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12 Hotjar integrations to help you optimize your ecommerce site
If you often wish you could read customers’ minds, we have some great news: your genie is in the building! Just add Hotjar to your existing tech stack, and a window will open, giving you a glimpse into what delights and frustrates users—and drives them to click that magical checkout button.
Analytics and numbers provide a high-level view of what your visitors are doing (or not doing) on your site. For instance, crowd favorite Google Analytics tells you new people are coming to your site—but that insight begs for further investigation when most of these people leave without buying anything.
When you connect Hotjar tools like Heatmaps and Recordings with Google Analytics, you can go beyond the numbers and figure out the why behind the dropoff.
Hotjar integrates seamlessly with many popular apps and platforms to help you instantly get into your users’ headspace. Use this guide to determine the Hotjar ecommerce integrations most likely to move the needle for your ecommerce business, and start getting the visual insights you need to optimize your user experience (UX) and convert prospects into paying customers.
Connect Hotjar with your favorite tools
Bring user insights into your workflow with ease. Then start improving your site and offerings right away.
Why integrate Hotjar into your existing tech stack?
Collecting user data, without breaching people’s privacy, is an integral part of an ecommerce business’s growth. But even companies in a less traditional vertical like ecommerce still struggle with data silos.
It’s why Hotjar’s ease of integration can make a world of difference. This capability helps break down silos while boosting your bottom line.
Here are just some of the benefits of including Hotjar in your organization’s arsenal of tech tools:
Streamlining your tech stack
Many similar, competing, and promising tools end up in an ecommerce company’s tech stack. But not all of them play well together or deliver positive results.
The Hotjar platform is designed to be incredibly flexible, fitting in with thousands of apps.
How to improve your workflow with Hotjar
Set it up on your Shopify store and record sessions for later review
Uncover the reason for spikes you see on Google Analytics by cross-referencing the recordings or heatmaps
And, of course, if you spot an issue through these user behavior data sources, don’t forget to share it with your team on Slack
In other words, Hotjar helps keep your analysis of quantitative and qualitative data smooth-running. If you reach this point, then you’re well on your way to…
Strengthening cross-functional collaboration
So you have the data to prove a problematic feature or annoying step is breaking users’ checkout flow. Now what?
If you’re a marketer who found the issue through an ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit, you may wonder how to convince the developers to prioritize a fix. Why not do it with Hotjar?
How to build your case with Hotjar
Schedule a Hotjar Watch Party with the development team. (Or, better yet, get everyone involved, including logistics and inventory!)
Treat them to a unified view by watching real users interact with your website
Let developers see for themselves where users struggle and smash the conversion blocker in record time
Improving organizational awareness
Getting buy-in from stakeholders is a serious challenge for any team. You know how it goes: management may initially only focus on the high cost of adding a certain feature and tell development to de-prioritize. Meanwhile, the latter is frustrated and struggling to articulate that adding the feature much later will cost the company more in the long run.
Enter organizational awareness. This practice refers to one’s ability to ‘read the room’ and sense the informal hierarchies and communication channels inside their organization.
When you know the different persons making the decisions across teams, it’s easier to communicate with them accordingly and enlist their support.
And then there’s Hotjar integrations, helping you improve your engagement style by including various stakeholders’ communication preferences.
How to align your team and get buy-in with Hotjar
Send frequent, short updates via Slack
Gather visual insights and present them in a face-to-face or virtual meeting
Use a Miro board, Kanban template, or Loom video to add context to a written document
Let the right Hotjar integrations help you improve UX and boost ecommerce sales
Here’s a list of the most popular tools you can integrate with Hotjar to give your ecommerce website a leg up:
1. WordPress
WordPress and Hotjar are a match made in heaven thanks to the Hotjar plugin for WordPress that sets up in seconds and updates regularly. It changes very little about your workflow. But don’t be fooled: it packs a lot of punch for a deceptively simple tool, adding context to traditional analytics numbers.
Let’s say your conversion rate is at an all-time low. If you’re conducting ecommerce CRO, Hotjar tracks user interactions on your WordPress site to help you understand the reason for the decline.
