23 Hotjar Survey examples and questions from real websites

I picked 23 examples to show you what Surveys look like on real website pages and what they can be used for. Whether it’s your first time or you are a user feedback pro, I hope you'll find some inspiration in the way other companies are using Surveys... and perhaps steal an idea or two.

Table of contents

• What is a Hotjar Survey?

• 23 Hotjar Survey examples

• Getting started: create a Hotjar Survey in 6 easy steps

• Final thoughts

What is a Hotjar Survey?

A Hotjar Survey (also known in the industry as an on-site survey) is a small, slide-in poll that allows website owners or managers to ask survey questions and collect feedback from people who are visiting specific pages.

The surveys can be triggered at defined moments (e.g., after 20 seconds from landing, after visitors click on a specific button) and customized by color to match a specific brand.

AN EXAMPLE OF HOTJAR SURVEY

The survey questions you decide to ask depend entirely on what type of opinion survey you create, what market research you’ve performed to compile questions, and what types of answers you need. The below examples are a great place to start if you’re looking for the best poll questions to ask.

23 Hotjar Survey examples

Below are 23 examples of Surveys being used across a variety of websites—e-commerce sites, non-profit organizations, subscription pages, blogs, etc. They are organized by page to help you think through your users and their journey across your website, and I added an ‘if this was your site’ scenario for each to explain what you could achieve by setting up a similar survey on your pages.

Hotjar Surveys on a homepage

1. E-commerce homepage: Colgate

The survey on the homepage of shop.colgate.com investigates why customers are not going to make a purchase. The “What stopped you?” question offers 4 possible answers and allows for multiple boxes to be checked.

If this was your website → in addition to getting quantitative insight about the recurring reasons that stop people from purchasing, you could collect qualitative data points by giving them an opportunity to elaborate on their choice after thy click on their preferred answer(s). You could also, like Colgate does, customize the Survey to your company color for a fully on-brand experience.

2. E-commerce homepage: The Lowry

Unlike the multiple-choice option used on Colgate’s page, UK-based gift shop The Lowry only allows visitors to choose one of 5 available answers to the “What are you looking for today?” question.

If this was your website → answers to this question could help you understand what the majority of people expect to see on your homepage; you’d also get some qualitative insight about how to organize the main navigation menu to direct your visitors towards the most sought-after products.

3. Non-profit homepage: FoodCorps

American non-profit FoodCorps presents its homepage visitors with an open-ended question that asks “What did you come [here] to do today?”

If this was your website → you could use this question to understand the drivers that bring people to your site and the goals they're hoping to achieve once they get there.

You can’t see it in the screenshot, but the follow-up survey question asks FoodCorps visitors to rate “How easy was it to accomplish” their task by choosing one of 4 answer options: very easy, easy, somewhat challenging, difficult. You could use a similar rating system to match people’s drivers with their perception of how easy it is to complete a task on your site, and identify areas where you need to simplify or clarify the process.

🏆 Pro tip: FoodCorps also gives people the opportunity to leave their email address if they want to receive a follow-up answer. Collecting email addresses (and, obviously, emailing people back!) helps you ‘close the feedback loop’ and show these who invested time on your site that you really do care about them.

4. Subscription service homepage: allplants

Vegan delivery service allplants presents its visitors with a simple yes/no question: “Is there anything preventing you from trying allplants?”

If this was your website → when you want to understand what barriers are stopping people from converting, you can ask a straightforward yes/no question like this one to collect valuable information. In this example, after choosing “Yes” visitors are given the option to add a short write-up and express any potential concerns they might have; on choosing “No,” they are presented with a follow-up question that asks them if they have been able to find what they were looking for.

5. Course subscription homepage: Masterclass

Masterclass uses its homepage survey to ask people for content recommendations: “Help us choose our next class!”

If this was your website → you could ask this question to investigate what products to add to your e-commerce line, which experts to interview on a content-based website… the possibilities are pretty wide. You could start from a checkbox-style set of answers like Masterclass does or formulate this as an open-ended question, collect some survey data, and then feature all the frequently recurring answers as options in your Survey.

