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Behind the scenes
Building a new brand filled with empathy
Today, we’re launching our new brand. As you’re reading this blog post, we’re guessing you’d have noticed on your own eventually—what with our new shiny logo, a blazing new set of colors, and a playful new typeface—but we wanted to share more about what’s happening and why.
In true Hotjar spirit and in line with one of our values, we’re building trust with transparency.
Christian Schorm
User research
Survey questions 101: over 70 survey question examples + types of surveys and FAQs
How well do you understand your prospects and customers? Do you know who they are, what keeps them awake at night, and what brought them to your business in search of a solution?
Hotjar Team
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User research
28 of our favorite customer feedback questions
Here at Hotjar, we strongly believe that what’s best for your users and customers is best for your business. But how do you know what’s best for your users?
You have to ask them.
Fio Dossetto
PX insights
Your introduction to Hotjar: what it is, what it can do for you, and how it works
You already know it: what’s best for your users is best for your business.
But do you have the information and insights you need to build and create products that your users will love?
You may have important numbers like churn rate, page traffic, and drop-off rate from a product or web analytics tool. But do you know why your users are behaving a certain way? Where specifically in your product they're having issues that cause them to churn? Why they aren't converting?
Hotjar helps you answer these questions. Let's show you how:
Hotjar Team
User research
5 questions to ask customers about the products you're selling
Whether you’ve just launched a new product that isn’t selling as much as expected or you’re wanting to sell even more of one that’s already doing great, here’s one thing you should try: survey your customers to get some insight about what’s working and what needs improving.
I don’t mean ‘spend thousands of dollars on customer panels’ or ‘research an industry-defining report on customer expectations’: I mean take 30 literal minutes out of your day to get on a call with an existing customer, or create a quick survey and email it to people who have already bought one (or more) of your products.
In this piece, we take you through 5 of the best questions to ask your customers about the products and services you’re selling. To pick them, I spoke to two business leaders, Brian Dean (founder of Backlinko) and Sarah Doody (author of UX Notebook), who experienced a few snafus in their business and bounced back by reaching out to the only people who could help them figure out what to do: their existing customers.
Louis Grenier
Behind the scenes
"Guys": the new 4-letter word (and how we tried to say it less)
Working as part of a remote team comes with plenty of upsides.
We Hotjarians get to work from wherever we want, choose our own work schedules, and spend more time with friends and family. But remote work isn't always easy; for example, building a shared and inclusive culture with a distributed team takes a conscious effort.
Language plays a big part of that. Whether we realize it or not, our words can affect the people we care about, including those we work with. With team members from all over the planet, the way we address and talk to each other is important to make everybody feel included.
A few months back, we realized that a four-letter word we used a lot had the potential for making some team members feel excluded from the conversation—and this is the story of how we worked on gender-inclusive language at Hotjar and learned to say 'guys' less.
Sara Bent
Behind the scenes
Hotjar reviews: what 120+ real user reviews say about Hotjar
Reading reviews from real, verified customers is one of the best ways to get an understanding of whether a tool is right for you or not.
Fio Dossetto
UX design and analysis
Using heat maps to improve your website’s UX: 5 ways to get started
The clue is in the name: UX (user experience) is all about your users. So it makes sense that the more user-focused you are when collecting website data, the better equipped you’ll be to make optimizations that serve your users’ needs.
You probably already have some clues about user behavior from traditional UX analytics data (e.g., bounce rate, page views, conversions). But how do you know what to fix first when you spot a problem? And where do you start when you’re looking to increase conversions?
If you’re a UX designer, developer, or marketer working on improving the user experience, heat maps can help you collect data on how people interact with your website, so you can use those insights to improve UX and the metrics that matter to your business.
Fio Dossetto
Hotjar News & Remote Tips
Remote teams
The ‘Great Resignation’, from an entirely remote company’s perspective
A record number of people are leaving their jobs. It’s a phenomenon being called ‘The Great Resignation’, where more workers are planning to leave their jobs than ever before.
Some are pointing to the slow move to flexible or remote working as the main culprit. While on the other hand, some businesses have ignored this entirely and adopted the tactic of moving everyone right back into the office and returning to business as usual. (As a remote business, we don’t comply with this!)
Nevertheless, businesses are currently experiencing an exodus of talent. And on top of that, they’re having just as much trouble filling those empty seats.