💡Pro tip: use Heatmaps for ecommerce to see how users click, scroll, and move around your pages. Are they clicking your CTAs? Do they even scroll to the bottom half of your homepage?
Or, send surveys at key contact points. What almost stopped them from signing up? Is there anything they wanted you to add to your catalog?
Let these visual insights and the voice of the customer inform your decisions. They can inspire small yet significant changes that improve conversion, such as putting your main CTA at the top of the page or reducing the fields in your sign-up form.
2. Shopify
Shopify makes it so much easier to start an online store. But converting users on the platform is another story.
With Hotjar tools plugged into your Shopify site, you can spot the exact reason users are dropping at checkout. For instance, Hotjar’s Recordings for ecommerce tells you how customers experience each page they visit. Try to filter recordings by URL to see who made it to the checkout page.
Next, filter the URLs to check who rage-clicked on the checkout page. From there, identify the cause of the rage clicks. It could be a broken page element, limited payment options, or their inability to change shipping details.
3. Google Analytics
Deepen your understanding of user behavior by combining quantitative and visual data. Through our Google Analytics integration, you can look at what's happening in Google Analytics and learn the why behind the numbers in Hotjar. Achieve these game-changing insights by sending user IDs to Google Analytics and filtering Google Analytics events in Hotjar.
Learn: how to capture Google Analytics events and send them to Hotjar
With events for Google Analytics set up, trigger Surveys for ecommerce to appear after a user completes an action on your site. This method enables you to reach users in the moment and gain context into their real experience.
4. Zapier
Zapier is the ultimate workflow automation tool, and configuring Hotjar with Zapier opens you up to a world of improved workflows and inspired cross-functional collaboration.
This integration allows you to organize user behavior insights from Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, and Feedback for ecommerce. Connect with apps you already use, such as Google Sheets, Airtable, Miro, Microsoft Teams, and thousands more.
Share these learnings with stakeholders to get buy-in for site updates. An example flow for this ideal outcome would look something like this:
You show this data to the team to spark new ideas for optimizing your UX (with minimal effort on your part).
Removing the guesswork with real user insights
Totally Promotional is a promotional products manufacturer and online retailer based in Ohio, USA. After confirming that Hotjar anonymously follows the conversion paths of users, Rachel, the SEO and Customer Behavior Analyst, decided to give it a go.
And it turns out, integrating Hotjar into the brand’s website was one of the best decisions the Totally Promotional team could have made. Because of Hotjar, Rachel got buy-in from the designers to change a process that was confusing customers. This change led to pen purchases increasing threefold—all thanks to the proof provided by Recordings!
5. Slack
Enhance cross-functional team alignment using Hotjar’s integration with Slack. Forward insights from Recordings, Surveys, and Feedback to your team’s Slack workspace to keep everyone in the loop and aware of critical issues.
Things can get busy for an ecommerce business, with entire teams and members focusing on different goals at any one time. So think about this integration as an automated monitoring method.
Take advantage of it to avoid missing important information from, say, user feedback. Hotjar’s Feedback widget lets users tell you which elements on your site delight or distract them. Set Hotjar to ping you on Slack whenever a user sends feedback. Then share the data with your team to discuss and pinpoint the exact site changes to prioritize.
Hotjar’s integrations in action: turning Hussle’s ‘folder of pain’ into brand-client gain
Hussle, an online marketplace for gyms and spas, maximizes the Hotjar for ecommerce tools to improve the customer experience (CX) and bolster conversion.
Specifically, the team’s Product Lead identifies issues fast by filtering every Hotjar Recording that contains a rage click. With Hotjar’s Slack integration, this particular data goes straight to a Hussle Slack channel fondly called the “folder of absolute pain.”
Hussle’s Customer Experience Manager then quickly checks if there’s a problem affecting all users. After validating their hypotheses with the relevant heatmaps, the team makes sure to deal with the bug and set users back on the optimal path the very next day.
Hussle’s folder of pain
Luke*, Hussle’s Product Lead, shares:
“I have no idea how many hours we saved or how many users we’ve helped as a result, but we couldn’t spot these issues without Hotjar.”