6. Review sites: Trustpilot

Trustpilot asks its homepage visitors an easy question: "Do you trust the information on [the website]?”

If this was your website → you could use this question to understand if people find your content/website/brand trustworthy, and take remedial action if a majority answered either "No" or "I don't know."

When surveying people with a similar question, you’d want to give them the option to elaborate further on their answer—and then dig through the result to compile a list of the most pressing issues to tackle.

Hotjar Surveys on an e-commerce product showcase

7. Made

On Made.com, the showroom page guides prospective buyers through their choice of products with a color picker functionality. Shortly after seeing the page, people are presented with a question that investigates “How did you hear about this showroom?”

If this was your website → this survey would help you with traffic attribution. Because the radio button only allows one answer, you could build a quantitative model of your traffic sources and weigh elements such as word-of-mouth or offline advertising that cannot be easily measured through standard analytics tools.

Hotjar Surveys on an e-commerce product listing (PLP) page

8. Neeta Naturals

Neeta asks a straightforward question on their product listing pages (PLPs): “How can we improve this page? Is anything missing?”

If this was your website → you could run this quick survey not just on your PLPs, but pretty much everywhere else, to understand what people are not finding. Through an open-ended question, you are not forcing people to choose between a limited set of possible answers; instead, you allow them to tell you—in their own words—how to make the website work better.

9. Mulberry Bush

On the category page for 'Wooden Toys', Mulberry Bush asks its visitors to rate the ease with which they found (or didn’t) what they are looking for.

If this was your website → you could use this question to understand the level of effort your potential customers need to make to accomplish a goal (i.e., finding the product(s) they are looking for) so you can make things easier, clearer, or simpler—or all of the above.

🏆 Pro tip: while Mulberry Bush is using a 0-10 rating that is typical of Net Promoter Score, you could also present your customers with a Customer Effort Score (CES) survey and ask them to rate how easy it had been to find what they were looking for on a 1-5 or a 1-7 scale (where the lowest score = extremely difficult and the highest score = extremely easy).

Hotjar Surveys on an e-commerce product page

10. Guitar Sauce

Australian guitar wiring site Guitar Sauce presents its customers with a simple, open-ended product page question: “What is your biggest frustration or question when finding a new wiring harness?”

If this was your website → you could ask this question (or variations that uses words like ‘concern’, ‘objection’, ‘doubt’) to understand what is stopping people from buying something and you'd then use the answers to re-organize your product pages to address such frustrations head-on. For example, if after analyzing your open-ended results you found that your market’s top frustrations was a lack of 360° product images, you’d be in a great place to know exactly what to give your potential customers.

11. K9 Clean

On its product pages, K9Clean shop asks a simple, direct question: “Will you be making a purchase today?”

If this was your website → you could ask the same question to understand the barriers that prevent your users from converting. Giving people the option to elaborate on their "No" answers allows you to get a comprehensive list of potential objections and frustrations that you can address in an updated version of the page.

12. FTC Cashmere

FTC Cashmere is a German-speaking e-commerce, but the question they ask is easy to translate: “How likely are you to recommend [this site] to a friend or colleague?”

If this was your website → you could use this question, known as a Net Promoter Score (NPS) question, to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. As a business metric, NPS tends to be used as a predictor of growth—the higher the score, the healthier the relationship with your customers who will act as evangelists for your company and its product, fueling word of mouth and generating growth.

🏆 Pro tip: the question returns a quantitative result on a 0-100 scale, but there is more to this survey than what you see here: the real power is in the follow-up survey questions you ask to understand why people scored you low or high. PS: read more on the topic in our complete NPS guide to see how to get maximum value out of this type of survey.

Hotjar Surveys on an e-commerce shopping cart

13. Riot

After potential customers have added one or more products to their shopping cart, e-commerce site Riot presents them with a powerful question: “If you could change anything on this page, what would you have us do?”

If this was your website → you could use this question to create a list of the top issues experienced by your customers and work to implement changes that solve them. Note that the question is not specific to the page—you could use the same survey on any part of your website where you have a high bounce or exit rate, and use the qualitative feedback to zero in on what the problem(s) might be.