Hotjar Team
Remote teams
Tips and observations on remote working from a remote company. (Hint: It’s us!)
Hotjar was always going to be a remote company, long before the coronavirus pandemic. In 2014, when Hotjar began, our three founders all lived in Malta, yet they didn’t know how long they’d be there and where life would take them next.
So, they set out to create a remote company, and what better way to practice than by working from different corners of the island? It could’ve been easy to have a Meetup and work alongside each other, but David, Marc, and Jonathan started as they meant to go on.
Now, a few years and over 100 employees later, and in the spirit of one of our values—build trust with transparency—we’re ready to share some tips with the world. We asked Hotjarians about their experiences of working remotely and we’ve summarized them below.
Hotjar Team
Behind the scenes
Hotjar has a new CEO
"Today marks an important milestone in the history of Hotjar. On behalf of the Hotjar co-founders and team we are delighted to announce that Mohannad Ali, our Chief Product and Technology Officer, is taking on the role of CEO."
Mohannad Ali
Behind the scenes
9 lessons learned scaling Hotjar's tech architecture to handle 21,875,000 requests per hour
We’re extremely ambitious - our goal is to have Hotjar installed on 10 million sites. Having such a bold vision whilst taking a freemium approach presents huge technical challenges. How does an engineering team build a platform that can handle hundreds of millions of requests per day knowing that the majority of that traffic is coming from free users? Early on, we knew the key was to do things differently and focus on building a platform that can scale.
Marc von Brockdorff
Behind the scenes
How to grow and run a remote business - the Hotjar way
When Hotjar was initially built the founders knew they wanted the company to grow and flourish in a remote environment. Rather than be held back, they wanted to allow the flexibility to find the best people in the world while also providing the opportunity for Hotjar employees to live wherever they wanted, spend time with their families and friends at their leisure, and control their own working schedules. This belief system quickly grew into what we all call 'The Hotjar Way' internally. We have been able to grow, manage, and maintain an awesome culture across the world. So we wanted to share with you how we did it!
Hotjar Team
Remote teams
15 tools that our product teams actually use in 2022
Are you using the best tools for your job? It’s a trick question. Because there’s rarely a hands-down best tool for any job. What matters is that you find the ones that work for you and your team.
As part of a product team, you design and build products that customers love. How do you do that? By putting the customer first, and translating their needs into your product. So you need ways to interact with customers, gather all the research you’ve done, prototype and design solutions, and to keep track of progress along the way.
Hotjar Team
Behind the scenes
How we (Hotjar) communicate with our 17,385 users
With 17,385 users in Hotjar and only a small team to build and support the product, as well as run the company – we quickly realized we have to be smart and efficient in the way we communicate with our users. We're also obsessed about delivering great service.
So how do we deliver top-notch service with limited resources? Here is the setup we use:
David Darmanin
Remote teams
Hanging out in the Mediterranean: How Hotjar does remote team meetups
In June 2016 the Hotjar team flew in from all over the world to spend a week together on the gorgeous island of Malta (click here in case you’re wondering where it is).
Hotjar Team
Behind the scenes
Turning your career around: the real-life stories of 7 Hotjar team members
Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep! That's the sound of your alarm going off. Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep!
Oh come on, one more minute! I need to sleep a bit more... I really don't want to go to work...
Have you ever felt this way before? Most certainly. There are always days when it's tougher to wake up than others.
Let me ask you another question: have you ever felt like this day after day?
Some Hotjar team members did, for months and even years, because they weren’t in the career of their dreams. The good news is that they managed to turn their careers around thanks to sheer persistence, tough decisions, and individual introspection.
These are their stories.
Louis Grenier
PX insights & behavior analytics
PX insights
Product manager prioritization: channel your inner PANDA!
Being a product manager can feel like being on safari. You’ve planned the route you want to take and you have your backpack full of tools ready—but changing environments and unpredictable creatures can derail your plans at any moment.
Hotjar Team
PX insights
How to use session recordings to improve user engagement and product adoption for your SaaS
Imagine you could sit behind your users looking over their shoulders as they interact with your product. How valuable would that be to your product team?
Well, that’s effectively what session recordings let you do.
Adina Timar
PX insights
Why user behavior signals are vital for product teams
The work of a product team never ends. There's no 'completion date' for growing revenue, reducing churn, increasing product usage, improving task completion, lowering the number of support tickets; and the list goes on.
