers than a user experience. There’s less of a culture of user research in Marketing, but session recordings prove their value in moving the needle, and I believe this is changing.
Q: When a CFO (who mutters “ROI” 200 times a day) asks how much investing in a Hotjar subscription returns, what’s the answer?
A: Hotjar provides valuable insights on your digital experience, and while we can’t quote the exact ROI you can expect, our customers see some extremely positive results. Each customer’s ROI will of course depend on how they use Hotjar to make improvements to their site to achieve their business goals.
What I can say is that I’ve seen first hand where customers have more than doubled or even tripled their conversion rates, all because they acted on the insights they got from Hotjar. Here’s a few examples:
- +300% conversions: Brand24 significantly increased conversions using Recordings, in just 12 hours.
- +60% revenue: ClickMechanic identified conversion barriers and grew revenue with Heatmaps, Recordings, and Feedback.
- +140% NPS score: DashThis achieved higher customer satisfaction using Recordings and Surveys.
- -7% drop-off rate: Gogoprint understood user behavior and reduced drop-off rates with Heatmaps and Recordings.
HubSpot, Session Recordings and Stacks
Q: So you just built a feature that the SFP team had been lusting over themselves. Your integration with HubSpot is much deeper. Can you explain how the two systems work together to capture a customer’s digital journey?
A: The integration works by sending Hotjar session recordings and survey responses to the contact timeline in HubSpot. From a technical perspective, HubSpot will share with us the unique user ID of your HubSpot contacts so that we can match Hotjar recordings and survey responses.
But what does this actually mean you can now do? Each team can use this to their advantage.
Sales: See what prospects did on your site, and what caught their attention. You’ll quickly see how engaged they are and can use these insights to prepare for calls and help you close more deals.
Success: See how users interacted with your product or what they had to say about their experience. This will help you pre-empt their pain points and tailor conversations to their needs.
Support: See where users got stuck or confused, and what they did before they got in touch. A quick view into their on-site experience can help you to resolve issues faster.
And for the Marketing teams we have two great use cases.
- You can now personalize marketing based on user behavior for a more tailored experience that converts segment prospects and customers into active lists to trigger automations using a combination of Hotjar behavior data and HubSpot contact criteria.
- Build automations to notify your sales team when a recording is available for a highly-engaged prospect. Add another personal touch and alert reps when prospects are showing signs of frustration, so they can follow-up at the right time and with better context on their experience.
Professor’s Note:
Syncing HubSpot and Hotjar to support sales, marketing, and support professionals is part of our HubSpot configuration services and includes training on how to create automations.
We also have DIY instructions and more what can be done when the two are synced in our Hotjar<>HubSpot integration review.
Q: Setting HubSpot aside, there’s a lot of consolidation of what we call “stacks.” Marketing stack, sales stack, tech stack, for example. Using our SaaS example again, what categories of software would you say a marketing team that wants to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of their digital funnels needs?
A: To start, all marketing teams will need a good reporting and analytics tool to understand performance and make data-driven decisions. You’ll want one where you can easily measure experiments as well, as that’s key to making small but impactful changes. Google Analytics, Tableau, and Mixpanel are key. For digital experience insights, you’d want something that satisfies the entire user research processes in one tool. Hotjar, for example, includes surveys, heatmaps, recordings, and user interviews.
For communicating with your customers, you’ll want a marketing automation tool like HubSpot or Iterable to launch campaigns and journeys along the customer lifecycle. If product adoption is your area, you’ll need a tool like Appcues where you can create personalized experiences across your tech stack.
Collaboration tools are essential for tying it all together. You’ll need a project management tool like Asana or Trello to manage your work, Slack or Microsoft Teams to communicate with your team, and we love Miro for team collaboration, brainstorming, and planning. Loom is also essential for quickly communicating with your team and cutting out needless meetings.
The Future of Hotjar
Q: At SFP, we’ve always been big fans of trying out the new-new stuff (Betas, unknown startups, etc.) to get a competitive edge. What’s around the corner for Hotjar? How do you see the platform evolving through 2024 and beyond?
A: Our most recent big release was a really cool step for us into the world of AI. Our first features help you do two key things:
1) generate survey questions based on your goal and
2) automatically generate summary reports of your survey results. So we’re continuing to work on everything Hotjar AI-related in a bid to make your research and analysis efforts even more efficient.
Another focus for us going forward is localizing Hotjar into multiple languages. You can now switch your Hotjar experience from English into German, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese – and over the coming months we’ll be unveiling even more languages.
Through the rest of 2023 and 2024 we have a really exciting integrations roadmap which we know the community will be really excited about.
Looking further ahead, we want our users to get a new perspective on user behavior by connecting the dots between your qualitative and quantitative data. We’re on a mission to help you truly understand your users – from conducting research interviews, to surveys and onsite feedback, to measurement and analysis, to our bread and butter of heatmaps and session replay. Hotjar is continuing to evolve into your home for user insight.
