5 quick tips to get started with Hotjar

Optimize your Hotjar tracking, filter for meaningful insights, and discover where your users are struggling.

🔥 Who’s this guide for:	If you're just starting out using Hotjar Product Managers, Designers, Researchers, Marketers
🔥 What you’ll get out of it:	How to configure your Hotjar tracking to surface insights quickly and efficiently
🔥 What you’ll be doing:	Optimizing your session targeting & tracking Segmenting the user sessions you track Getting useful insights from Heatmaps and Recordings fast Finding issues and bugs with the help of user feedback Filtering Hotjar Recordings by your user IDs
🔥 What you’ll need:	Route 1: optimize some tracking basics, get your first useful insights -- 20 mins Route 2: additional setup to filter by custom data like User Attributes and events -- a couple of hours

• Don't Miss Relevant Data
• Get a bird’s eye view - scan key pages in Heatmaps
• Let’s get specific: segment your user sessions in Hotjar
• Cut the noise: filter your session Recordings
• Spot issues and bugs fast with your users’ feedback

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You’ve signed up, chosen a plan, and installed the Hotjar Tracking Code on your site - now what?

In this guide, we’ve got 5 tips to help you get relevant insights from Hotjar. We’ll be covering some session tracking basics, segmentation, and the core Hotjar tools. We’ve also added an indication of how much time you’ll need along the way, and if you might want to bring in your developer to help with advanced setup.

Let’s go!

#1 Don't Miss Relevant Data

Our first suggestion is pretty key: get your session tracking set up right. Whether you’re validating a problem space, working on issue discovery, or simply want to get a better understanding of your user journey—you want to be sure you’re capturing the user sessions you need.

• Which user sessions? On which parts of my site/product?

Will you want to analyze user behavior across your whole site or just specific parts of it? Are you capturing the volume of sessions you need? You can manage the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of session targeting and tracking for each site you’ve got on Hotjar. By default, Hotjar will track sessions 30 seconds or longer, so consider if your users engage with your product in shorter transactions, and customize this option as needed.

• What kinds of data do you need to track?

Will you want to see keystroke data? By default, Hotjar suppresses keystroke data (and quantity/order size data) and replaces it with asterisks (“***”). This is in line with our principles of protecting end-user privacy. There might be situations where you want to see non-sensitive keystroke data--for example, you might want to see what users type in the search bar to help you optimize for discoverability--so have a look at our guide on showing elements and keystrokes in data collection to learn about what’s allowed, and how to do it.

• Got subdomains?

Is your website and/or product set up across multiple subdomains? Hotjar supports cross-domain tracking for sites you own, so you can track the user journey and behaviors across all your subdomains.

#2. Get a bird’s eye view - scan key pages in Heatmaps

As you’re getting started in Hotjar, it’s useful to get a better understanding of how pages perform on an aggregate level, especially if you’ve got a specific site or product area in mind to optimize--that’s where Heatmaps come in. Spend the first couple weeks looking at key pages of your site or product area, for example, your homepage or main dashboard. Checking Heatmaps can also help identify areas of further exploration in Recordings or through user feedback.

We recommend exploring Heatmaps by date. One quick way to get started with this is using the date picker to compare user activity on key pages over the past week, and repeating this next week. What trends can you spot?

#3. Let’s get specific: segment your user sessions in Hotjar

Do you work with campaign or user segments? If so, you can surface insightful sessions from these specific audiences or users with User Attributes. It’s a great way to troubleshoot bugs and issues your users report, as well as discovering differences in user journeys across your user segments.

Does your org manage customer data through Segment? Hotjar can be added as a Destination in Segment, which makes it easy to pass data into Hotjar without the need for extra code.

Want to give your devs a head start? Help them scoping the effort needed for enabling User Attributes? Send over the Hotjar Identify API reference docs.

#4. Cut the noise: filter your session Recordings

Hotjar Recordings show your users experiencing your product: their behavior, their journey, and importantly - where they might be getting stuck.

Once you start tracking user sessions at scale, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have more recordings than you have time to watch. So which recordings to watch? Here’s a few filtering recommendations to get you started:

• Sort Recordings by the relevance score.
• Apply the Rage Click filter to curate your recordings list with sessions where users are running into issues.
• Working on improving a specific part of your product (e.g. signup)? Add URL filters for the key pages in the process/workflow you’re looking to analyze. Pro tip: If a step can’t be specified using a URL, set up event tags using JavaScript
• Filter by User Attributes -- your data, your way (See tip #3 above!).
• Save your favorite filters using ‘Save as segment’ for quicker access next time.

Filtering in Recordings gives you plenty of options to curate your list. Only got a minute? Go with Rage Clicks and Visited URL to see where users might be struggling on an important step/page in your product.

Consider setting up a routine--the sweet spot for Luke, Product Lead at Hussle, is to spend eight minutes every day watching Recordings.

Want an inside look at how we do it at Hotjar? Check out how our Product team filters recordings when doing discovery work.

#5. Spot issues and bugs fast with your users’ feedback

Recordings are a powerful way to see exactly where users get tripped up, but sometimes it can be difficult to grasp the full context of why when you’re watching a recording. This is where feedback comes in.

The Incoming Feedback widget is a real-time suggestion box for your product or site. There’s one on this very page you’re reading, over on the right ⏩👉 It helps us pick up on usability issues, bugs, or ways we could improve our products and content.

With Incoming Feedback, users can open it and give feedback whenever they want--quickly and visually--keeping your team on the pulse of how your users feel about your product. Once your widget is live try and build a regular routine of reviewing responses:

• Include reviewing feedback in your daily routine. It’s a proven ritual for Sam, PM at Hotjar, who used Incoming Feedback to pick up on a potentially huge issue that might have been missed otherwise. He reads IF for a few minutes every morning with a coffee, and with minimal time investment gets a really key pulse on how users are feeling.
• Get your Incoming Feedback flowing into Slack. It’ll make it easy to ping the right teammates to see the feedback and jump into action if there’s an issue your users are highlighting.

Pro tip: Looking to validate specific ideas or issues with users? Maybe you want to know how they feel about a certain feature, why they churned, or didn’t take a specific action. A Hotjar Survey is a great way to bring user feedback to how you prioritize, and can be targeted on specific pages. Want some inspiration? We’ve got you covered - explore our best survey templates.

 

-Words by Alex Jost (Product Marketing) & Ashlee Brown (Customer Success) @ Hotjar.