Combining heatmaps with other tools for more insight

Instead of having to go online and research every behavior analytics tool and spend hours figuring out how to use them, we’ve done it for you—this list contains five popular product discovery and experience tools that can be integrated with heatmaps to give you a better understanding of your product and users.

1. Heat maps + traditional analytics

With traditional web analytics tools like Google Analytics, you’ll get plenty of quantitative data points and learn about large-scale traffic and usage patterns—but numbers and charts will not, by themselves, answer questions you might have about what people want from your site or product, where they get confused, and where their attention goes.

By combining traditional analytics with heat maps, you can start a deeper investigation and find out the why behind your product and website metrics. Got a page with lots of traffic that doesn’t convert? Set up a heat map, go through the heatmaps analysis checklist, and start seeing what’s making people stumble.

2. Heat maps + A/B testing

Heat maps and A/B testing are a two-way street: you can use heat map data to define a hypothesis for a future split test, and you can also run heat maps on A/B test variations to provide more insight into why different versions of product pages are or aren’t successful on the website.

Using Hotjar’s Continuous Heatmaps, you can filter customer data based on user attributes such as their organizational roles, job titles, and even the language they speak. Hotjar also allows you to filter heatmaps based on a specific date—for example, if you’re a start-up, you can monitor the progress of your product or website from start to finish, determine changes to make, and validate whether they’re successful or not!

3. Heat maps + session recordings

While heat maps help you visualize data from page visitors in aggregate, session recordings are created for individual users and show you their actions across multiple pages.

Session recordings (also known as visitor recordings or session replays) are renderings of user browsing sessions, and they help you bring more clarity to some of the insights you pick up from a heat map. Instead of making assumptions about the clicking, tapping, and/or scrolling you see on a heatmap, try viewing some session replays and see how your users actually interact with your site.

 4. Heat maps + on-page feedback

Quantitative data is crucial when making data-informed UX decisions, but don’t overlook the value of qualitative (non-numerical) data.

Use heat maps to find design issues and product opportunities on your website, then ask your users for feedback and learn why they are not finding what they need or what you need to do to improve their experience. A simple one-question survey that pops up on the page might be all you need to kick-start some UX changes you hadn’t considered before.

5. Heat maps + highlights

Highlights are Hotjar’s shiny new feature that lets you ‘favorite,’ download, and share particular user insights with your colleagues without getting lost in a sea of useless or irrelevant information. In short, it saves you time and can be included in presentations to build use-cases for feature changes, product updates, or design changes.

But, how do you integrate heatmaps with highlights?

You can also create a collection of heatmaps (seen below) that highlight different product and user experiences that help managers and business owners prioritize bug issues and validate ideas.