The Hotjar blog

The term 'omnichannel' has long surpassed its initial buzzword status to become a cornerstone of modern retail strategy. The consumer landscape has changed dramatically, driven by technological advancements and evolving consumer preferences. 

Today's consumers are channel-agnostic and incredibly discerning, often interacting with brands across multiple touchpoints before making a purchase.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a popular inbound marketing strategy for good reason. Done well, it works wonders—magnetically drawing users from Google to your website. 

But writing for SEO is challenging. Search engines use complex algorithms to sift through billions of pieces of content, selecting a treasured top ten for each query. You have to use a seemingly magic combination of ingredients on your web page for a chance at a high-ranking spot on the list.

Stepping into a marketing leadership role can stir up a mix of emotions: excitement, optimism, and, often, a gnawing doubt. "Do I have the right skills to truly lead and inspire?" If you've ever wrestled with these uncertainties, you're not alone.

Whether you’re a seasoned sales representative or a marketing newcomer, each conversation with a potential customer is an opportunity to nurture a lasting relationship and drive business goals forward. 

But without a clear strategy and solid call preparation, you may leave customers unengaged or unconvinced, leading to lost sales and revenue.

So how do you ensure you’re fully equipped to meet—and exceed—a prospect’s needs and expectations before you’re on the call?

Whether you're sifting through campaign attribution data or reviewing performance reports from different sources, extracting meaningful business insights from vast amounts of data is an often daunting—yet critical—task many marketers face. So how do you efficiently evaluate your results and communicate key learnings? 

This is where business intelligence (BI) tools come in, transforming raw data into actionable insights that drive informed, customer-centric decisions. 

Today, marketing trends evolve at the speed of technology. Ecommerce businesses that fail to update their marketing strategies to meet consumers where they are in 2023 will be left out of the conversations that drive brand success. 

If you’re just starting out on your ecommerce journey, you’ll have one critical question: which platform is the perfect fit for your business?

With so many options, from full-scale ecommerce solutions to website builders, it’s not easy knowing which one will set your online business up for success.

From hidden shipping costs to an overly complicated checkout process, there are many reasons online shoppers ditch their carts without completing a purchase.

While abandoned shopping carts are common for many ecommerce brands, they don't have to be. By understanding why people abandon their carts, you can address these common cart abandonment reasons in advance, enabling you to optimize your ecommerce site, win happy customers, and make more sales.

Choosing which ecommerce platform to launch your store on is no small decision. You’re picking the policies that’ll govern your business for its whole life, and a set of technical capabilities that’ll make or break the customer experience. 

With more than 2 million daily users, Shopify is the Titan of ecommerce platforms. BigCommerce, with around 1 million users overall, is hot on its heels. Weighing up the merits of Shopify vs Bigcommerce is no mean feat, not least since they’re both great platforms that host thousands of successful ecommerce businesses.

As an ecommerce business owner (or a soon-to-be one), you have a long list of decisions to make.

Choosing a platform to host your store is a big one. Got Shopify and WooCommerce among your options and want a thorough comparison of the two? You’re in the right place.

Choosing the right platform for your ecommerce store can be tricky. With slick marketing campaigns, long lists of features, and countless reviews to consider, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed before you even make your first sale.

That’s why we’ve done the hard work for you and compared two of the most popular ecommerce platforms. Who will come out on top in the battle between Shopify vs Wix?

It's no secret that bad or broken user experience (UX) drives up cart abandonment and, consequently, revenue loss. But cart abandonment reasons differ from brand to brand, site to site, and user to user.

Hear it straight from your customers when you create relevant surveys with the Hotjar Surveys tool. By including the voice of the customer (VoC) in your analysis, you’ll unlock insights that help fine-tune your UX and, ultimately, improve conversions and sales.

Online shopping is the future—and the future is definitely here. 

If you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer, it’s increasingly difficult to remain relevant without an online store. Customers expect the convenience and variety of online shopping, and meeting your customer’s expectations is essential to remain in business.

Are you investing significant effort and budget into your SEO, ads, and overall marketing but seeing no increase in sales? If users fill their carts on your site only to abandon them, much of that investment goes to waste.

But you already know this—that’s why you’re looking for cart abandonment statistics: to benchmark your online store against and determine what you really need to change in your ecommerce buying experience.

It’s hard to avoid all the water cooler talk about a looming recession. 

If you spend any time on social media—today’s virtual water cooler—a quick scroll through your feed will have you anxiously gripping your computer mouse and googling ways to recession-proof your business.

Hotjar’s heatmaps and recordings provide context to real data. Here’s how the Hotjar team uses their tools to improve site performance and marketing efforts. 

Brands worry about how to treat customers. The answer is to show them love by listening and creating flawless experiences that aren’t frustrating. Here’s how. 

The customer is at the center of all marketing activities in product-led marketing, ultimately driving their success. Here’s how we use product-led marketing at Hotjar. 

There’s no perfect organization structure, but implementing marketing squads at Hotjar has increased happiness and efficiency—here’s how we made it work.

It’s easy to guess what our customers want. But assuming we know them better than they know themselves can lead to failed campaigns, miscommunication, and churn. 

