free heatmaps of your website activity with hotjar

How to Use Hotjar for Free Heatmaps of Your Website

LaptopLauraBlog [read me!]

A heatmap for your website or webpage allows you to see where your visitors have hovered, clicked, and scrolled! This can offer invaluable insights.

Before spending cash on a full-fledged initiative, you can try HotJar.com for 15 days for free. Here are the quick start steps below.

But a note first, this tool should be implemented after you have traffic coming to your site.

Step 1: Go to page and click (5 seconds)

Go to www.hotjar.com and click “TRY IT FOR FREE” red button at the top

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Step 2: Create an account (20 seconds)

Fill in your name, email, a password, role at your business, and hit continue.

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Then your company name and website plus country and accept the terms. Hit “Create Account.”hotjar 3

 

Step 3: Once inside, copy & paste the tracking code (45 seconds)

Similar to what we did in Google Analytics set up. You want to copy and paste this code into the head of your website code.

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Step 4: Verify things went well (45 seconds)

Once you copy and paste your code in, come back here and you can verify that HotJar and your site are communicating properly.

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Step 5: Get more familiar with HotJar while you wait for data (several minutes – as long as you want)

As you wait for data to accure as visitors come to your site, click around inside HotJar and get familiar what is possible.

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Step 6: Check back in after two weeks and analyze your data! (the fun part!)

Now before you start analyzing, take a look at these examples of what your heatmap could reveal plus good solutions to issues: https://www.hotjar.com/heatmaps

Since I do not have data yet to share as I write this, here is an example I found online.

heat map example

My thoughts:

The activity is all over the place with a red (heavy) concentration over one button on the menu which says “Design Patterns.”

I would run a split test (using something like Optimizely) with a redesigned page, or just menu bar, where this is far more prominently featured since it seems like the audience wants it.

Why make it so small if it’s the main attraction?

Conclusion

Once you have traffic coming to your website, you need to find ways to figure out what is going on so that you can make it better.

It’s all about testing! Data!

What other tools and tips do you love for getting data and testing?  Please share.