Hotjar

What Is Hotjar?

Hotjar is a behavior analytics platform that helps website owners understand how users interact with their sites through visual tools including heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and feedback widgets. Founded in 2014 in Malta, Hotjar serves over 1.3 million websites and was acquired by Contentsquare in 2021.

Heatmaps

Hotjar generates three types of heatmaps. Click Maps show where users click, revealing which elements attract attention and which are ignored. Move Maps track mouse cursor movement as a proxy for visual attention. Scroll Maps display how far down the page visitors scroll, identifying where content engagement drops off.

Heatmaps can be filtered by device type, traffic source, and user segments to understand how different audiences interact with the same page.

Session Recordings

Recordings capture individual user sessions showing mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, and page transitions. Frustration signals like rage clicks, u-turns, and dead clicks are automatically tagged, helping teams identify usability problems.

Recordings can be filtered by page, device, duration, country, and frustration score to focus on the most informative sessions.

Surveys and Feedback

On-Site Surveys appear on specific pages or after specific actions to collect qualitative feedback at the moment of experience. Feedback Widgets allow visitors to rate their experience and submit comments with optional screenshots.

Survey targeting options include page URL, time on page, scroll depth, exit intent, and custom JavaScript events.

Why Use Hotjar

Teams seeking to understand the qualitative side of user behavior choose Hotjar. While analytics platforms show what users do in aggregate, Hotjar shows how and why individual users behave the way they do, providing the insight needed to make informed design and content decisions.