Guides by Hotjar

Have you ever wished you could just ask your users what they think about your website? Get straight to the root of their behavior? Find out why they decided not to convert at the last second?

With user feedback, you can.

Every potential customer is on a journey. While you may want them to go straight from awareness (the moment they learn about your brand) to conversion (the moment they become a loyal paying customer), it’s rarely that simple. Instead, they need to be nurtured, guided, and convinced at crucial moments of the journey before they arrive at that final destination.

Heatmaps are a powerful way to understand what users do on your website pages—where they click, how far they scroll, and what they look at or ignore.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement taken from asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0-10—but there’s a lot more to the story than that.

Building a better product or service requires one critical insight: a deep understanding of the people you’re building it for. What could be a more effective tactic to achieve this goal than talking to them directly? In this guide, we’ll discuss how to plan, run, and analyze user interviews to get actionable insights.

Exit-intent is a signal that a visitor is about to leave your website, like when they move their cursor from the main content of your site up toward the exit button. 

Losing website visitors and potential customers is tough enough—but you don’t get any closure when it’s a mystery why they left. When you understand the cause of abandonment with exit-intent surveys, you can use what you learn to reduce churn and improve the customer experience.

Communicate and collaborate with your team directly in Hotjar, and make quick decisions on what user-led product updates to prioritize next.

Your Hotjar Dashboards provide a visual overview of some of your most meaningful insights. Discover everything you need to know about what it is and how it works right here!

With Highlights, a Hotjar feature that facilitates and simplifies team collaboration, teams can easily sort through, categorize, and share valuable insights.

Want more from your data? Learn how to use Hotjar’s User Attributes to get valuable insights unique to your site or product.

Learn how to use Hotjar’s Events for deeper insights based on custom actions unique to your business.

Hotjar’s new tool, Trends, helps you spot patterns in user behaviors and understand your metrics on a deeper level.

An anticipated increase in website traffic is all the more reason to optimize your site and grab more opportunities to boost sales, increase conversions, and deliver a delightful user experience. 

Behavior analytics is the key to understanding your customers, and how they really experience and interact with your website or app.

How do you learn more about your customers, their behavior, what they want, and what they love and hate about their experience with the service or product you're providing?

Customer analytics makes it possible for you to understand exactly how your customers engage with your website, brand, and product to give them what they want. Successful businesses use key analytics insights to improve the customer experience (CX) and, as a result, boost user satisfaction, conversions, and revenue.

What customer experience (CX) is, why it's important for your business, and how you can improve it for your customers.

Data analysis lets you uncover exactly where, when, and why people interact with your brand—so you can optimize your marketing campaigns and improve the user experience (UX).

But with thousands of data points from dozens of sources, how do you best make sense of everything to inform your marketing plan?

A glossary of the most frequently used terms in the world of Google Analytics.

Building better products for your users is all about tracking and optimizing your digital strategy—setting up metrics, measuring your key performance indicators (KPIs), and making data-driven decisions. But things get complicated as you dive deeper into these insights and start to act on them.  

That’s where Mixpanel comes in, offering simple workflows that enable you to effortlessly build powerful funnels, gain valuable insights into your top user flows, and create custom cohorts in just a few clicks. You won't need to waste hours writing SQL or wait for someone else to do it.

Product experience insights help teams see how customers really use their products, making it easier to remove bugs, delight users, and reduce churn.

When you start working on a new product—or a new initiative on an existing product—do you already know exactly which problem your product needs to solve for your customer?

Probably not.

At the start, you work with assumptions and hypotheses about what you need to do and whether it makes sense for your customer.

Your introduction to product management: what it is, what a product manager does, and best practices.

Our PM glossary translates industry jargon and complex terms into simple definitions of the most popular concepts and terms used by product management teams.

You want to build a long-term vision for your product, and work on something that your users will buy and love—but can you really do that if you don’t understand your customers?

Probably not.

Enter product research, the key to leading your business to success through data-backed insights and smart, customer-centric product decisions.

But how can you make sure your product research is effective, and that it will benefit your customers and business? Keep reading to find out!

What and how people feel is part of any experience—and the more emotionally connected people feel to your product, the more likely they are to buy it, use it, and recommend it to others.

But how can you measure users' emotional connection with your brand and product? That's where qualitative data analysis comes in.

Numbers help us make sense of the world. We collect quantitative data on our speed and distance as we drive, the number of hours we spend on our cell phones, and how much we save at the grocery store.

Our businesses run on numbers, too. We spend hours poring over key performance indicators (KPIs) like lead-to-client conversions, net profit margins, and bounce and churn rates.

But all of this quantitative data can feel overwhelming and confusing. Lists and spreadsheets of numbers don’t tell you much on their own—you have to conduct quantitative data analysis to understand them and make informed decisions.

A multi-chapter look at website usability testing, its benefits and methods, and how to get started with it.

Introduction to UX design: key principles, best practices, and mistakes to avoid.

Whether you’re a casual internet user or you work on a website or product, website tracking and product analytics are a fundamental part of your daily life online.

As an individual, you’re likely interested in protecting your privacy. As a marketer, or a UX or product person, tracking is what helps you optimize a site, fix bugs, improve UX, and achieve business growth. When done right (and we’ll show you how), website tracking can be beneficial to both users and businesses.