Hotjar Surveys on a product landing page

14. Kaplan

On one of its course pages, training provider Kaplan asks a single-choice question to determine “What is the main purpose of your visit today?”

This first question is followed by a second one to identify the demographic category the visitor belongs to:

If this was your website → you could use this question sequence to create simple but accurate user personas—that is, semi-fictional characters based on the real people who currently use your website. Like Kaplan, you'd need to ask three basic questions:

• Who are you/What best describes you?

• What’s your main goal/What are you trying to achieve?

• What’s your main barrier to achieving this goal?

Based on this data, you'd be able to create your user personas and focus your efforts on improving their experience. If you want to know more, here is a step-by-step guide to creating user personas with a Survey—exactly like in this example.

Hotjar Surveys on a pricing page

15. Calcworkshop

On their pricing plans page, CalcWorkshop asks a variation on a question we’ve seen before: “Is anything stopping you from joining CalcWorkshop today?”

If this was your website → if you have a SaaS or subscription website, you could use this question on your pricing page to understand last-minute objections to signing up for a paid plan. In the context of a pricing page, an alternative formula could be “Is pricing clear?” (yes/no), with a follow-up question that asks “What’s confusing you about pricing?” if your visitors respond negatively.

Hotjar Surveys on a Knowledgebase

16. Razorpay

Payment system Razorpay asks visitors to rate their knowledge base articles on a scale from 1 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). Depending on the answer, they offer a follow-up question where people can add some context to their answer.

If this was your website → this type of conditional logic (where you present visitors with different follow-up questions depending on their first answers) allows you to dig deeper into the context behind somebody’s score and paint a comprehensive picture of the good and the bad on your website. On choosing "Other," your visitors should be able to provide a quick write-up; eventually, if a lot of people added the same information, you could use it as another of the option you present them with upfront.

Read more: the team at Razorpay doesn't just use Surveys to improve their pages—they pair their on-site surveys with session recordings to find design flaws and build a superior product. Check out their Hotjar case study from 2019.

17. Trivago

The knowledge base on Trivago asks its Spanish-speaking users to express the degree of usefulness of the manual on a scale from “Not at all” to “Very useful.”

If this was your website → you would use this question to understand if the information you provide is useful or needs improving. Note that one of the options available here is “I don’t know, I haven’t read it yet:” if you added a similar option to your survey and found that a lot of people selected it, you could use this information to delay the survey. Instead of launching it immediately after the page loads, you could introduce a delay of 10, 20, 60, etc. seconds and see whether the answers change.

18. Hotjar documentation

This is the Hotjar Knowledge Base, where our users and customers can find technical write-ups about the product. Do you notice something odd?

…there isn’t a Survey in the screenshot!

Up until now, you've only seen Surveys that appear when people land on a page or after they’ve spent some time on it. But Surveys can also be triggered when people perform a specific action—in this case, the little survey only appears when people click the “No” button in response to the “Was this article helpful?” question. See it in action:

If this was your website → just like we do, you could decide to use JavaScript triggers and only display your Survey if people perform a specific action. In this example, the Survey is only triggered after a “No” response (never after a “Yes” one); this both alerts our support team to the fact that something may be missing from their content and gives our users an opportunity to explain what they need—so we can give it to them!

19. Miro

Hotjar Surveys on a sign-up page

On their sign-up page, Miro ask potential new customers who are about to leave what is stopping them from signing up. This is another variation on page-exit questions we've noticed before.

If this was your website → if you have a SaaS or subscription website, you could ask the question at the point of conversion to unlock useful insight about why customers stopped on the very last step in the journey.

20. Museum: British Museum

Hotjar Surveys on information & content pages

The British Museum recently (Dec 2019) went through a website redesign, and its team is using a Survey to check user satisfaction with the design on a 1-5 scale:

After the quantitative rating, the poll continues by asking visitors if they had visited the British Museum before (Yes/No option) and if they were able to find what they were looking for (Yes/No option).

