Great UX and high conversion rates go hand-in-hand. So, if you want to improve conversion rates, your first task is to improve the user experience.
And when you want to improve UX, understanding your users is non-negotiable.
But how do you do that?
Let us help—we’ll share some tools that’ll help you understand your customers, so you can make quick and impactful changes to create a user experience that makes your customers happy (and ultimately increases conversions).
Thanks to our friends at Hotjar for writing and sponsoring this post! ■
5 reasons your visitors aren’t converting
First things first, here are five main reasons you might not see as many conversions as you’d like:
- Your users don’t trust your website: issues like poor design, errors in your copy, and low-quality imagery can turn potential customers away.
- There are roadblocks you aren’t aware of: using your website might be easy for you and your team, but that bias makes it challenging to see roadblocks and other issues that might prevent users from having an enjoyable experience.
- Your site is confusing to navigate: if finding your way through a cornfield maze is easier than trying to get to the checkout page on your website, you have a problem. Users like it when they can get from point A to point B without roadblocks or confusion.
- You’re guessing what your visitors want — but you don’t actually know: you know your product inside and out, so it can be hard to take a step back to see it from your users’ perspective. Unless you’re collecting voice of customer (VoC) feedback, any changes you make will be based on guesswork.
- Your visitors are distracted: if your visitors are getting distracted by unimportant elements on your page, they’ll miss your CTA and won’t convert.
Simply put, if your website is clunky and difficult to navigate, your visitors won’t convert. But when you understand what your visitors want — and why they want it — you’ll be able to build an experience they love.
4 tools to improve UX + increase conversions
At Hotjar, we want to help you empathize with your users so you know how to make them happy. Here are four tools you can use to improve UX, create customer delight, and as a result, increase your conversions:
1. Session Recordings
It’s easy to improve UX when you know how your users are really using your website. Recordings let you watch renderings of individual users on your site so you can see exactly how they navigate through your website, identify roadblocks, and make sense of your web analytics.
Recordings show you mouse movement, scrolling, clicks, and keyboard strokes across multiple pages on your site.
Use Recordings to:
- Uncover bugs and see if something’s not working as planned (like pages that load differently on mobile versus desktop)
- See how long it really takes for users to convert (and identify what’s preventing them from converting sooner)
- Understand your exit and bounce rates by analyzing why your visitors are leaving your site
- Empathize with your visitors by understanding their blockers and frustrations on your website
2. Surveys
Getting VoC feedback is easy with Hotjar Surveys. Hotjar has two types of surveys: on-site and off-site.
On-site surveys let you ask your users questions while they’re on specific pages of your website. Ask them open- or closed-ended questions (or a mix of both), to get into the mind of your visitor, and collect valuable feedback to improve your site and increase conversions.
You can also use Hotjar Surveys to follow up on specific questions. For example, if you asked, “did you find what you were looking for today?” and someone answered “no,” you can ask a follow-up question to find out how you can improve the experience for them.
Use Surveys to:
- Gather valuable insight from your users
- Improve conversions through post-purchase surveys
- Show your customers you care about their input
- Validate new product ideas
- Understand why your visitors like (or dislike) aspects of your site
- Find areas of your site that need fixing — for example, place a survey on pages with high bounce rates to figure out why users are leaving
3. Incoming feedback
Hotjar’s Incoming Feedback tool lets you eliminate guesswork and understand the user experience — from the users’ perspective — by placing a feedback widget right on your site. Visitors can tell you exactly what they like and dislike, and you can use that insight to fix issues and provide more of what your users love.
The Incoming Feedback widget also lets users highlight elements of your site so you don’t need to guess what they’re referring to — you’ll know exactly what they’re talking about.
Use Incoming Feedback widgets to:
- Understand the emotions of your website visitors as they encounter issues on your site
- Identify exactly which areas are causing trouble for your users
- Get feedback on specific elements on your website, and understand why users like and dislike certain aspects of page features or elements
- Track changes over time to understand how they affect UX
4. Heatmaps
Heatmaps are aggregated visual representations of user behavior on your web pages, presented in a way that lets you easily spot popular and unpopular areas of your website. Heatmaps show you which areas of your website contribute to a poor user experience.
There are three types of website heatmaps: click maps, scroll maps, and move maps.
Click Maps:
Click maps show where users click their mouse (on desktop) or tap their screen (on mobile) and can help you understand if your CTAs are in the right place, and whether people are clicking on the right elements or buttons.
Scroll Maps:
Scroll maps show you how far users scroll down your page: red means more visitors went to that part of your page, and blue indicates low activity. They can help you understand if users are seeing key information on your pages.
Move maps:
Move maps show where users move their mouse while they’re on a page. Research suggests that mouse movement correlates with eye movement, which helps you understand what people look at on your website.
Use Heatmaps to:
- Spot where your visitors’ attention drops
- Make sure clicks and taps happen on “clickable” elements
- See how behavior changes on different devices (i.e., desktop, tablet, and mobile)
- See whether important information is being noticed by your visitors
- Decide where to place essential information on each page based on where users focus their attention
Improve your website’s UX today
Hotjar’s product experience insights and tools collect powerful data in ways everyone on your team will be able to understand. Using data to drive your decision-making process will steer you in the right direction, keep your customers happy, and improve your conversion rates. Click to sign up and see how easy it is to understand your users with Hotjar! ■
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