Combining recordings with other tools for more insight

Recordings + traditional analytics

Traditional web analytics tools (think Google Analytics) give you plenty of quantitative data points about large-scale traffic and usage patterns. You can certainly make educated guesses about what’s happening based on numbers and charts—but you’re still missing some crucial context behind them both.  

For example: what do you do after your analytics tools reveal that you have a page with lots of traffic but very few conversions? As a first step, you can find a list of relevant recordings, review 10-20 of them, and start observing what people actually do on the page. 

Recordings + A/B testing

Recordings and A/B testing are very closely linked: you can use insight that you get from recordings to define test hypotheses, and you can also watch recordings of A/B test page variations to understand what is making a page more successful than the other.

If you're running experiments using Google Optimize, Hotjar has an integration with Optimize that makes this a breeze: simply filter your Hotjar recordings by your Optimize experiment IDs, pick the variant(s) you want to see recordings from, and get busy analyzing.

Recordings + heatmaps

Session recordings are generated for individual users and show you their actions across multiple pages, while heatmaps help you visualize data from page visitors in aggregate.

When you are interested in a specific page, heatmaps (including click maps, scroll maps, and move maps) can give extra clarity to the insights you pick up from a set of recordings. For example: if you notice the same behavior across 5 or 10 recordings (for example, users ignoring a button or call to action, CTA), you might be tempted to generalize and think that everybody visiting the page behaves in the same way. A heatmap will easily help you prove or disprove the assumption.

Recordings + on-page feedback

Quantitative (numerical) data is fundamental to making data-informed UX decisions, but qualitative (non-numerical) data is similarly crucial.

After you observe interesting and/or unusual behaviors in your session recordings, you can ask your visitors and customers for direct feedback and learn why they behave the way they do (for example, why they are about to abandon your site). Even a one-question survey can give you powerful insight and lead to business-changing transformation.