But at the core of it lies the ultimate goal: to improve the user experience and create customer delight.
Hotjar Team
PX insights
Why your conversion rate doesn't tell you everything
Let’s take three product teams:
Team A ignores conversion metrics and focuses only on KPIs related to active users (MAU and DAU), retention (CRR), and customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Team B is fixated on product conversion rates, using the numbers as a North Star for understanding features or pages that trigger or block user actions.
Team C pays close attention to conversion rates, but as a springboard for diving deeper, getting inside users’ heads, and understanding why they do or don’t take actions that lead to conversions.
There’s a clear winner here.
Hotjar Team
PX insights
Your introduction to Hotjar: what it is, what it can do for you, and how it works
You already know it: what’s best for your users is best for your business.
But do you have the information and insights you need to build and create products that your users will love?
You may have important numbers like churn rate, page traffic, and drop-off rate from a product or web analytics tool. But do you know why your users are behaving a certain way? Where specifically in your product they're having issues that cause them to churn? Why they aren't converting?
Hotjar helps you answer these questions. Let's show you how:
Hotjar Team
PX insights
Click maps: using them to optimize your website
People can't use a website without clicking a mouse somewhere or tapping on a mobile device. Those clicks and taps help them navigate pages and find the products, services, or information they’re looking for.
But do YOU, as a website designer, marketer, or business owner, know exactly where your visitors click and tap? And do you know how to use that information to build a better website and experience?
That's where click maps come in.
Fio Dossetto
PX insights
Click tracking 101: what you need to know to start tracking clicks on your website
Say you’ve built a page, published a form, or sent a newsletter. As soon as they are out there, you naturally want to make sure people interact with them by taking action—the most common one being people clicking (or tapping) on something.
Enter click tracking, which is—literally—about tracking what’s being clicked (and what isn’t), so you can work on delivering more value to your users and get the clicks your business needs to succeed and grow.
In this piece, we give you an overview of the different types of click tracking you can use, examples of how measuring visitor clicks can help you learn more about your customers and increase conversion rates, and how to easily set up click tracking on your website.
Fio Dossetto
PX insights
18 product workflow red flags: how to spot & resolve them
As a product manager, your job is to deliver a product your users love.
It seems simple when put that way, doesn’t it?
Hotjar Team
Behavior analytics
9 user-driven tools and methods for ecommerce website analysis
When you think of analyzing your ecommerce site, you probably think about ecommerce tracking data like bounce and exit rates, average order value, checkout flow, and conversion rates, and maybe running an SEO audit and/or checking your site against competitors.
Tawni Sattler
Behavior analytics
Hotjar vs Crazy Egg: which one is the best for your needs?
If you’re hoping to see a stand-off with Hotjar versus Crazy Egg, we must ask that you stand down right now. The Crazy Egg team has done a great job creating a product that businesses use for heatmaps, user session recordings, and A/B testing.
Hotjar Team
PX insights
Product management 101: what a Product Manager (PM) needs to succeed
“Product managers work with their peers to build products that people love.”
This is a very broad statement. As broad as the role responsibilities itself. And probably why I get so many questions along the lines of ‘So, what does a PM actually do?’
Luke Vella
Behavior analytics
10+ web analysis tools to help you understand your users [including 5 Google Analytics alternatives]
If you want your visitors to keep returning to your website—to increase traffic, improve conversion rates, and ultimately grow revenue—you need to understand what’s happening when they reach your site.
Hotjar Team
PX insights
Scroll maps: 5 ways to optimize UX and increase conversions
Heat maps are a powerful visual tool for tracking user behavior on your website or app and understanding how visitors interact with pages and page elements.
Fio Dossetto
PX insights
4 practical ways to improve your ecommerce customer journey (with examples from MADE.com)
Either as a consumer or an online business owner, you’ve experienced the ecommerce customer journey.
As a consumer, you came, you saw, you purchased.
As an online business owner, you watched prospective customers come, and see, and purchase—or you watched them exit your site, leaving you with burning questions, like:
Why did that customer abandon their shopping cart?
Did this person not find what they were looking for?
What changes do I need to make to my site to increase conversions?
How can I learn from these customers’ actions on my site?