* For a good balance, Luke says there’s also a Slack group called “People having a great time - via Hotjar,” which shows users behaving the way Hussle wants them to. 😉
6. Segment
Segment combines data from multiple touchpoints, such as your website, mobile app, and cloud app (e.g. your email marketing tool or payment system). It then sends the data to various destinations, including Hotjar.
Integrate Hotjar with Segment to filter session recordings and heatmaps—and fix bugs instantly—based on the User Attributes you’ve set up in Hotjar.
💡Pro tip: User Attributes are facts about your audience that you record outside of Hotjar—any data you store when a user buys from you or browses your website. For more information on this useful Hotjar filter, check out our User Attributes guide.
Here’s how it works:
Send user data from Segment’s Identify Spec as User Attributes to Hotjar
A user encounters something that doesn’t work on your site and reports the issue through a chat
Support relays the message to you alongside the user’s User Attribute ID
Filter the recordings using the User Attribute ID to see how the user experienced your site firsthand and fix the issue immediately
7. HubSpot
Hotjar also plays nicely with HubSpot, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
If you use HubSpot to keep a full, accurate record of your leads, you can integrate Hotjar to connect a contact with their survey responses. Save the contact on HubSpot and then add important information from Surveys to your prospect’s timeline. This process takes you to an in-depth understanding of your visitors, providing more opportunities to win them as customers.
8. Optimizely
Conducting A/B or multivariate tests with a platform like Optimizely allows you to pick out which versions of your site features, landing pages, and marketing assets work for a particular audience. Add Hotjar’s Recordings and Feedback to know how the audience specifically interacts with these elements to deepen your insights and bolster conversion.
Create an Optimizely experiment to test several variations of page types you assume to drive better conversion. When a user enters one of these variations, it generates a session recording on Hotjar.
Filter the recordings according to your Optimizely experiment or a HotjarEvent you created, such as a user clicking on a CTA button.
💡Pro tip: Set up Events in Hotjar to trigger or filter data based on actions your users carry out, whether clicking a CTA button (yay!) or abandoning your site at checkout (boo!). For more information on this useful Hotjar filter, check out our Events guide.
Watch more recordings of the full user journey across pages with fewer conversions to determine if there are issues. Also, why not apply the insights you glean from your top-performing pages in the A/B test to amplify conversion on the poor performers?
9. Omniconvert
Hotjar connects with Omniconvert, a customer value optimization tool, in a similar way to Optimizely. Add your Omniconvert A/B tests as an Event and start filtering your visual data to show your Omniconvert recordings and heatmaps.
Identify opportunities by understanding what consumers want and care about. Find out what they like to do or see on your site, something as simple as a particular ecommerce cart design.
10. ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels, a powerful tool for building websites and sales funnels, integrates with Hotjar and requires zero coding knowledge, so you can start testing and tracking each page you build into your sales funnel.
After connecting Hotjar with ClickFunnels, here’s how to boost your lead generation efforts:
11. Leadpages
With the Leadpages integration, you’ll learn more about how your users engage with your landing pages, launch pages, and other types of money pages. You can set up any of the Hotjar tools to start gleaning critical insights into user interactions and these pages’ performance.
Like with everything else, sending data to Hotjar via Leadpages begins with a no-code installation.
12. BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce…and more
Ecommerce platforms give digital small to medium businesses (SMBs) a face, allowing them to connect with customers and sell to them online effectively.
Hotjar integrates brilliantly with the likes of BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), Squarespace, Weebly, WooCommerce, and loads more. Our tools convey information about real user interactions on your ecommerce site created on any of these popular site builders.
Solve your biggest ecommerce challenges with a streamlined tech stack
Break down data silos and access actionable insights fast. With a comprehensive tech stack, cross-functional teams can work hand-in-hand to uplift the user experience, conversion rate, sales, and, ultimately, your bottom line.
And with Hotjar added to your arsenal, it’ll be easier than ever to learn how customers experience your site or app. Read your customers’ minds and know exactly what changes they need to make them exchange their hard-earned money for your products.
Focus on what matters
Our simple and easy integrations let you spot issues and opportunities, so you can prioritize solutions that help you sell to more people.