If this was your website → you could use a similar poll to investigate the effectiveness of your website redesign process, and use specific follow-up questions to zero in on elements you are particularly interested in (for example, by asking visitors how easy it was for them to find specific elements or whether they spotted elements for additional improvement). If you’re thinking about a redesign, check out our website redesign tips beforehand.

21. Government pages: Mainroads Western Australia

On one of its public-facing resource pages, the Government of Western Australia asks citizens a straightforward “Were you able to find what you were looking for?”

It’s the same question from example #7 and you can use it with the same logic—the only difference here is that, instead of offering a 0-10 scale, this survey uses a simple yes/no approach with an option to add an explanation after choosing the negative answer.

22. Education blog: Northeastern University

On its blog pages, Northeastern University asks readers for help choosing content formats: “If we offered additional resources on this topic, which formats would you be most interested in?”

If this was your website → you could use this question to understand what types of content formats to invest in and/or what content strategy to plan in the future. You could obviously introduce formats that are more relevant to your audience (i.e., podcasts, video courses, etc.) as part of the available options.

🏆 Pro tip: bonus point for pairing this question with a demographic one that allows you to cross-reference the poll results. Some of the feedback might come from people who are not your ideal/target market, and you should weigh their answers differently so that your plans are not skewed by someone who was never going to use your content in the first place.

23. Industry consultants: Inbound Asia

This poll is placed on an SEO-related content page on Inbound Asia and asks people “What marketing channel does your company use primarily?”

If this was your website → if your company specializes in a particular service (in this case, SEO), you could use this question to investigate a prospective customer's interest in and need for your help. In this example, the options include SEO, Advertising, Community management, Blog writing, and Word of mouth or online marketing, but you could easily replace them with anything that is relevant to your market.

After choosing “SEO,” people are presented with a follow-up question about “What kind of information do you want to know more about?” and a few options to choose from. Again, you could use this data to create new content resources and/or expand or update any existing ones in need of a refresh.

24. The Hotjar blog

I couldn’t write a round-up of Survey examples without using one that you might have seen on this page (meta!). We very simply ask: “What did you think of this piece?”

We use this quick survey to ask for your feedback on our pieces, and we use the yes/no format to build a quantitative understanding of whether or not they are working. For example, here was the trend during the last two weeks of July:

We also give you a follow-up option to elaborate on why you thought a piece was great or share what you thought was missing. We then read through the results to figure out what we need to do more, or less, of:

Getting started: create a Hotjar Survey in 6 easy steps

Start here: create a new Survey

To create and add a Survey to your website, you need A) a Hotjar account (sign up for a free one) and B) to install the Hotjar script on your site.

Once you’re done, only 6 steps separate you from the websites you’ve seen in this article:

Click on “Surveys” in the Hotjar dashboard, then “New Survey.”

Step 1: name your Survey

Choose a descriptive name to help you identify your Survey easily.

Step 2: pick your question(s)

Pick the question(s) you want to ask your website visitors; you can copy some of the examples you’ve seen in this article, use the pre-written questions available in our question bank, get inspired by this list of 28 customer feedback questions, or come up with something entirely of your own.

Step 3: customize your Survey’s appearance

Pick your Survey’s language, its position on your page (left or right), and its background color (so you can match it to your own brand). When you are on a Business plan, you can remove the Hotjar branding as well like you may have seen in a few of the examples we used.

Step 4: select page targeting

Choose on which device(s) to show your Survey, on which pages it will show up, based on which specific JavaScript triggers (go back and review example 16 for an example) and how many of your visitors will be exposed to it.

Step 6: send live!

Set the survey status to ‘Active’ and you’re all set.

Final thoughts

If you don’t already have a Poll on your site, I highly recommend you set up one asap. After collecting some feedback, you’ll be able to:

• Understand your visitors and what drives them to your website

• Understand what they like and don’t like (and, most importantly why)

• Find troublesome pages that need fixing

• Create better-converting pages

• Change, update, or revise your content strategy

• Measure the customer experience (for example, through an NPS survey)

I guarantee that the insight you get will amply repay you of the 5-10 minutes you spent setting up your Poll. Give it a try on us!

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.