How Bannersnack used Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings to increase conversions and improve their product.

What do you do when you need to improve conversions / sign-ups for a tool and optimize the experience of people using it, but you don't have clear insight to point you in the right direction? The team at Bannersnack was facing this problem. Despite a lot of analytics data points, they were in the dark when it came to understanding what people were actually doing on their website, and why. 

A 60+ company on a mission to improve conversions 

Bannersnack is an online banner maker & design tool that helps people create slick and professional-looking banners and social media visuals in just a few minutes. 

At Bannersnack, most of the 60+ team members are developers or UX designers; the marketing team consists of 13 people in the sub-departments of Content, SEO, Social, Email, and PPC.

Different teams at Bannersnack relied on web analytic tools to track and measure traffic, but they didn’t have as clear a sense of how people were actually using the website once they got there, which meant they didn’t know what to start from to improve it.

Would Hotjar slow the website down? 

To speed up their optimization work, the product/design and marketing teams turned towards Hotjar because they thought it would help them get useful insight they could combine with their existing analytics data.  But Gabriela had a concrete objection: what if adding one more tool to the website would impact the page load speed and ruin the experience? 

Challenge #1: understanding how to optimize for conversions

Once Hotjar was up and running, the team started by placing Heatmaps on the landing pages they needed to optimize, gathering evidence of how people were interacting with them. Based on the data, the team would then produce an alternative design and A/B test the old and the new versions against one another. Through this testing cycle, the product design team kept reviewing heat maps and eventually understood that all they needed to do was make the call-to-action button on the landing page bigger and add more contrast to it. Here are the before and after versions: 

By applying this change, the team managed to increase sign-ups by 25%.

Challenge #2: understanding what numbers alone won’t tell you

The UX designers at Bannersnack also wanted to understand how people were interacting with the tool. Hotjar Recordings came in handy when the team started noticing that their just-launched ‘Timeline’ feature kept going unused by many of their longer-standing customers.

After watching lots of recordings, they realized that the button to show the ‘Timeline’ option (which was closed by default) was not quite as visible to the users as the designers had initially thought. The fix was easy: the word ‘Timeline’ was added to a button that also got slightly repositioned.  

After adjusting the UI to make the timeline feature more visible, the team noticed a 12% increase in the overall usage of the tool.