Websites have a lot of advantages over traditional shops, but there is one issue that trips up sites sometimes, understanding customers. Unlike customers in a bricks and mortar shop, visitors to a website cannot be seen, they are invisible, so you don’t know if they’re browsing in one place, going everywhere, or leaving after a moment. The answer to this is traffic analysis, but it can be a confusing process, especially for those who are not web-savvy. Hotjar v1 is a free way to make this analysis much easier.

Understand your visitors

Hotjar v1 works on the simple idea that people need to see the details of traffic going to their sites, but not everyone is great at gathering and analysing statistics. Hotjar scans the site for you and works out how visitors see it, including which parts are ‘hot’, using an intuitive heat map. In the developers’ words, Hotjar is a conversion rate optimisation solution, helping you to understand how visitors engage with, and interact with, your website. You can even use it to ask your visitors questions and see what they think in their own words. The interface is very straightforward, showing you the stats visually in forms like mouse tracking.

An advanced visitor tool

Hotjar v1 is very useful indeed, but it may go over the heads of those who don’t have at least some understanding of visitor metrics. With a little time, you should get the hang of it. You will have to pay to get full access to all features.