How to Use Your Dashboard

The Dashboard provides a high-level overview of your site’s key metrics using graphs and charts. Through regular viewing, your Dashboard enables you to stay on top of your most important metrics by filtering and comparing an aggregate of demographic and user-behavior metrics. You can also click through to each of Hotjar’s tools via the Dashboard to go deeper into the data.

In this article, we cover:

• An overview of your Dashboard and available metrics
• Common Dashboard use-cases
• How to use Dashboard filters

An overview of your Dashboard and available metrics

Within your Dashboard, you’re able to do the following:

1. Filter your Dashboard to focus on the data most relevant to you.
2. See trends across multiple metrics over time.
3. Click through to specific heatmaps, recordings, feedback, or surveys to zoom-in on the aggregated data and move from the quantitative to the qualitative to learn more.

Currently, the dashboard provides an aggregated view of the below metrics and we’ll continue to expand these over time.

• Total number of sessions
• Average session duration
• Average number of pages/session
• Bounce rate
• Top pages
• Average user sentiment
• Rage click & U-turn trends
• New vs Returning user sessions
• Devices, operating systems, browsers
• Top countries

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Common Dashboard use-cases

The dashboard is designed to be monitored regularly so you can keep track of the health of your site. The following are some of the most common use-cases:

• Compare users that convert with those that don’t convert.

  By applying filters to your Dashboard, you can check if those users who don’t convert are using a different device or browser than those that you support. You can also use average sentiment to watch relevant recordings and understand where users that don’t convert are experiencing problems and why this might be happening. Looking at the negative feedback of non-converting users can also help you understand the reasons for that sentiment.

• Check for unexpected problems after a website redesign.

  Monitoring your Dashboard’s rage clicks, u-turns, device and browser types, average session duration, and bounce rate will help give you confidence in whether a redesign has improved the user experience.

• Monitor trends based on ongoing work.

  Check for an improvement in user sentiment and a reduction in frustration and confusion as shown by less rage clicks and u-turns.

• Identify if one user’s interactions are because of a bigger issue.

  When finding a recording where a user rage clicks on a button, you can check the rage click widget on your Dashboard to see a timeline of rage clicks. This helps you to understand whether you’re seeing a one-time issue or a broader pattern that is trending over time and affecting more users.

• See where users are leaving your site and why they’re leaving.

  From your Dashboard, find your top exit pages and then analyze the heatmaps, recordings and feedback for those pages to see where users are leaving and why.

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How to use Dashboard filters

Filters allow you to display only a specific group of sessions that match your filtering criteria so you can more effectively focus your Dashboard analysis.

Date (available on all plans)

• Relative date ranges allow you to see data from up to 12 months in the past. Since the Dashboard feature was created on March 8, 2022, data collected prior to that date will not be included.
• Custom date ranges are useful if you want to compare data before and after changes were made to your site. Custom date ranges allow you to view Dashboard data from a specific time period, up to 12 months in the past subject to data retention. Find more details on data retention at Hotjar in our How long does Hotjar keep my data article.

Additional filters available only on our paid plans

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