Hotjar

What Stevin gets out of Hotjar

Hotjar is not an analytics tool, it is a diagnostic tool. You use it when you know conversions are dropping but do not know why. Heatmaps, session recordings and surveys tell you what a dashboard cannot: where people click on non-clickable elements, where they scroll past your most important CTA, where they stop on a form field. We deliberately run Hotjar periodically (two weeks per quarter) instead of permanently, otherwise your team drowns in 'interesting but not actionable' video footage. The free tier covers 35 sessions per day, enough for diagnostic rounds.

What you pair it with

Combine it with your analytics stack as a source of hypotheses, not as your primary measurement. When conversion drops on a specific page, first turn Hotjar on for that page, form a hypothesis, then build an A/B test to validate it. Integrate surveys with your CRM (through Zapier or native) so answers are tied to customer segments instead of floating around anonymously.

Common mistakes

• →Leaving recordings always on, a privacy risk (PII in forms) and the team never reviews them
• →Reading a heatmap as quantitative data, 100 sessions is not a statistically valid sample
• →Showing surveys on every page, survey fatigue, the response rate collapses
• →Cookie consent not implemented correctly, Hotjar places cookies before consent, a GDPR violation