Happy customers spend more and shop with you for longer, and a positive experience is often valued more than price as a core brand differentiator. 

The trick for online shops is how to build that happiness—and there’s a good chance it starts with ecommerce search.

David Darmanin, one of Hotjar’s founders, launched two startups before Hotjar took off—but both companies crashed and burned. Each time, he and his team spent months trying to design an amazing new product and user experience, but they failed because they didn’t have a clear understanding of what the market demanded.

You can now install the Hotjar tracking code on your WordPress website from the newly released, official Hotjar plugin for WordPress. Watch the 1-min video below to learn how.

When you get on a website and read a wall of customer testimonials that gush with nothing but praise, it’s not surprising if your first reactions are skepticism or suspicion.

At Hotjar, we use Hotjar in everything we do.

Whether it’s building, writing, scaling, designing, or hiring - Hotjar helps us make Hotjar better. We’re firm believers of practicing what we preach (and we 100% believe in our product) so using Hotjar to grow Hotjar is a must for our team.

I was hired by Hotjar last year to lead content, which I thought meant the blog, but it didn’t. Our CEO, David Darmanin, had a much wider scope in mind. It just took me a while to figure that out.

Once I did, the idea to launch a podcast began to evolve (the evolution of which we’ll cover in our next post, because it’s an interesting story of trial, error, and a picture of a light-saber wielding Rand Fishkin).

And now, we are launching 'The Humans Strike Back' as a podcast, and a website, and a community about helping each other succeed as individuals, as employees, and as business owners by putting people first.

Rand Fishkin found success by transforming his mother’s small business marketing firm into a $45M+ marketing software company. Over the course of 11 years, he helped to design and launch a multitude of software products and made his fair share of mistakes.

Lucky for you, Rand is an open book.

Here are four lessons he learned building a $45M software company, based on a conversation we had with Rand Fishkin on Hotjar’s podcast 'The Humans Strike Back'.

Ask 10 marketers about marketing funnels and you’ll probably get 10 different answers. Why is that? A marketing funnel isn't a one-size-fits-all strategy; your marketing funnel is uniquely tailored to how your buyer buys.

Most startup founders dream of creating a single successful company.

David Cancel has done it 5 times.

His latest company, Drift, has already raised $107 million in funding and acquired over 70,000 active users in just 4 years.

So how did he do it?

The key has been a customer-driven methodology that David stumbled upon almost by accident at one of his previous companies.

Sticking an opt-in gate in front of your content and counting how many people go through it has become the go-to solution to measure lead generation and marketing success. But is inundating people with pop-ups that promise mind-blowing content in exchange for their email address really the best way to go about building your brand/business?

If you’re building a startup or digital business (or want to), the worst thing you can ever do is fail slowly.

Failing fast and often won’t hurt you in the long run because you can recover or change course quickly. In fact, failure is part of the entrepreneurial world and building a business. But it needs to be fast.

Just to be clear – by failure, I'm not just referring to the entire business. It might be a feature, your onboarding, or the user experience.

David Brown talks about “failing fast” this way:

“Fail fast isn’t about the big issues, it’s about the little ones. It’s an approach to running a company or developing a product that embraces lots of little experiments with the idea that some will work and grow and others will fail and die.”

Yet, again and again, people with ideas spend too much time obsessing over the theory and the big idea – but at the end of the day, what matters the most is how quickly and effectively you can get to a big enough share of your target market.

Because, if you're too slow to take your idea to market...

...you risk ending up dead in the water.

In this post, I want to let you in on the entire process that went into developing ‘The Humans Strike Back’ by Hotjar; a podcast, a website, and a community about helping each other succeed as individuals, as employees, and as business owners by putting people first.

It’s been a winding road, but hopefully, in seeing how this idea developed, you’ll gain insight into how to create your own purpose-driven marketing campaign that not only shines a spotlight on your company, but makes the world a better place for humans to live. Some of this may sound familiar, if you’ve signed up for our emails, but here I go into even greater depth and share the whole story of our journey to get back to being human.

It was my first job in digital marketing and I wanted to make an impression as quickly as possible.

I was working for a SaaS company in Dublin and one of my objectives was to increase the conversion rate from visitors to paid customers.

I really had no clue where to start.

I remember looking at the websites of major SaaS companies to get some ideas: Mailchimp, SalesForce, Zendesk...

Zendesk's registration form caught my eye. They only had two fields: "First Name" and "Email".

We had eight.

I remember searching for articles mentioning best practices on how to increase form conversions and found plenty. The vast majority had “Reduce the number of fields” as the first item in their list.

In the world of marketing, there is no shortage of approaches and strategies.

One such method is called customer-centric marketing. We were fortunate enough to interview Bill Macaitis, a marketing leader who served Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack, about this approach, and learn exactly how customer-centric marketing has helped him—and can help you—grow these companies.

Let’s face it: something is probably off if potential customers leave your ecommerce site before they make it past the first page they land on. Whether they can’t find what they’re looking for or just don’t like what they see, it’s essential for any ecommerce business to be aware of what pages visitors ‘bounce’ from in high numbers—and why. 

This article covers several customer-centric tools for understanding and reducing ecommerce bounce rate.

