5 advanced Hotjar Feedback tips to collect deeper user insights

This guide takes you through five advanced user feedback tips to help you use the Hotjar Feedback tool to its fullest potential. Use these tips to gain deeper insights into user behavior, make your website more customer-centric, and grow the metrics that matter to your business.

1. Target feedback to specific users, events, or pages

Sitewide feedback is a useful starting point, but you’ll save time and home in on business-critical optimizations by targeting your Feedback widget to specific pages, demographics, or actions.

How? Analyze your conversion funnels to identify which pages get the biggest drop-offs. Adding a feedback widget to those pages helps users report any issues, confusion, or unanswered questions that might stop them from converting.

Use Hotjar Funnels to visualize a conversion funnel for your most important customer paths, such as:

• Adding an item to cart ➡️completing checkout

• Visiting the blog ➡️ signing up for a trial

Trigger your feedback button by URL or Event to only appear on pages with the most user drop-offs.

You can also target and filter feedback by User Attribute or—if you use Hotjar’s Google Analytics (GA) integration—GA Events. This allows you to target a widget to users who fit specific demographics or take certain actions, for example, iPhone visitors in the US who have downloaded an ebook. 

Here’s an example of targeted feedback in action: ecommerce management company eShopWorld used Hotjar Feedback on clients’ checkout pages. If the team saw a drop in conversion rates, they reviewed comments to identify common issues and cross-checked the data in Google Analytics to determine which customer segments were affected.

The team then looked at individual session recordings (see tip #2 below!) to understand exactly how shoppers who didn’t convert behaved. By targeting and combining feedback with other conversion data points, eShopWorld could find and fix points of friction—and increase conversion rates. 

2. Combine user feedback with other analytics tools to get a ‘big-picture’ understanding of user behavior 

On their own, feedback responses give you insight into what users think and experience as they navigate through your website. But, sometimes, feedback still leaves you guessing what you need to fix. 

For instance, a response like, “This page isn’t working!” tells you there’s something wrong, but not what exactly is wrong. That’s why you’ll benefit from combining feedback tools with other analytics tools to pinpoint the issue without wasting time on assumptions.

In Hotjar, combining Feedback with session recordings is the easiest way to start.

You’ll see a play icon on feedback responses with companion recordings from the same user.

Click the play icon to view a replay of the user’s session, including the moment they left feedback. 

Watch what they did just before leaving feedback: did they rage-click on a button that didn’t work? Did they scroll past something important?

Here’s an example of how this could work for you: gym and spa marketplace Hussle used Hotjar Feedback to place a feedback button on the product sign-up page (see tip #1 about targeting ⬆️) to understand what stopped people from signing up for corporate accounts. 

Feedback responses like “It’s impossible to register” revealed people were leaving because they weren’t able to sign up—but without additional data, the team didn’t know why. 

By viewing companion recordings, the team realized people were trying to sign up without adding a payroll number. A quick change to the sign-up page error message fixed the funnel bottleneck before it became a serious issue.

You can also combine Feedback with heatmaps by filtering any heatmap by feedback rating. Generate a heatmap of users who selected ‘Hate’ or ‘Dislike’ and compare it to a heatmap of visitors who gave you a ‘Love’ or ‘Like’ rating. Are there differences in clicking and scrolling behavior? Are unhappy visitors missing important information?

3. Create a customer feedback dashboard to monitor sentiment

Customers’ ratings of their experience with your website play a huge role in how likely they are to give you repeat business or recommend you to others. 

Because the Hotjar Feedback widget always asks people to rate their customer experience on a scale from 1-5, you can keep track of your average experience score and quickly see if your efforts are improving overall sentiment—or if there’s a spike in issues to investigate. 

There are a couple of ways to achieve this: the easiest is to add a sitewide feedback button and monitor the Feedback metric in the Hotjar Dashboard.

You can even segment the Feedback metric to cover a subset of pages (for example, your blog or product pages) so you can see how sentiment differs for different parts of your website. 

Another way to create a customer experience dashboard is to integrate Hotjar Feedback with your favorite performance reporting tool, like Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio). 

The team at homeware retailer Matalan did exactly this, using their dashboard to give every department visibility into their users' website experience over time while making it easier (and quicker) to spot issues before they became big problems.

4. Embed a feedback widget to avoid interrupting the user journey 

One big reason a sitewide feedback button helps you collect large volumes of feedback is its prominence and visibility—but having a button permanently present on the side of your website pages could sometimes be counterproductive. 

Users might visually ‘tune it out’ after a few pages and ignore it throughout the rest of their journey, or find the site too cluttered, particularly on pages where other widgets (like customer support chatbots or newsletter pop-ups) already exist.

Embedded feedback widgets are Hotjar’s solution to both problems: you can embed a widget on any page, in line with other page elements, exactly where you want to get feedback. 

For example, embed a widget at the bottom of your help pages to determine if the content has been, well, helpful, or below a blog post or video tutorial to get people’s reactions.

To set up an embedded Feedback widget, select the ‘Embedded’ option when creating a new feedback widget and enter the CSS target element where you’d like it to appear.

5. Set up a survey to collect more detailed feedback

Hotjar’s user feedback tools, Feedback and Surveys, work in harmony to help you collect valuable user insights. Which tool you pick depends on the type of insights you need. 

Hotjar Feedback lets you capture in-the-moment comments from visitors to your site, but sometimes you’ll need surveys to: 

• Investigate specific user experience (UX) questions, like “What’s making users bounce from this page?”

• Hear from customers after they’ve used your product or made a purchase

Surveys give you access to more, customizable question types, conditional logic, and the option to have the survey appear on any page or be shared as a link.

Setting up a survey in Hotjar is similar to adding a feedback widget: log in to Hotjar, select the Surveys icon, and click the ‘+ New survey’ button. 

You can start from scratch or use our free survey templates for specific use cases. For example, use the exit-intent survey if you need to figure out why people are leaving your checkout page without completing a purchase, or send a customer satisfaction survey or Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) survey to measure how customers feel about their overall experience with your brand.

Gain a competitive edge by putting people first

The biggest mistake you can make when collecting user feedback insights is not collecting any at all. But by implementing advanced Hotjar Feedback tips, you gain an edge over your competition, leveraging actionable insights into data-driven improvements that grow your business by putting people first.