10 Tips For Success With Hotjar

If you really want to excel in product analytics, then learn how to fuse learnings from GA/Mixpanel with another source of great insights:

Session recordings.

Sadly, session recording tools mostly go underutilized because it's time consuming when done in high volume & PMs lose interest because most recordings are meh. (I'm guilty of this too btw)

However, if deployed and used correctly, these tools can unlock insights like no other.

Here are some tips on getting better with Hotjar specifically:

1) Use programmatic tags...a lot!

Just like how we drop event trackers with GA, Hotjar allows you to tag sessions via JS whenever something interesting happens. This is the single best way to flag sessions of interest so that you can quickly cut through the noise.

Ex: tag a session when a user logs in, watches a video, clicks on a certain CTA, fills a form etc.

2) Get regular

Block off an hour a week (or every other week) on your calendar to to sift through the account in peace.

3) Set a focus for the session

I've found the following 3 work for me:

• I find an anomaly in a data point in Google Analytics that I need to unpack (e.g. form conversions cliffed)
• I just launched a feature & want to see how it's being used
• I'm looking for optimization opportunities on high traffic pages

4) "Recruit" sessions first

Don't just dive in. This isn't a Netflix session where you just hit play. The first 5 minutes need to spent on queuing up the best videos for yourself to cut through.

Eliminate the noise by filtering on:

• A tag
• Entry or exit page (if a certain page has high exit rates on GA, filter by that. Turns up great insights)
• Session time

5) Bucket

I typically isolate sessions as follows:

• View those less than 5 seconds separately (usually looking for obvious tech flaws that made the user pogo-stick)
• View desktop sessions first and then and do another sweep for mobile

6) Make notes on an Excel sheet copying over the recording link to retain context

7) Watch Fast & Slow

Watch in 2x to get a general overview of what happened. But watch in original speed a few seconds prior to a critical CTA click to see if there was confusion or hesitation.

8) Watch out for pain points

I'm always surprised to see bugs I was never expecting e.g.

• Layout doesn't render properly,
• One component hiding another,
• Misalignments,
• User constantly clicking on unclickable items,
• Searching a page frantically without a click etc.

9) Search for trends

Group your findings into patterns (anecdotal evidence can be thin). Add manual tags like bug, UX, copy etc. to easily retrieve them.

10) Show the team

It anchors UX discussions & helps guide brainstorming.