WordPress powers over 33% of the web, making it the world’s most popular content management system (CMS). With that number of websites comes a huge amount of owners, marketers, product managers, and UX professionals who can benefit from learning more about the behavior and needs of people who visit their sites.

In this quick article, we show you how to use Hotjar’s official WordPress plugin, which makes it easier for any WordPress user to install Hotjar and start collecting useful behavior and feedback insights. We also share five ways to use Hotjar heatmaps, surveys, and session recordings to spot bugs, increase conversions, and improve user experience on your WordPress site.

We don’t just design and build Hotjar—we’re users, too. Insights from Hotjar regularly drive our decisions, keeping customer-centricity top of mind. 

This article unpacks how our product design team uses Hotjar for interaction design, a sub-discipline of user experience (UX) design.

Here's a hard truth: some customers lose their initial excitement toward your company's products or services as time passes; others choose your competitors' offerings from the get-go. More often than not, this failure to resonate with target customers reveals an “It's not you, it's us” situation: it shows you've neglected to understand what users truly want and need.

You're here because you know better than to let this happen. As a designer, you want to polish your approach and pick up on the finer details of the user experience (UX). And if you’re hoping to win people’s business and loyalty, you're right to shift your focus to empathy-driven design.

You can only choose a wonderful present if you really know the person you’re buying it for. By the same token, you can only create an outstanding product or service when you really know the person you’re building it for. 

That’s the theory behind the ideal customer profile (ICP) framework. 

You've painstakingly built a website to capture users' heads and hearts. But despite your effort, the site's bounce rates are high, conversions could be better, and users abandon their shopping carts faster than a kitten chasing a laser pointer. 

This is the story of many website designers, UX designers, and online businesses—and these all-too-common issues are often symptoms of user frustration. 

No business can please all prospects all the time (if you can, tell us your secrets!). But suppose a customer is unhappy with your brand, product, or service. Would you rather hear it from them directly, or find out by chance on social media or third-party review sites?

Capturing direct feedback from real users certainly sounds like the better option—and, luckily, it’s become much easier to do. 

Nowadays, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with limited resources can conduct online surveys at any point of the buyer's journey—for free. With best-in-class survey tools, you can customize the survey flow and elements, deploy your questionnaire, and collect quality responses faster than ever.

Feedback is a powerful way to connect with your customers, get objective opinions, and make optimizations that have a real impact. 

But proactively requesting user insights can be challenging, and responses are often vague or irrelevant. Navigating these pain points is crucial for making the most of your customers’ feedback.

Your team has been working hard on a brand-new website, and you’re ready to hit ‘publish’. Or, at least, you think you are. How can you be confident your site is up to scratch when nobody’s even seen it yet?

Creating a website prototype gives you an outside perspective from real people—and the opportunity to fix issues before you go live.

In our digital age, creating a great-looking webpage is no longer enough to draw in customers. Your website needs to be trustworthy, user-friendly, and fast-loading to encourage customers to stay and purchase your product. 

In short, your web page needs to offer a great user experience (UX).

But how do you create a great user experience? With constant updates to search engine algorithms, it can be tricky to know what to focus on to make a difference.

Tracking where users move and rest their mouse cursors helps you build an image of what attracts attention (or doesn’t) on any website page or product interface. At Hotjar, we call this visualization a move map.

Do you want to stop guessing and start creating products your customers will love and use repeatedly while referring others to your brand? 

Email surveys are a convenient, cost-effective way to collect feedback and understand how your users feel about your website, product, or service, so you can identify what delights or frustrates them and improve their experience and your metrics.

Success in a crowded digital landscape lies in one key element: which companies provide the most outstanding user experience (UX)? As more businesses tap into user insights, those with an advanced UX analytics approach set themselves up to win. How do the best in the game do it? With the right tools for creating a website or product that truly resonates with users.

Where do you start, and keep, learning about user experience design? UX Goodies creator Ioana Teleanu shares the six UX books at the top of her list. Research, feedback, communication, emotion—it’s all here.

UX research and design is the foundation for building great products that users love and return to. But getting buy-in for UX can be a frustrating challenge. UX educator and mentor Ioana Teleanu shares her experience and tips for how to get buy-in for your UX projects.

There’s never been a more exciting time to be a UX designer. But that doesn't mean it’s easy. Here, UX educator and mentor Ioana Teleanu shares her take on the most important UX design challenges, and how to deal with them.

Design driven companies are on the rise and user feedback becomes the bedrock of business. Here’s what it means to be design-driven and why it’s important.

Guest author Matt Diggity shows how you can improve your brand identity by conducting more surveys with your customers.

One of our values is that we challenge ourselves to grow. By hosting external speakers and sharing their ideas, we’re hoping to inspire you, our Hotjar community, to grow too. 

Before a brand or business launches a new product or idea, it undergoes a long process to get approved. There's always room for negotiation, but you have to get feedback and be open to altering plans accordingly with your team.

Product feedback is one of a product management team’s most effective tools, but only when that feedback comes with the proper context.

