In this guide, we'll give you some tips to help you get relevant insights from Hotjar. We’ll be covering some session tracking basics, applying filters, and the core Hotjar tools.
- Check your tracking settings
- Get a top-level view using Dashboards and by scanning key pages in Heatmaps
- Cut the noise: filter your session data
- Spot issues or bugs, and uncover opportunities with user feedback
1. Check your tracking settings
Adjusting your session targeting settings allows you to make sure you're getting the most out of our your plan's session limit, and tracking the user flows that are most important to you.
Below are some important areas to configure.
Decide whether to capture sessions shorter than 30 seconds
By default, Hotjar will track sessions that are longer than 30 seconds as they tend to provide more insight. However, if your users engage with your site in shorter time frames, you can select the option to capture sessions less than 30 seconds.
See our article on Session targeting & tracking settings for help with changing this setting.
Customize data input suppression settings
Hotjar suppresses keystroke data, such as text fields and inputs, by default and replaces it with asterisks (“***”). This is in line with our principles of protecting end-user privacy.
There may be situations where you want to adjust these settings to see non-sensitive keystroke data. For example, you might want to see what users type in your site's search bar to help you optimize for discoverability.
See our guide on How to Show Elements and Keystrokes in Data Collection to learn about suppression setting options.
Track your subdomains using the same subscription as your top-level domain
Hotjar supports tracking across subdomains that use the same top-level domain, for example help.hotjar.com being a subdomain of the top-level domain of hotjar.com.
By installing the top-level domain's tracking code on your subdomain, you can follow the full user journey across your sites.
See our How to Track Multiple Subdomains article for more details.
2. Get a high-level view using Dashboards and by scanning key pages in Heatmaps
It’s useful to understand how different sections of your site perform.
Hotjar Dashboards allow you to keep an eye on important metrics and then clickthrough to other Hotjar tools, such as Heatmaps, when you need to dive deeper into the data. You can create multiple Dashboards to track different sections of you site, or quickly view metrics that are important to your team.
For example, clicking on the heatmap icon in a Dashboard lets you dive into a heatmap for each of your key pages, such as your homepage or product pages. This can help you identify areas of your site that need further exploration.
From there, you can use the update heatmap screenshot feature to view data on pop-ups, dropdowns, and dynamic page content.
When you spot a trend in your heatmaps, you can get more context by viewing recordings containing that page or by gathering user responses with surveys.
3. Filter your session data
When you start collecting session data at scale, you’ll have more recordings than you have time to watch.
Applying session filters lets you narrow down and segment data even further so you can focus on specific actions or groups of users.
Here’s a few recommendations for filtering your session data to get you started:
- Sort your recordings by the Relevance, Frustration, or Engagement score.
- Apply the Rage Click or U-turn filter to curate your recordings list with sessions where users are running into issues.
- Add path filters for the key pages in a user journey you’re looking to analyze. For example, when analyzing your signup flow or finding drop-offs.
- Find sessions based on parts of your page where users have or haven't clicked using the Clicked element filter which requires no additional code on your site, or set up an Event using JavaScript.
- Filter by User Attributes to show sessions from specific users based on attributes you've passed to Hotjar from your own data.
- Save your favorite set of filters by clicking Save segment. With segments, you can quickly and repeatedly access your most relevant filters across Recordings and Dashboards.
Session filters can also be applied across other tools including Heatmaps, Surveys, Feedback, and your Dashboards.
You can also create and compare custom metrics using our Trends feature and apply filters to steps created within a Funnel (both Trends and Funnels are available on the Observe Business plan).(both Trends and Funnels are available on the Observe Scale plan).
4. Spot issues or bugs, and uncover opportunities with user feedback
Recordings let you see where users get stuck, but sometimes it can be difficult to understand the full context of why they are stuck. This is where Hotjar's Feedback tool comes in.
The Survey feedback widget is a real-time suggestion box for your product or site.
You can create your survey in many ways, including using our AI tools. When your survey widget is active you can use our Slack or Microsoft Teams integrations to automatically forward responses to you as they come in. You'll then be able to ping teammates to see the responses and jump into action if there’s an issue your users are highlighting.
For more guidance on using Hotjar and the Feedback tool to track down bugs and UX issues, see our How Can I Use Hotjar to Find Bugs or UX Issues? article