Ready for a quick overview of one of my favorite web tools for tracking conversions? If you’ve never used a website tracking tool before, you’re going to love this.
What is it?
You’ve got options for website user tracking tools. The top two that we’ve tried out are HotJar and Mouseflow.
What exactly is this magic tool, and how would it help you convert visitors on your site more effectively?
Well, let’s back up. It isn’t exactly magic – but it’ll feel like looking into a crystal ball of insight once you start using it.
Basically, it gives you a live-action review of how people are interacting with your site.
Here’s a quick video showing you what a typical recording in HotJar looks like:
Why It’s Awesome
- It’s one heck of a Visual Analytics Tool.
Data, data, data. Who likes mulling over numbers and data sheets? Website functionality & user experience tracking tools are priceless for people who want to analyze their site in a more dynamic and interesting way.
If you are the type of person who loves looking at numbers (I’m with you, bud), HotJar and other tools still provide that as well.
2. You get a better understanding of your Customers & Conversions
Other than requesting users to give you feedback on their experience, you’re not really going to know where Friction lives on your site.
Friction is any moment you’ve caused a delay in your customers getting what they need. It’s a big, bad speedbump on the road of your customer’s journey. You want to minimize them as much as possible.
Visual recording tools for your website tracking can give you incredibly valuable insight into where these friction points live so you can eliminate them.
Here’s an example:
You notice that you’re getting traffic to a page on your site but the bounce rate is high.
You add two options for CTAs – one at the top that’s a generic “Contact Us” and one near the bottom that’s an eguide download.
You can’t figure out why you’re just not getting engagement on your super valuable, awesome eguide that you invested a lot of time into.
Well, with a tool like HotJar, you can view recordings of that landing page and discover that lo! and behold! your visitors are never making it far enough down the page to see your eguide prompt.
Now, you’ve got options to adjust how and when that guide displays to try to improve your conversions.
3. It’s Free for Most Small Businesses
Who doesn’t love free?
This doesn’t come without a little caveat. You, of course, don’t get unlimited features or recordings. But if you’re a smaller business doing basic web work or marketing, then you’re likely not channeling thousands of visitors through your site daily and can get away with the base package.
4. Heatmaps are HOT
Data is sexy when you’re an analyst. Even when you’re not, heatmaps are hot features to derive some real valuable information from.
Let’s say you’re a business owner looking to discover the focal points for your homepage.
Run a heatmap and get that snapshot you need to figure out where people are clicking or hovering.
Here’s a great example of getting an impression of heatmap value. You can see that Missoula is a big ticket focal point for the location-specific pages.
Aside from that, heatmaps can help you identify user experience issues such as attempted clicks on items that are NOT, in fact, clickable.
This is a common branding issue that sites have where graphic elements and font styling aren’t consistent, leading to confusion on what’s actually a clickable element.
5. Easy to Use & Set Up
It’s almost criminal how easy it is to set these things up.
I’d love to say go out and hire your web person (that’s me) to install this complicated code (so we can get paid), but I’m a terrible liar.
These codes are sometimes as simple as installing their dedicated plugin – like HotJar.
If you have admin access to your website, just find the plugin install on your Plugin menu, hit “go”, and you’re in.
Have you feeling like a Hacker:
6. Discover (Even More) Issues
Still not getting all the feedback you need? Well, these tools also can implement feedback forms to get insight from your customers. Customize the language and request to get to the heart of what they were looking for to begin with.
How We Used It
Traffic data is great but if those visitors aren’t converting, then you need user experience data to find out why.
We implement these reporting tools as part of our monthly review to get better insight into how people are interacting with our customers’ websites.
We want to make the most of our investment into their branding – such as those super awesome eguides. If we aren’t seeing the right ROI (return on investment) from our campaign, we want to know what can be improved.
We review these types of data monthly and use that info to make improvements.
You may find that you don’t enjoy pouring through endless recordings to see what people are up to – but I do!