Imagine you’re running a brick-and-mortar store. From your perch at the counter, you can see and fix any issues the customers have as they move around the shop: if they have trouble navigating the aisles, you can make adjustments and help out; when they come up to the counter, you can strike up a conversation and learn who they are and what they’re looking for.

At Hotjar, customer feedback is at the core of what we do. We want all of our team members to obsess over the wants, needs, and opinions of our users and customers, and in turn, we encourage our users and customers to obsess over their users and customers. It’s a virtuous cycle where everybody can have the best experience possible.

There are no quick hacks or fancy solutions here: the most direct way to find out what’s working (or not) for customers is by simply asking them. In this article, we show you why you should collect feedback from customers, how to do it, and how to use that information to make positive changes.

There’s a reason why moving junk food to a hard-to-reach shelf might help us eat less of it: the location is impractical, it’s going to take effort to reach it, and—unless the motivation is really strong—most of the time we end up not actually bothering.

Sometimes, online businesses are exactly like that hard-to-reach shelf: something impractical that requires extra effort and make people lose motivation and leave.

The good news is that there is a simple way to find out if that’s the case with your business: all you have to do is ask your visitors and customers how much effort they have to put into doing business with you. This is the Customer Effort Score (CES), and measuring it can help you make accurate predictions of future business success or failure. 

Visitors flow through your website every day, but somehow all of that traffic funnels down to just a trickle of conversions, sales, and signups. Funnel analysis can help you spot where users are leaving your website, so you can optimize it and increase conversions.

In this post, we’ll explain how you can analyze funnels to identify key traffic sources and spot high-exit pages. You’ll also learn how to combine funnel reports with more analytics insight, so you can send more traffic down the marketing funnel to the pages that matter.

Every time you update or redesign your website, there’s a risk of something unpredictable happening that breaks it—and every second where something’s going wrong is costing you money.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by an element on a website that doesn’t respond to your clicks (no matter how many times you try), you’re probably already familiar with the concept of rage-clicking—which is a good thing! Understanding your website visitors’ frustration means you can empathize with them.

Happy, successful customers are the heart and soul of any business. They’re what transform your growth from a funnel into a flywheel. 

You can create happy customers, but to do that you have to truly understand them and what they think about your business.

So how do you know what they’re thinking? You have to ask!

What do you know about your customers? Do you know what actually makes them buy or why they choose you?

Conventional wisdom says you can get to know your target audience by studying demographics such as age, ethnicity, and education. A few marketers go beyond that by taking psychographics criteria into consideration, such as attitudes, values, and desires.

But this is still misleading: if you want to define strategies to engage your customers, you need to truly understand their buying decisions.

How well do you understand your prospects and customers? Do you know who they are, what keeps them awake at night, and what brought them to your business in search of a solution?

Developing an accurate picture of your customers doesn’t need to cost you large amounts of money and effort.

There’s a time and a place for specialized tools, in-depth interviews, and complex datasets; but you can also do a lot with little—and asking your customers direct questions will give you a clear idea of who they are, so you can improve your website experience for them.

Unless you’re a mind reader, the only way to find out what people are thinking is to ask them.

That's what surveys are for. But the way you ask the question often determines the kind of answer you get back—and one of the first decisions you have to make is: are you going to ask an open-ended or a closed-ended question?

Nobody knows more about what your users want than the users themselves. So why not ask them?

Regardless of what type of website you’re working on, surveying users on the page will give you the feedback you need to improve the user experience for your audience and increase conversions for your business.

In this guide, you’ll learn which survey questions to ask, our favorite survey question examples, where to ask questions on your site, and how to get started using an online survey tool like Hotjar.

If you really want to get inside your website visitors’ heads—to know what they actually think about your site, and how they think it could be better—you’re in the right place.

From page design to site usability, there are plenty of factors that impact user experience. Pinpointing what leads to a bad experience can seem like a daunting task. With heatmaps (also known as “heat maps”), you can visualize key user interactions and gather meaningful insights with ease to ensure your site delivers an outstanding UX throughout the entire user journey.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has spent the past 30 years making fun of inefficiency in business—including our efforts to reduce inefficiency.

Here at Hotjar, we strongly believe that what’s best for your users and customers is best for your business. But how do you know what’s best for your users?

You have to ask them.

Traditional metrics like customer retention rate (CRR) and customer lifetime value (CLTV) are good to know, but they don't tell you the whole story of customer churn. To really make a difference in your retention rate, you need to know why customers stop using your product—and how you can get them to stick with it.

Have you ever wondered what your users think of your website? Sure you have. But have you let your users inform (even dictate) your design process? If you're like a lot of website owners in the world, your answer might be: maybe.

What changes can we make that will have the most positive impact on our users and customers? Why are some of them leaving and never coming back?

These are two very important questions Hotjar needs to answer to continue to grow, and in order to answer them, we need user feedback.

One way to collect it is to ask the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) question:

“How likely are you to recommend Hotjar to a friend or colleague?” on a scale of zero to 10 (with 10 being extremely likely).

When we first launched Hotjar, success was anything but guaranteed. We were completely unknown, didn’t have a cent of outside funding, and were facing some well-known competitors.