In this guide, we explore website tracking from both sides and cover what it is, how it works, and how to use a privacy-focused approach to tracking website activity.

To build a website your customers love, you need to understand which features give them a thrill—and which put them to sleep. A/B testing takes the guesswork out of engaging with users, providing real insights to help you identify and optimize your website’s best features.

Imagine you’re in the midst of a long-awaited rebrand, and your graphic designer has just sent you two logo options to review. 

If you don’t decide soon, you’ll throw the entire project off its timeline. And it’s too important to just go with your gut, but you don’t have time to plan and run an A/B test. 

Your best bet? Concept testing.

Forget about best practices and quick hacks: to increase website conversion rate, your best move is to understand your visitors, users, and customers, and give them what they need.

In this guide, we dispel a few myths about conversion optimization, talk to 20+ conversion experts, and give you a free, downloadable 3-step CRO plan to help you gather the data you need to improve your conversion rates over and over again.

Businesses often find themselves with customers who pay the subscription fee, yet never (or rarely) use their product, users who are technically active but only use the basic features, or shoppers who add items to their cart but don’t become paying customers. 

If your customers aren’t getting the full value of your product, you risk high churn, low conversions, and dissatisfied users.

The good news? Customer activation helps you re-engage existing customers and makes sure new ones are engaging with your product from the get-go.

You can’t have a stable, profitable business without a steady stream of new customers. 

Where customer acquisition ranks on your list of priorities can define how much—and how fast—your company grows. But for many business owners, gaining new customers can feel like a game of chance. And maintaining a consistent and effective customer acquisition rate is easier said than done.

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

You know when you’re telling a story you think is riveting, but everyone’s eyes start to glaze over? That very problem also troubles SaaS and ecommerce businesses, but they call it customer retention.

If you don’t capture your users’ attention early and solve their problems, they’ll drift away. Your job is to keep users around for the long haul, so your relationship, product, and bottom line grow.

Increasing your customer satisfaction rates isn’t as simple as sending out a survey every once in a while. Truly understanding customer satisfaction means building an informed strategy and measuring your success using dedicated tools and tactics. 

It’s worth the effort: learning how to improve customer satisfaction helps you empathize with your users, refine your value offer, increase revenue, decrease acquisition costs, and so much more.

Solving problems is a pivotal part of product development. But some issues that come up during product development are more complex than others, and it can be difficult to find the right solution—or even know where to start looking.

That's where the concept of design thinking comes in, keeping users at the center of every process by combining problem-solving with deep empathy.

Whether you're updating your existing ecommerce offering or launching a new online store, your business needs a comprehensive blueprint to follow on your path to resonating success.

Ecommerce lessons from UX, Marketing, and Analytics pros—in 5-minute video format. In June 2020, we ran an ecommerce and UX-focused event with a twist: each speaker could only use 5 slides and was allocated a maximum of 5 minutes—we called it ⚡Ecommerce UX Lightning Learning.

If there’s one thing that tech powerhouses have in common, it’s an appetite for growth—and it was only a matter of time before companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Uber, and TikTok started shifting their product management initiatives to enable that growth.

Growth product management is taking hold throughout the software industry. But what does it mean, how does it work, and what value does it bring to your team and business? Find out in this guide to the increasingly vital role that growth plays in product management.

Landing pages are a key component of a successful online business. 

Improving landing page performance—also known as landing page optimization—helps create an experience that resonates with visitors and converts them into paying customers.

Think about the top marketers you respect: they make essential tasks look easy, from crafting campaigns and optimizing channels to elevating the user journey. They live up to their role as wizards of the marketing world. 

Their secret weapon? Data. Great marketers use data to delve deeper into their users' pain points and desires. By tapping into these valuable insights, they create personalized experiences that leave a lasting impact.

The success of any business, product, or project revolves around an overall picture of its performance—that is, understanding how customers behave and respond to it and what you can do to improve their experience (and increase your conversions). 

That’s where performance reporting comes in, putting measurement, quality assurance, and accountability data into context.

Designing a product that solves real customer and market needs would be a lot easier if you could see into the future. You need to know how potential customers will react to a product or if there’s market demand—all before you even start designing. 

But without a crystal ball, it can be hard to keep sight of shifting customer and stakeholder needs—while creating a market-viable product that helps users accomplish their tasks and goals.

In the world of product—the world of continuous discovery, learning, and feedback—there is no ‘end’.

Product managers, designers, researchers, and engineers are constantly making development decisions, each of them ultimately coming down to one question: will this change have the intended effect?

A product manager (PM) advocates for users, effortlessly collaborates across teams, and puts out metaphorical fires—all before lunch. 

Overseeing a product development cycle is no easy feat. But with the right combination of skills, a good product manager juggles their responsibilities with ease and ensures their product’s success. 

Product marketing propels your product to market—and ensures it has a long, successful run once there.

But it’s complicated. Product marketing requires a deep understanding of your customers, a strong grasp of the competitive landscape, and a mastery of strategic storytelling.

Excellent products don’t appear out of thin air. 

Even the simplest, most intuitive products were meticulously planned by a product manager and product team who developed an intimate understanding of their customers and the market.