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How Electric Eye uses Hotjar to drive customer-centric optimizations for ecommerce businesses

Electric Eye is an ecommerce agency serving businesses in the fashion, home goods, beauty, and accessories spaces. As experts in the Shopify ecosystem, the Electric Eye team uses Hotjar to support clients in understanding their customer behavior and improving conversion rates for their online businesses.

AgencyEcommerceHow to improve customer experienceHow to improve conversion

Last updated

6 Jul 2023

Reading time

6 min

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We sat down with Electric Eye co-founder Chase Clymer to understand how Hotjar helps his team gather people-centric insights to drive sales and growth for their clients.

Using Hotjar for more meaningful insights

Chase and his team are Shopify experts, working with businesses to overhaul their ecommerce website performance. Electric Eye approaches each site as an optimization project involving design development and creative problem-solving tailored to individual clients’ needs, so they can understand their users and boost their conversion rate optimization (CRO)

That's where Hotjar comes in. 

Electric Eye is a member of Hotjar’s Partner Program, granting the agency access to early product launches and specialized training to support their clients’ business goals—all while earning up to 25% referral commission.

Once Electric Eye has an overview of a client’s user experience (UX), brand, target audience, and product, Hotjar is the next step to thoroughly understand the client’s users and test potential improvements.

Setting clients set up for success

Chase’s team installs the Hotjar platform on clients’ ecommerce sites, collecting user behavior data for just over a month. This window of time gives Electric Eye and the client a general view of performance and sparks ideas for improving overall UX.

For these initial evaluations, Chase finds the following Hotjar tools particularly handy:

  • Feedback and Surveys: Hotjar’s user feedback tools seek out individual people’s opinions—what they love, hate, want, and need—yielding actionable insights directly from customers

#Not just for clients: a Hotjar survey on Electric Eye’s own ‘Contact’ page seeks valuable qualitative data from prospects
Not just for clients: a Hotjar survey on Electric Eye’s own ‘Contact’ page seeks valuable qualitative data from prospects
  • Recordings: watching recordings of their clients’ end users as they navigate a site or product gives Electric Eye complete visibility into customer frustrations and pain points

#With Hotjar Recordings, you can watch users interact with your site
With Hotjar Recordings, you can watch users interact with your site
  • Heatmaps: comparing page performance data with its associated click, scroll, and move heatmaps reveals areas of a site customers aren’t using as expected

#Engagement Zone heatmaps show the areas of a page users interact with most or least
Engagement Zone heatmaps show the areas of a page users interact with most or least
  • Interviews: getting face-to-face with real users and hearing first-hand about their experiences onsite reduces the risk of subjectivity and guesswork

#User interviews allow you to connect with your users directly so you can get valuable insights
User interviews allow you to connect with your users directly so you can get valuable insights

Hotjar’s unique combination of quantitative and qualitative data provides Electric Eye with endless inspiration for ways to help clients drive conversions and build better relationships with their customers. As Chase says, “It's a big information download, but it sets the stage to say, ‘Now we know what's broken.’“

Hotjar’s insights also inspire impactful testing ideas. Chase believes “trying, testing, learning, and being okay with a failed test” is integral to the CRO process. “You learned something, but it wasn't the answer. Let's go back to the drawing board and find something else.”

For Electric Eye’s clients, Hotjar’s biggest superpower is the visibility it provides into user behavior on ecommerce websites. By seeing for themselves how customers behave—and with Chase and his team to help them turn these insights into action—clients are set on a path to making data-driven optimizations guided by Electric Eye.

Hypotheses based on real behavior

According to Chase, the relationship between Electric Eye, its clients, and Hotjar is very simple: Hotjar reveals problems on clients’ websites, and Electric Eye finds solutions for them. Spotting these bugs—which could easily have been overlooked—helps Electric Eye increase clients’ conversion rates and average order value (AOV). And, as Chase says, “That's directly correlated to margin and profit.” 

The Electric Eye team hypothesizes why a client's website performance or sales might be struggling, looking for the ‘red flags’ in clients’ user behavior to explain it. Analyzing heatmaps and recordings, they often discover issues like:

  • Customers unable to click buttons or elements

  • Pages attracting an unusual number of rage clicks

  • Visitors overlooking important parts of a page

They’ll see where users click and scroll, watch them engage with elements on a page, read the responses submitted through the feedback tools, and gradually develop an understanding of each customer’s journey. 