Five years later, we’ve gone from €0 to €17 million in Annual Recurring Revenue and Hotjar has been installed on over 670,000 sites. And a huge factor in reaching this level of growth has been our commitment to staying close to our customers.

In this article, we share the exact methods we use to stay in touch with our customers year-round, and how we collect and measure user feedback to constantly improve our website and product experience.

✏️  Note: we are a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, but the techniques we cover in this post are highly applicable to your e-commerce and/or lead generation business.

Whatever business you're in, it's crucial to keep your finger on the collective pulse of your customers. Are they growing more or less happy with you?

Developing a product without user feedback is like having a relationship without conversation. (Not great.)

And while there are plenty of ways to learn about your users—like watching session recordings, A/B testing, and even scouring forums where they spend their time—online surveys are one of the best ways to get direct user feedback.

You spent months planning your online event, and now that it’s over, it’s time to sit back and relax, right? Not so fast! After hosting an event, there’s one more thing you absolutely must do: send post-event surveys to your attendees.

When I started my career in sales, I found myself surrounded by people who were always obsessed with something: competitors, market trends, industry best practices. Some would keep constant track of who else was selling what, and how much of it; others would go to great lengths to steal clients from the competition.

We’d have weekly meetings where I would report on sales, and every single time we’d just look at these numbers going up and down on a spreadsheet. At one point, the marketing goal for the entire year was to get more fans on Facebook than one of our direct competitors.

Building a SaaS product, app, or site?

If you’re a Product Creator in any capacity, the way you build your product will dictate the level of success you'll achieve. Like me, you’ve seen products and apps come and go. Some disappear as quickly as they arrive, and some (like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, et al) have achieved incredible success.

But, why is it that people get hooked on some products while others don't even make a ripple in the pond?

If you are expecting this to be a list of UX tools, devices or platforms then be prepared to be disappointed!

Being a rockstar at UX design means that you can deliver bankable and measurable results with your work... not eye-candy that impresses your friends and colleagues. So understandably, I chose to base this list on what I have learnt from seeing UX specialists at work on hundreds of projects, split tests and experiments.

Mastering these 8 skills might not be a simple feat - but the returns of achieving this will be worth the while. Every competitive organisation will pay handsomely for a UX rockstar!

Note: These observations are based on my work with several organisations that generated yearly revenue between 8 million to 250 million dollars and teams that varied between 3 to a dozen members.

Open-ended questions are great for getting authentic feedback because they give people a chance to describe what they’re experiencing in their own voice.

We know what it’s like to have pressing questions about a website—Who is really visiting it? What are these people looking for? Why are they not converting? What can we do to improve their experience?—and not having a clear sense of how to go about finding the answers.

If you don’t understand your customers, it’s almost impossible to improve your product or service for them.

Online surveys make it easy to get to know your users, but even a short, simple survey can leave you with a headache-inducing amount of user data to sort through.

So how do you make sense of it all? Read on to know how to conduct effective survey data analysis.

On average, for every 100$ of Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) being newly generated on a given day, $32 is lost one year after (which means we’re left with $68 of MRR).

Our revenue churn is therefore 32% - almost a third of our revenue - after one year, which means that our revenue retention is 68%.

Thankfully, we cover our churn losses by generating new revenue from new Hotjar customers.

But revenue churn is a parasite slowly eating us from the inside. We need to kill it now before it grows too big.

The very basis of UX Design is effective qualitative user research which is for the most part not achieved by reading - it's achieved by asking the right questions. When it comes to UX mistakes, more often than not it's the habits and processes we ourselves dictate that lead to a bad user experience. Let's explore some of the mistakes which might be easy to overlook but can have big negative consequences for your website.

Web forms have become an integral part of most websites and the internet in general. Their primary purpose is to help both users and businesses achieve their separate goals by establishing a relationship or initiating a conversation between the two.

- Registration forms are what allows people to become members of online communities or services. Think of Facebook - their 1 billion+ users all joined through a registration form;

- Checkout forms allow transactions to happen through the web. Subscribing to a paid service and people purchasing products are a couple of examples which happen through a checkout form;

- Data submission forms are how people share knowledge, post information and communicate online. Forums, blogs, and social communities all rely on users posting these forms for their websites to grow.

Even with their extensive importance online, it is surprisingly common to come across very poorly made forms - which is a shame. Here are some simple guidelines which are a good foundation for most types of forms.

First off, let’s explore what elements a form is made up of and some best practices.

Website usability is at the heart of customer-centricity. If you give your potential customers a difficult, complex, or broken experience, it’s unlikely they’ll stick with you for long.

When the market changes—like it's changing right now—and you suddenly get different online customers than the ones you are used to, how do you make sure your website works for all of them:

How can a company that specializes in conversion fail a launch so badly they almost have to let an entire team go?

More importantly, how did this company, ConversionXL, turn the six-month-long failure of their CXL Institute into a massive success using customer insights?

Peep Laja, the founder of CXL, sat down to walk us through the answers to these questions.

This is a case study about what to do when your big plans fall through, when your launch fails, when you feel out of step with what your customers actually need, and how to use customer insights to put you back on the right track.

