7 Hotjar features you may not know about

So I went to a few of our Product and Success team members, and asked them one question: “What are the features our customers and users most often react to with ‘WOW!, I didn’t know I could do that’?” And that’s how this list of 7 things you may not know you can do with Hotjar was born:

1. Narrow down Session Recordings by rage clicks, u-turns, and referrers

2. Save your filter combinations as segments

3. Export Heatmap analytics data as a .csv

4. Customize Incoming Feedback to your brand

5. Forward Incoming Feedback replies to a support email

6. Trigger surveys after specific user actions

7. Use Hotjar to run your Net Promoter Score® surveys

1. Narrow down Session Recordings by rage clicks, u-turns, and referrers

Session Recordings are one of the best tools in your UX toolbox when you want to watch how people interact with your site and spot issues or opportunities for improvement. But watching tens or hundreds of random recordings is not a great use of your time: narrowing them down to the ones that can really help you is a much more efficient solution.

Just a few months back, in the summer of 2019, we launched a new filtering system that allows you to filter recordings by:

• Rage clicks → so you can review sessions where people quickly and repeatedly click on the same element(s) out of frustration

• U-turns → to watch Recordings of people who navigate to a page then quickly return back to the previous one

• Referrer URL → so you can watch recordings of people who come to your site from a specific traffic source (e.g. a Facebook campaign)

➡️Try it yourself: from your Recordings tab, select ‘Add filter’ and pick one (or more) of the options listed under ‘Source’ and ‘Behavior’. Your list will be narrowed down according to these specific parameters, and you’ll be able to go straight to the insights you need.

Note: if you can't see these filters in your dashboard, you might be on legacy Hotjar pricing. Speak to our Support team to upgrade the account to our current pricing model.

2. Save your filter combinations as segments

Let’s stay with Recordings for an extra minute: you can save any filter combination as a segment and return back to it whenever you need—which saves you significant time, particularly if you have recurring goals.

➡️Try it yourself: from the Recordings tab, select relevant filters (in my example, I selected the ones I’d use if I wanted to review sessions from the last 30 days + from desktop users + who visited the homepage + saw more than 3 pages + stayed for 3+ minutes), click on ‘Save as Segment’, and give your segment a name.

Now you can come back to this segment whenever you need to, and find relevant recordings in just a couple of clicks.

3. Export Heatmap analytics data as a .csv

Heatmaps are a great visual tool to help you see, at a glance, how people interact with specific pages—and raw heatmap analytics data can be used to benchmark and measure your optimization efforts. It all happens from the ‘View Data’ button:

Clicking on ‘View Data’ opens up a window that lists all your page elements and the number of clicks (in the case of a click map) or visualizations (in the case of a scroll map) they received.

➡️Try it yourself: when you are looking to set growth goals for specific pages, consider tying them to the numbers you see in this window/in the complete .csv export. It’s hard to argue with data points such as "This element got a 100% increase in clicks after being optimized”!

4. Customize Incoming Feedback to your brand

When you are not quite ready for a full on-site survey but you want to collect qualitative feedback about your page(s) anyway, Incoming Feedback is the tool for you. We ourselves love using it to get in-the-moment reactions from our visitors—in fact, you’ve likely seen the widget on the site and inside the Hotjar platform:

What may not be as obvious is that you can customize the IF widget to show different icon styles and colors when you are on a Business plan—there are plenty of websites where our traditional ‘buddy’ style doesn’t quite cut it, and if that’s your case, no problem: you can choose the one you prefer from an easy drop-down menu.

➡️Try it yourself: whenever you create a new feedback widget, look for the ‘Reactions Style’ menu in the ‘Appearance’ tab and customize it to your heart’s content.

Pro tip: pick your main brand color and use it as an accent color for a fully on-brand experience.

5. Forward Incoming Feedback replies to a support email

This one can be a pretty quick win for support and design teams: when people use Incoming Feedback to leave a piece of feedback and add their email address, you can forward their reply to one or multiple email addresses—so you can be sure that those who must see this feedback, will.

➡️Try it yourself: when you turn on Incoming Feedback, add all relevant email addresses into the box shown above.

6. Trigger Surveys after specific user actions

Here is a little-known Survey feature that will help you improve the way you collect feedback once you hear about it. A Survey doesn’t have to show up as soon as somebody gets on the page: if you are on a Plus or Business Plan, you can make Surveys appear after your visitors have reached a specific part of a page, or as soon as they click on a specific element using JavaScript triggers,

See it in action: here is what happens on our Knowledge Base, where a Survey is only triggered after somebody clicks on a ‘No’ button:

➡️Try it yourself: this one needs a bit of JavaScript wizardry. Start by checking out the step-by-step resource on using JavaScript triggers with Surveys, which will show you how to add your triggers in the space below when you create your next Survey:

7. Use Hotjar to run your Net Promoter Score® surveys

According to my colleagues in the Customer Success team, not all Hotjar customers know that they can run Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys through Hotjar, and that Hotjar will calculate the NPS results automatically and display the results in a dashboard like the one below:

➡️Try it yourself: whether you want to display your NPS survey on your website or share it with your customers via email, follow our step-by-step instructions and create an NPS survey with Hotjar. Bonus points for you if you read the rest of the Net Promoter Score guide we created to explain why NPS is important in the first place, what questions you should ask in your survey, and what you should do with the information you collect.

Wrapping up

Hotjar helps you understand the behavior of your website users and get their feedback through tools such as heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys—but there is a lot you can do with these tools that may not be immediately obvious.

The 8 examples above are a good starting point, but let me finish on an Editor’s promise: if you, too, have recently discovered there is something you can do in Hotjar that you didn’t know about, reach out (fioAThotjar.com) and we’ll add it when we next update this piece.

PS: thanks to my colleagues Coleen and Alison who shared their experience and helped me come up with this list.

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