Yep, it’s not actually “Hot Jar” but spelled Hotjar and the European company provides an analytics package that gets better as you take the various upgrades.
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What Is HotJar?
For us, Hotjar fills an analytics gap that our other favorite tools simply do not.
Google Analytics in its present form (GA4, the forced replacement for the much better “Universal Analytics“) is another dud product released in the Sundar Pichai era at Google and is most useful for aggregate reporting on various sources of visitors and some of their on-page behavior.
Google Ads gives you lots of reporting for what happens on your ads but can only really report on what happens within your website via “conversions” that you set up and send back to it, so it’s the primary tool when using PPC as top of funnel.
Google Search Console has also become a weaker product as Google hides more and more useful data in the Pichai era but still provides some useful information about what pages rank in organic results on Google, so think of it as a tool specialized for SEO as top of funnel.
We use Zoho, GoHighLevel, and SalesForce as CRMs, but really prefer HubSpot for its platform approach and breadth of features within a single interface and ability to show a prospect’s digital buyer journey in what HubSpot calls the “Activity Feed.”
But even with all of those tools, we like to add Hotjar to our funnel analytics because it helps us watch a user’s journey through a website to requesting a meeting, making a purchase or in a software scenario, watch them transition from a website into a SaaS platform.
At Sales Funnel Professor, we get asked to explain “Hot Jar” quite a bit and it really starts with the platforms killer feature: session recordings.
What Are Hotjar’s Session Recordings?
Session recordings are DVR recordings of people mousing or thumbing through your website.
If you’re in the US, you might remember TiVo pioneered a piece of hardware that would digitally record your live tv shows even when you couldn’t watch them. This was back when Netflix was still shipping DVD’s all over the country.
When you were ready to watch, you simply opened up the interface, picked the show and then the specific episode you wanted, and then watched at your leisure with the ability to pause, fast forward through commercials, etc.
Now that functionality is included in digital cable and streaming services for shows and movies. Hotjar is one of a number of companies that allow you to record and stream the activity of visitors to your website in the same way.
So with session recordings, you’re watching individuals go through your site and if applicable, software.
Why Would You Include Hotjar in Your Sales Funnel?
Conversion rate optimization is all about throughput in sales funnels. Helping companies achieve consistent touch-1 conversions on landing pages is a great example of “dialed in” CRO. Relying on a ‘one and done‘ approach in sales and marketing can be a costly mistake, as it often overlooks the importance of nurturing long-term customer relationships.
What you’re doing with Hotjar is looking at the recordings from the period you care about, identifying sessions that meet the criteria for what you want to study, and then watching people on both mobile and desktop interact with the page.
Professor’s Note
When we audit sales funnels in our package service, we’re reporting on a single audience<>value prop pair with a single top of funnel source, so we would use Hotjar to look at:
- Only sessions with visits from the right top of funnel source: organic search, PPC campaign, organic social, newsletter, etc.
- Only sessions where the page is actually designed for that audience and value proposition.
Hotjar makes it easy to find just the just the “shows” we care about within all the traffic that may be flowing through a site.
If you don’t include a tool like this in your stack, you’re highly likely to miss tons of solvable problems. A CRO expert will know that including a session recording tool is critical for optimizing your digital funnels.
“Hot Jar” Competitors
Hotjar has a number of competitors that provide session recordings.
Atlanta’s FullStory was founded by a number of ex-Google engineers and is priced more like SalesForce and geared towards enterprise companies only. You have to deal with an account rep trying to negotiate with you if you have a larger subscription plan. The FullStory UI also feels overdesigned in many ways.
Inspectlet is based on San Jose, California and does a nice job as a standalone product without many of the advanced features you can get in the paid version of Hotjar.
Lucky Orange is based in Overland Park, Kansas and has a number of annoying features like giving each user an ID that is a combination of a fruit and a color while quirky sounds play. It doesn’t feel oriented towards business.
Overall, Hotjar has a nice mix of price points and features as a standalone product. The major drawback is their Euro-centric approach wherein they hide data that is already available to you such numbers written in HTML and form field values. Luckily, the HubSpot integration solves that problem.
HubSpot<>Hotjar Integration
At Sales Funnel Professor, the native integration between HubSpot and Hotjar is a “killer feature” and one of the reasons we include both in our 2024 ideal sales and marketing stack.
The ability to see a prospect or customer’s touches (pages visited, emails read, calls, chats, support tickets) etc. chronologically in HubSpot (on the Contact activity tab) and then dive into the detail by opening up the video at the correct spot in the chronology is like magic for sales and support efficiency.
When we configure HubSpot, we always recommend at least the free version of Hotjar.
The paid versions are useful for firms that have lots of traffic or want the Trends and Funnels tools.
Hotjar for Marketing
As a marketing tool, Hotjar’s session recordings (DVR recordings) are super useful for studying landing page behavior.
Aggregate reporting tools tell you things like bounce rates.
At Sales Funnel Professor, we’re very interested in how many deep readers we get on a landing page. Since our landing pages are designed to be fully understood via just reading the second headers (without the supporting copy), we start to get a feel for what is resonating by simply watching where people pause.
Desktop users often swirl their mouse over what they are actually reading.
When we act as sales funnel consultants, we’re often able to show people that their landing page visitors aren’t even scrolling the whole page due. Poor branding and messaging hurt even sophisticated companies. Sloppy styling causes even more problems.
Hotjar for Sales & Product
For a PLG or freemium company, the sale happens within the app. For a SaaS CMO working on a freemium product or where a free trial lives just before the the company makes money, the marketing team and product team have to act as one to be sure that experience is delightful.
Most software companies deploy once a week or twice a week as they start to get into a sprint rhythm. Whether they follow that cadence or not, those first in-app session recordings need to watched like a hawk.
If you’re using Hotjar within HubSpot, you can document bugs and other issues as tickets directly on the contact record of the user.
If you have HubSpot and JIRA connected, you can also created a synced JIRA ticket directly from your HubSpot ticket and your developers are one click from the Hotjar session that shows the problem. This saves enormous time writing out detailed “Steps to reproduce” and answering questions about context.
Why Do We Recommend “Hot Jar”
To summarize the reasons we recommend Hotjar and joined their partner program, it’s a tool that allows our digital clients to evolve their go-to-market faster and get to a truly delightful customer experience across their middle and bottom of funnel faster, which shortens sales cycles and helps firms to become iconic brands and open up margins.
There’s really no reason not to run it as the free version is quite powerful and does not require a payment method. With a funnel builder, you can create customized marketing funnels that streamline the process of turning prospects into loyal customers, optimizing each step along the way.
Further reading: Hotjar: The Secret Sauce for Your Marketing Stack?