Cloud hosting is used by almost everyone today, ranging from the newest startup companies to some of the biggest players in the industry (Pinterest, Airbnb and Netflix all run on publicly available clouds). Before the advent of cloud hosting, you had to buy or rent your servers and manage them yourself. This is still a viable approach if you have very specific needs, but for most use cases the cloud works remarkably well...however not without a couple of caveats.

The day may come when you feel you’ve hit a wall with your business. Your products are great, and you have an amazing team of talented professionals working with you, but still, you can't seem to grow past your current revenue numbers.

Could it be that you haven't given the customer experience enough attention?

One of the best ways to measure your success in this area is to track Net Promoter Score (NPS®). NPS is a crucial business metric that Taylor & Hart, the award-winning jeweler featured in this case study, uses religiously: it's helped them secure repeat business, expand their product offerings, and grow at an impressive pace.

We recently sat down with Stefan Milev, the company’s CMO, to discuss how Taylor & Hart has grown so quickly by using the NPS metric and obsessing (in a good way!) over the customer experience.

See the ‘copy to clipboard’ button below?  It helps thousands of new users a month copy the Hotjar code snippet and get started with our product.

Ah, the user interview. Without a doubt one of the most valuable exercises you can run for understanding users better. But how can you, the interviewer, make sure you get the insights you need (and end up with a happy interviewee)? The first stage is understanding what this is—and what it isn’t.

If you’re running an online marketing campaign, you probably want the same thing everybody else does: better performance.

In my experience as Director of Content at Klientboost, I’ve found that one of the most useful tools in the campaign-performance-improvement toolbox is landing page split-tests, where you design two different versions of the same page and test them against one another to see which one performs best.

The KB team has created and tested over 1000 pages at a rate of 250-300 tests/quarter—in this article, I will share a few ideas about how you and your team can also identify new ideas to test on your landing pages.

In this article, I’ll cover what tests have worked for our clients and how we sourced the ideas to test on their landing pages. After all, knowing how to run a good split test doesn’t do you any good if you have no idea what you’re testing—and why.

How much research did you conduct before launching your last marketing campaign? Or running your last A/B test? Who had the final say on your website redesign?

If you want to make better—more profitable—marketing decisions, you need research to back them. Qualitative and quantitative research both have a role to play: together, they give you a rich portrait of what your customers want and need.

At the time of writing, there are over 230,000 enabled surveys built with Hotjar in the world, which have gathered a total of 138,091,181 responses. That’s an average of 17 responses per every single person on the planet!

Why are visitors abandoning your website? Who are they? What do they think about your product? You can speculate endlessly about these answers—or you can get them by asking the actual people who visit your website every day.

Whether you’ve just launched a new product that isn’t selling as much as expected or you’re wanting to sell even more of one that’s already doing great, here’s one thing you should try: survey your customers to get some insight about what’s working and what needs improving.

I don’t mean ‘spend thousands of dollars on customer panels’ or ‘research an industry-defining report on customer expectations’: I mean take 30 literal minutes out of your day to get on a call with an existing customer, or create a quick survey and email it to people who have already bought one (or more) of your products.

In this piece, we take you through 5 of the best questions to ask your customers about the products and services you’re selling. To pick them, I spoke to two business leaders, Brian Dean (founder of Backlinko) and Sarah Doody (author of UX Notebook), who experienced a few snafus in their business and bounced back by reaching out to the only people who could help them figure out what to do: their existing customers.

Implementing an on-site survey right after your customers make a purchase is an easy, non-intrusive way to learn what you need to improve the buying experience and overcome potential objections.

Capturing this kind of website feedback is so valuable and simple that we recommend all our e-commerce customers do it—and we put together this quick guide to help you create a simple, post-purchase survey in just a few minutes. We’ll go over exactly what questions you should ask as well as where, when, and how to set it up.

What do you do when your website is not converting, your product is not working, and people are leaving you? How do you find out what’s wrong—so you can fix it?

To understand your customers, it's not enough to look at metrics like pageviews, bounce rates, and conversion rates alone—standard metrics are out of context and leave you guessing and making assumptions about what your customers need.

It's October and we've got exciting updates to share, from what happened last month to what’s coming soon. New ways to surface insights, improved collaboration, and an event not to be missed. Take a look. 👇

It's August and we've got heaps of spicy updates to share, from what happened last month to what’s coming soon. 

A flaming hot conference, a platform now available in (even) more languages, sizzling Surveys updates, and more! 

We launched it, you tried it, and we’ve been improving it based on your feedback.

Multiple types of heatmaps—like click, move, and scroll heatmaps—have proven vital in visualizing complex interaction data. But when you’ve spent several minutes, even hours, toggling between them to glean on-page engagement insights, haven’t you wished to the analytics gods that there was a more efficient way to do your job?

We’re no deities, but we heard you. Hotjar’s alternative to this imperfect science isn’t a magic button, but another type of heatmap. Everybody, say hi to Engagement Zones. 👋

Here at Hotjar, we stand for an inclusive culture where our team members experience the psychological safety necessary to express themselves fully at work.

Guided by this principle, we have a long-standing tradition of celebrating Pride Month with initiatives proposed and curated by our internal LGBTQIA+ group.

