Hotjar helps you uncover how users interact with your website and how you can guide them better using not only visual design but also words. Combine insights from Recordings, Heatmaps, and Ask Tools to improve your written content and website structure.
Follow the steps described below to learn how to evaluate your existing website copy and validate your ideas for improvements:
- Identify opportunities for copy improvements
- Use Ask tools to validate your findings and test new copy ideas
- Investigate A/B test results with different copy variants
Identify opportunities for copy improvements
Create a heatmap for a page you want to improve.
Choose a page you'd like to improve, for example, one of your landing pages, your pricing page, or your sign-up page. Save the heatmap to access it anytime you want to analyze the results.
Analyze each heatmap type, noting down your observations and opportunities for improvement.
Find the copy that gets the most attention and the areas of your website that get overlooked. Use the Map types section to switch between heatmaps and better understand different aspects of the user journey:
Each heatmap type highlights a specific user behavior. Use the following suggestions and examples of questions to formulate assumptions while analyzing your heatmaps:
- All clicks: Evaluate your CTAs. Are there any CTAs that get significantly more attention than others? Are there any clicks that stand out from the general patterns?
- Move: Mouse movements can indicate user interest in the paragraphs they're reading. Are users focusing on the content you want them to? Follow their mouse movements and see if they skip any areas. These paragraphs might need new copy or a structure change.
- Scroll: Discover if your priority content isn't located too far down on the website. Are there any sections that stop users from scrolling down? Should you move some of the content to the top of your website? Do you need more CTAs to adjust your website to the scrolling habits of your website visitors?
- Engagement zones: You can use this heatmap to evaluate the copy that defines your website structure. It shows combined results for clicks, mouse movements, and scrolls. Does the navigation look clear? Are users particularly interested in specific sections or topics?
- Rage clicks: Spot points of frustration or sentences that possibly should've been links.
For further analysis, download a CSV of the heatmap data to check the numbers in more detail. This can also be useful to validate your A/B test results.
Click View recordings to investigate the opportunities you've identified using Heatmaps.
Watch the user sessions, paying extra attention to mouse movements and the moments where users get stuck. You can use session filters to find the most relevant recordings:
- Apply the Clicked element filter to learn more about a specific action the users take. Is the explanation clear? How are users reacting after clicking the CTA? Does it look like they've found what they expected, or do they look confused?
- Apply the Rage click and U-turn filters to find sessions that show clear signs of confusion, and think about how you could improve the guidance.
Use Ask tools to validate your findings and test new copy ideas
Set up a feedback widget or a survey.
Ask questions related to your copy, for example, "Are the setup instructions clear?" or "Are our pricing plans easy to understand?"
You can ask follow-up questions to better understand the initial user response, for example, "What would you add to the instructions?" or "At which point are you unable to move forward?"
Review the responses to validate your assumptions or discover new ideas.
You can filter your responses based on the user rating to focus only on positive or negative responses.
Evaluate your findings and compare them with your assumptions from Heatmaps and Recordings. Implement copy changes to your website or, if you need additional evidence, create an A/B test following the instructions below.
Investigate A/B test results with different copy variants
Create variants of copy for your A/B test and publish them on your website.
Summarize your learnings from the previous sections and create at least two versions of your website copy. It's also helpful to define your goals for the experiment and measure the results. For example, you could focus on improving the conversion rate for a specific landing page.
Set up Events to track results for different copy variants.
Create Events to differentiate between copy variants when you're filtering your session data.
You can set up Events in your website's code or send Events to Hotjar using Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, or Segment. To do that, you might need the help of a website developer.
To help implement the Event API code, we’ve provided further information in our Events API Reference Guide.
Compare heatmaps for each variant of the page.
Use the Events filter to create heatmaps for different copy variants.
You can also download the heatmaps by clicking Download JPG. You can use these images to present the results of your experiment to your team or other stakeholders.
Click View recordings to validate your findings from Heatmaps.
You can always select additional session filters to find the most relevant recordings.
Choose copy from the variant that brought better results and apply it globally to your website.
Make it a habit to check your Heatmaps and Recordings periodically to evaluate the performance of your new copy over time.