During the analysis phase, Chase is a particular fan of Hotjar’s rage click filter. There’s no interpretation needed with rage clicks—the filter immediately draws the team’s attention to issues, so they can jump in and fix a bug at the source before it damages conversions. 

#Hotjar customers can filter heatmaps by rage clicks to get clear visibility into their user’s frustrations
Hotjar customers can filter heatmaps by rage clicks to get clear visibility into their user’s frustrations

Once a high-priority issue is identified, they brainstorm solutions and work with the client to guide them into specific site optimizations. It’s easy for Chase to get buy-in because the proof is right there in the platform: by revealing the entire user experience first-hand, Electric Eye’s team can make a case for more user-led optimizations that benefit both their clients’ customers and their businesses. 

Optimizations driven by data, not opinions

What Chase loves about Hotjar is its ability to drive change and challenge a brand's old beliefs. Often, he sees clients making decisions based on superficial UX goals or having their ecommerce website design influenced by opinions instead of data.

Hotjar removes the need for guesswork and subjectivity, showing clients where their customers click, what they ignore, and, most importantly, why they don’t convert.

When you can show a founder multiple recordings of a frustrated client because of a UX choice, it's not you vs. the founder anymore. The founder sees their customers being frustrated and realizes there has to be a better way. Let's find that better way.

Chase Clymer
Co-founder of Electric Eye
#Session recordings reveal frustrations or blockers as users explore your site
Session recordings reveal frustrations or blockers as users explore your site

Inspiring experiences that put customers first

When Electric Eye wants to understand what clients’ customers really need, nothing compares to simply asking them.

Getting feedback from customers on high-traffic pages, asking what brought them to the site, asking why they didn't buy. Those are questions that reap so many rewards.

#The Feedback widget lets ecommerce customers share their opinions  and rate their experience from ‘love’ to ‘hate’
The Feedback widget lets ecommerce customers share their opinions and rate their experience from ‘love’ to ‘hate’

Chase’s team uses Hotjar to ask the right questions at the right point in the customer journey, watch how they interact with the website, and get answers quicker. By showing clients what their customers truly think and feel, Chase is able to prove the immense value in listening to real user needs. And in this way, Hotjar increases clients’ empathy for their customers.

Customers are going to give you that real insight. They're going to show you what's confusing or broken about your website, so you can take those insights and fix the thing that's broken or get an idea for a test you can run to make a site better.

Helping clients grow with Hotjar

In Chase’s experience, many clients often feel out of their depth: for the uninitiated, ecommerce optimization feels complex, and clients don’t fully trust their key metrics. 

As a team, Hotjar and Electric Eye build confidence by introducing clients to the full spectrum of customer behavior and helping them get critical learnings from a reliable source. 

Chase views Hotjar’s free-forever Basic plan as the ideal first step into user behavior analytics for younger ecommerce brands. However, he believes the additional features that come with higher plans hugely increase his clients’ depth of understanding and empathy for customers, allowing them to make even better UX design decisions. 

For Chase, the Business plan hits the spot for most of his clients’ needs, providing impactful features such as:

  • Rage click and u-turn filters

  • More customizability options

  • Engagement Zones in Heatmaps

  • User attribute tracking

  • Frustration and engagement scores on recordings

  • Custom-built integrations with platforms like Shopify

Tapping into the full spectrum of Hotjar’s platform gives clients all the visibility they need to analyze performance, understand the people behind the statistics, and make the right business decisions for the right reasons.

Creating unforgettable digital experiences

Having everything they need to analyze user behavior and assess performance in one powerful platform saves Electric Eye—and its clients—a considerable amount of time and effort. They’re able to tap into a new perspective on their businesses and build a holistic connection with the people behind the numbers at the same time.

A client’s win is a win for Electric Eye—and for Chase and the team, “Hotjar helps us get to those answers quicker and makes our job much easier.” 

In Electric Eye’s mission to educate clients on the true value of the voice of the customer, a partnership with Hotjar just makes sense.

Be a part of the Hotjar Partner Program

Calling all marketing freelancers and agencies—interested in earning up to 25% commission on referrals, developing your brand, and getting early access to new features? Let’s be partners!