Optimize Your Conversions with HotJar Analytics & Growth Driven Design

Last year, our agency took a serious pivot in the way we thought of and practiced web design. We believed this shift was necessary and imperative to take regarding the future of web design. The concept of Growth Driven Design clicked for us; we knew it was the right path for us and our clients and we haven’t looked back.

In this article, we’re going to walk you through the new approach to website design projects and one of the most powerful tools we utilize to optimize the conversion path for our clients.

Doing Away with the Traditional Approach

The traditional approach of designing a new website was usually one-off projects, which consisted of several parties working together to build a masterpiece. This site might have taken years of planning and coordination, and usually exceeded the original budget that was put aside for the project. We’ve seen one-off website projects outlast the original employees, designers and executives that started it. We’ve also seen these types of projects turn into massive budget deficits – one in particular spent a million dollars out the door.

Change Ahead

Your cell phone, your appliances, your TV and your computer all have at least one thing in common: they need to be updated every now and then to reflect the changes around you.

Don’t you think you should look at your website this way, too?

After all, your website is a representation of of your brand,, the products/services that you offer and the ways you stand out compared to your competitors. The concept of growth driven design is something we have covered in several articles, so in this article we won’t explain why you should take this direction, but rather how to capitalize on it.

Hot Jar Analytics

Let’s say your business has taken the GDD approach and your launchpad website is up and running. You have your wishlist ready for the next round of design add-ons, features or upcoming sections to add to your site, but you also want to see what’s working and what’s not. You also want to see in real-time how users are interacting throughout your website.

Now is the time to setup a UX monitoring system, such as HotJar or Crazy Egg. At Viral Element, we prefer HotJar and have installed this software for all of our clients and, respectively, our own website. We use HotJar to study our Conversion Funnels, Visitor Recordings and Heat Maps, which allows us to optimize any part of our own website and our clients’ websites as necessary to increase conversions (their entire suite of tools is shown below).

It is unbelievable what we have observed and learned watching recordings of our clients’ website visitors. Although we don’t know exactly who these visitors are, we do know what country they are in, how many pages they looked at and whether they were on mobile or desktop.

3 Conversion Optimization Examples

Now that we have the tools to make these website updates based on real data from real website visitors, lets talk about what we have done with some of these findings.

1. We watched recordings from a client’s website and realized this visitor was trying to access something that wasn’t clickable. We quickly made that piece of text on the homepage clickable so that wouldn’t happen again, thus streamlining the user experience.
2. We set up a Conversion Funnel from the homepage to a “Request a Demo” page and quickly learned that the typical visitor had to jump through too many hoops in order to actually request a demo. We shortened the process to just 2 clicks instead of 4.
3. We viewed a recording of a website visitor who was on mobile and having trouble filling out a form on one of our landing pages. We shortened the form by removing a few unnecessary questions that we were asking because we would rather have the conversion over those answers.

If you’re looking for more information about this topic, check out how the entire growth driven design process works by clicking here.

 

Source: Bluleadz