The AI-powered research assistant that helps you find the insights you need.

We’ve acquired PingPong—a user testing and interviews platform—and we’re integrating it right into Hotjar.

Building a customer success program for the first time? Learn from Hotjar’s experiences to make your customer success program a winner.

Private sector companies of all sizes have a crucial role to play in fighting climate change. Here are 10 ways companies can do more to fight climate change now.

Emotional intelligence is a skill. Several skills, actually. Learn the five components of EQ, and take note of your strengths, and what you may need to work on.

From the behavioral study of animals (gorillas to be precise) to UX Design, Irene No shares her career path along with the 7 skills you need to start your career in UX Design.

Empathy is like any other skill that can be improved with practice. Here are seven ways to build empathy and improve your workplace communication.

While businesses have a larger role—and responsibility—in fighting climate change, the individual impact shouldn't be overlooked. After all, our personal choices do escalate to bigger results. What steps could you take now to generate less waste?

We don’t confuse perks with gimmicks. We prioritize home-office space, human connection, mental health, and personal time and growth. And we’ve got the budgets to prove it.

Behavioral change specialist Kevin Groen shares actionable steps for dealing with defensiveness in the workplace (and in personal life).

It’s important for everyone in society to know about LGBTQIA+ flags and basic expressions.

Between product activity and your proposed solution is a gap. Do you fill it with assumptions, opinions, and guesses? Here’s a better way to do it.

There are only 44 women CEOs in Fortune 500 companies. Here's why this is and how you can help get more women in leadership.

Learn more about why so many people fear giving and receiving feedback and how you can improve your own emotional intelligence for better workplace feedback.

We’re delighted to announce today that Contentsquare, Hotjar’s parent company, has raised $600 million in a Series F investment round.

We interviewed our People leaders, Sara Bent, Angela Buccitti, and Carol Veiga for a behind-the-scenes look at what makes our hiring experience unique for both recruiters and candidates.

Many businesses shy away from being open—to their detriment. Hotjar’s CEO, Mo, shares how and why the company maintains radical transparency as a core value.

Achieving accessibility in tech is tough for many reasons. Learn how Hotjar is rising to the challenge to build a more inclusive product and business.

Hotjar’s 2022 Pride Panel highlighted the immense diversity within the LGBTQIA+ community, shining a spotlight on asexuality and personal stories from around the globe.

'People first' is a new buzz phrase that’s catching on for many companies, but what does it mean? Hotjar’s CEO explains how to build a people-first company.

Profitable businesses don’t have to be exploitative. Here’s how Hotjar is working to prevent employee and consumer exploitation.

Business is about more than just profit. Here’s why conscious capitalism matters to us at Hotjar.

We can achieve the same or better results by doing less. This is probably surprising to most people, but that’s exactly what a zero-waste culture accomplishes. You’ve probably heard the term in relation to products and packaging. What does it mean in a company-wide context?

Do you feel safe speaking up in front of your team? You don’t build trust through team-building exercises and stated values. Here are 11 ways to build trust in teams. 

“You’re on mute." Three familiar words that rang throughout households across the globe, starting in March 2020. Three words acting as a metaphor for all the small, yet meaningful ways we’d have to adapt as we scrambled to function in our new remote world. 

Businesses aren’t exempt from doing what’s best for the planet—and that includes tech businesses that don’t have any physical products.

Do you or some of your team members turn their cameras off most of the time or stay quiet about new ideas? If your remote team has been struggling with collaboration, miscommunication, and decreased productivity, lack of trust could be a contributing factor.

Why don’t employees open up about burnout before it happens? Learn how to create a culture where it’s safe to talk about it. 

Ever felt like you weren’t good enough, like you were an imposter in your own job? Us, too. So let’s talk about it—along with ways to overcome those fraudulent feelings.

Do you know your company’s OKRs (objectives and key results) off the top of your head?

If you don’t know them, then your team likely doesn’t either. So it’s crucial that you do know what they are because OKRs are key to keeping teams aligned. 

What makes people invested in a company anymore?  Is it all about a higher salary? Remote work options?

What’s your first thought when you hear 'company values'?

Many of us are immediately skeptical. For the cynics, values = platitudes, corporate lip service, and that meaningless sign you point new joiners to, never to think about again.

We’re updating our pricing model to better align our pricing with the value that Hotjar provides. We don’t take changes like this lightly and transparency is one of our core values, so we’d like to share our thinking behind the update, and outline exactly what’s changing.

Does giving one-on-one feedback to your team members feel natural and comfortable? Or is it something you avoid or cringe about doing?

Business books on leadership often cite certain qualities that make a great leader, such as discipline, focus, determination, and perseverance. It feels like the stories of “great” leaders start with waking up at 5am, plunging into ice baths, or wearing the same style of outfit every day.

But in my experience, great leadership is not only about your daily routine but also about your willingness to connect with your team on a human level. In other words, to be vulnerable. 

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by all the tasks you have to complete, your jam-packed calendar or a looming deadline that you can’t seem to start—or that feeling like you can’t possibly do it all?

Who hasn’t, right? 

A few weeks ago, we put Megan Murphy, the VP of Product at Hotjar, on the spot to answer our users’ burning questions.

