Chances are that you’re using Google Analytics on your landing pages and/or website, right?
It’s free, it’s popular, it’s the 800-pound gorilla of the analytics world.
But there’s a problem with Google Analytics.
It’s primarily for quantitative insights. That’s the stuff that tells you “what” is happening, like how many page views you got, or what percentage of your visitors were on a mobile device.
And that’s fine, but it doesn’t give you a full picture of your analytics profile.
Something is missing….
Time to get qualitative
And that’s where qualitative data comes in.
Qualitative data is the stuff like session recordings where you can see how people navigate on your landing pages on a one-to-one level. Or polls that give you insight into the actual thought patterns of your visitors by asking simple questions right on the page.
Qualitative data is extremely useful because it helps you answer the question “why.”
Why are people not scrolling below the fold? Why aren’t they filling out the form? Why are they abandoning their cart right in the middle of the checkout process?
These questions–and the data behind them–can help you improve the visitor experience, which ultimately can be translated into more leads and sales on your pages. And that’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it?
Getting started with Hotjar
So, now that you’re hopefully convinced of the value of qualitative data and feedback, how do you start collecting it?
Step one is to simply install Hotjar and let it start doing its thing. They have a very generous free plan that should be more than enough if you just want to test it out on a few landing pages.
I recommend setting up the heat maps, session recordings, and a simple poll.
If you have a form on the page that has more than 3 fields, I’d also recommend giving their forms tool a try too. It can help you diagnose where people are getting stuck on your form.
While there are many other features inside Hotjar, this should be more than enough to get you started with some highly valuable data that will help you uncover the “why” of your conversion issues.
Making changes
One final thing I’ll say before wrapping up this topic is that you should remember to actually implement changes on your landing page based on the data you uncover.
Whew, that felt like a really long sentence. But hopefully, you get the point.
If all you do is collect data and never act on it, what’s the value? Zero.
But if you collect and act on the data, you’ll be able to continually improve your landing pages and achieve higher conversions over time.
And that’s the name of the game.
So give Hotjar a try today (it’s free) and discover the other half of the analytical data that you were missing out on!