In this piece, we show you a few quick ways to help you find some of the answers. To keep this practical, we’ll use real examples from designer furniture store MADE.com, whose Head of Digital Experience, Spencer Wong, wanted to improve the experience for MADE customers across each stage of their online journey.
Tawni Sattler
PX insights
Top 5 session replay tools for analyzing user behavior
If you’re a business selling online, it’s important to create a website experience your users will love. A poor user experience or frustrating customer journey can negatively affect your site’s conversion rate, and ultimately your revenue.
Hotjar Team
Behavior analytics
How to set up a free Google Analytics heat map
If you’ve come here to learn more about Google Analytics heat maps, we have both good and bad news for you.
The bad news: Google stopped supporting its heatmap add-on in 2017, and recent reviews confirm that it doesn’t work anymore for a lot of users.
The good news: there's another way for you to get a free heatmap using Hotjar, and we guarantee it will work.
Hotjar Team
Latest articles
Behind the scenes
The secret ingredient of successful leadership
Business books on leadership often cite certain qualities that make a great leader, such as discipline, focus, determination, and perseverance. It feels like the stories of “great” leaders start with waking up at 5am, plunging into ice baths, or wearing the same style of outfit every day.
But in my experience, great leadership is not only about your daily routine but also about your willingness to connect with your team on a human level. In other words, to be vulnerable.
David Darmanin
Behind the scenes
We need to talk about mental health at work—full stop
Have you ever felt overwhelmed by all the tasks you have to complete, your jam-packed calendar or a looming deadline that you can’t seem to start—or that feeling like you can’t possibly do it all?
Who hasn’t, right?
David Darmanin
Ecommerce
5 ways to gain happier customers and why ecommerce search can be of big help
Happy customers spend more and shop with you for longer, and a positive experience is often valued more than price as a core brand differentiator.
The trick for online shops is how to build that happiness—and there’s a good chance it starts with ecommerce search.
Jake Rheude
Remote teams
10 tips to drive product teams in 2022
The new year is well underway. And by this time, many people’s New Year’s resolutions are well out of mind.
But we don’t want that to happen to you. So we put together a list of 10 New Year’s resolutions web-olutions to help you stay tuned into the goals you’ve set for yourself, and the goals you may have forgotten to put on your list.
Prioritizing product roadmaps, building trust with your team, and overcoming the biggest and baddest product obstacles. This, plus plenty more.
So grab your notebook and let’s make sure this year counts.
Hotjar Team
Remote teams
Inside Hotjar's sales team: an interview with Kristina Maleeva
Why do you work where you do? What made you want to work there? And now that you’re there, why do you decide to stay?
We sat down with Kristina Maleeva, our Sales team Lead for the Americas, to find out why Hotjar is where she calls home. We learned a lot about what makes Hotjar’s Sales culture unique, some company perks that you don’t hear every day, and an approach to remote work that actually works.
Hotjar Team
Remote teams
How empathy and experimentation drive Hotjar's product team rituals
How much time do you spend a week in recurring meetings? How many of those are actually useful to you? If you’re like most product teams, I’m sure you’ve got your remote rituals pretty much nailed by now. Right? Sure.
At Hotjar, we’ve been doing this fully remote work thing since 2014. Yes, way before the pandemic hit. And to be honest, we still haven’t nailed it. But we have learned some things along the way that have helped.
Hotjar Team
Remote teams
15 tools that our product teams actually use in 2022
Are you using the best tools for your job? It’s a trick question. Because there’s rarely a hands-down best tool for any job. What matters is that you find the ones that work for you and your team.
As part of a product team, you design and build products that customers love. How do you do that? By putting the customer first, and translating their needs into your product. So you need ways to interact with customers, gather all the research you’ve done, prototype and design solutions, and to keep track of progress along the way.
Hotjar Team
PX insights
Product manager prioritization: channel your inner PANDA!
Being a product manager can feel like being on safari. You’ve planned the route you want to take and you have your backpack full of tools ready—but changing environments and unpredictable creatures can derail your plans at any moment.
Hotjar Team
UX design and analysis
4 steps to being less wrong in UX Design, from Leandro Lima at Google
One of our values is that we challenge ourselves to grow. By hosting external speakers and sharing their ideas, we’re hoping to inspire you, our Hotjar community, to grow too.
Hotjar Team
Get more out of Hotjar
Guides to help you uncover product experience insights, and make the right changes to improve UX and create customer delight.