In these two videos, Megan covers everything from how to get strategy buy-in to handling loud voices in meetings to whether she’d abandon everything to open a bar on the beach.

So, despite it not being in our usual format for our Building in Public video series, whether you’re an experienced Product Manager or looking to start your product career, there’s something in here for you.

Today, we’re launching our new brand. As you’re reading this blog post, we’re guessing you’d have noticed on your own eventually—what with our new shiny logo, a blazing new set of colors, and a playful new typeface—but we wanted to share more about what’s happening and why.

In true Hotjar spirit and in line with one of our values, we’re building trust with transparency.

Would you believe that we managed to get every discipline equally excited about a single OKR? One that encouraged paying down some expensive tech debt, brought in some much-needed delight to a rather dull area of our product experience, and drove impressive business metrics—all at the same time?

How do you measure a product manager’s performance? And how do you make sure the criteria you’re using is setting them up for a successful and rewarding career?

At Hotjar, we believe competency frameworks should be empowering. They should help others give feedback, provide transparent guidance about the expectations of a PM's role, and clearly signpost how they can reach the next step in their career.

Hotjar and FullStory are two best-in-class behavior analytics platforms popular for analyzing website performance and user behavior. 

Both have similar tools and features but essential differences in their function. While FullStory aims to collect as much user data as possible, Hotjar’s combination of voice-of-the-customer (VoC) tools with heatmaps and recordings enables a more qualitative, people-centric approach to behavior analysis. 

Hotjar vs Google Analytics: it’s not an either/or (and why you should use both).

Hotjar and Mouseflow are best-in-class digital experience insights platforms, each providing users with a wealth of behavior analytics tools. Both platforms have similar functionality, but some crucial differences will affect which is right for you.

Hotjar vs Lucky Orange: which one should you choose?

If you’re in a product team (or just have a product-related hobby), we’ve got some exciting news for you. We’ve just launched the first episode of a new video series called Building in Public, where we share the secrets of how we build Hotjar—as we build Hotjar.

Watch the first episode—all about Hotjar’s product principles—right here:

"Today marks an important milestone in the history of Hotjar. On behalf of the Hotjar co-founders and team we are delighted to announce that Mohannad Ali, our Chief Product and Technology Officer, is taking on the role of CEO."

When we started Hotjar in 2014, the four co-founders and I knew what we wanted from each other: the ability to move fast, stay lean, self-manage, and take ownership. We didn’t need to write any of it down as our official company values: we just acted in line with those principles and kept one another in check every day.

Fast forward to 2019, when we’ve grown into a company of 70+ people spread across 19 countries. At this point, company values play a crucial part in how the company is shaped and grows — and, as the CEO, it’s my job to own these values and the culture of Hotjar.

In this article, I’m sharing what I’ve learned about company values in the past five years at Hotjar: why they are important, where to look for inspiration, and how to go about articulating and implementing them.

At Hotjar, we believe that success shouldn’t be measured in profits alone, but rather in the contributions we make to all stakeholders: our team, customers, end-users, partners, the community, and the planet.

This is why in 2017 we announced that Hotjar would begin pledging 1% of our revenue to ‘giving back’. We didn’t have a solid plan on how we’d give, but we knew we wanted to do it in a meaningful way.

As part of Hotjar's month-long celebration activities this Pride Month, we held an LGBTQIA+ panel for the team—exploring how to show up for and represent LGBTQIA+ people in the workplace.

If you’re serious about cooking, you don’t want a swiss army knife in your kitchen. You want a proper set of kitchen knives. The same principle applies to software tools, and how we’re thinking about building Hotjar.

Shopify is a leading ecommerce platform, boasting over 1 million stores worldwide. Opening a Shopify store may be simple enough, but consistently driving conversions and sales is a trickier task.

There’s no magic way to make your website better, but we do know of something that can set you on the right path: getting to know your users.

After reading this article, you’ll know exactly how to start using Hotjar’s user behavior and feedback analytics tools (think heat maps, session recordings, and surveys) to give your users what they need and increase conversions and sales for your Shopify-powered website.

Last year we wrote about how Hotjar went from idea to 60,000 beta signups in 6 months. As we inched closer to the end of the 6-month Hotjar beta phase, we had no idea what would happen once we started asking for payment.

We had just over €100,000 left in the bank after paying salaries for 9 months. I had worked as a consultant during this time, billing clients from the company and not taking a salary myself. I had planned to keep these funds available so we could weather a storm should Hotjar not take off.

Luckily, we were covering our operational costs within two months of stopping the beta. Having seen this result, we had the confidence to invest more personal funds into Hotjar and have a small treasure chest to build the team from. This allowed us to continue building on the success of our beta and ultimately reach €1 million in ARR in just 6 months.

Giving and receiving feedback is an essential ingredient for the long-term success of any organization… or any relationship for that matter. Companies are built on professional relationships, and the strongest relationships are built on effective communication.

I am Eric Robinson, Support Engineer at Hotjar, and I’d like to share my strategies for giving and receiving feedback in the healthiest, most productive way possible. I’ve seen these techniques work well here at Hotjar, and I hope they inspire you a