21 August 2026

What Does Hotjar Actually Do?

What happens after the click?

In a world of ‘zero click’, many people may think that website optimisation is secondary to improvements to wider discovery. However, with traffic ever harder to acquire, making those searches that do result in a visit count is now more important than ever.

But what about if you get that precious traffic and your visitors fail to perform a conversion action? They don’t enquire. They don’t buy. They don’t sign up. That’s where understanding behaviour becomes just as important as attracting traffic in the first place.

You can talk to people and observe how they use your website or refer to Google Analytics and other native platform analytics. But Hotjar can provide you with another route.

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar is an analytics tool that helps you see exactly what users do on your website. You can learn a lot about user behaviour, such as: where website visitors are clicking on each page, how their time on each page is spent, and the way that they scroll through content.

Hotjar does this by providing three key types of data: heat maps, recordings, and conversion funnels. It is the richness of Hotjar’s data reporting that sets the tool apart from a more generalised platform, like Google Analytics. While Hotjar isn’t an alternative to an all-purpose analytics platform, its focus on User Experience makes the data extra useful for marketing teams.

Why we use Hotjar

In order to improve the conversion rate of your website, you first need to identify any obstacles that are standing in the way of conversions.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are the first data –type of interest. Hotjar’s heatmaps can give you a better understanding of how users are interacting with your website by showing where users click most.

However, as well as identifying which elements of the website are popular, heatmaps are a great way of seeing if key parts of your content are getting missed by visitors. By establishing elements and areas of interest, you can reconsider the page layout to boost priority pieces of content. It can also help you shape your thinking about what is being missed and why. Sometimes the most valuable insight isn’t what people click. It’s what they completely ignore.

For example: the large image slider that sits proudly at the top of your homepage – maybe it gets a ton of clicks but doesn’t take users anywhere? If it doesn’t, that’s a missed opportunity – adding an obvious Call To Action could really improve your conversion rate.

On the other hand, if users appear to click through your menu and ignore your main attraction slider, then maybe it’s hogging some prime real estate on your homepage that could be put to better use.

Data Recordings

Analytics can tell you that something happened. Session recordings can often help you understand why.

Data ‘Recordings’ are an invaluable feature. Rather than seeing static data about the frequency of clicks or the length of sessions, you can watch recordings of how users navigate your site.

This is helpful because you can track when users leave a page and abandon a cart. A lot of factors can influence this behaviour, not all of which can be tracked using a heatmap or a behaviour recording.

However, upon watching a recording, you may notice that users are repeatedly clicking on certain buttons that don’t work, are encountering issues with specific value fields, or maybe they just aren’t scrolling down the page. Users rarely scroll as much as web designers think they will, therefore you need to carefully prioritise the order of your website’s content to reflect their behaviour. Plans for how you progressively disclose content to aid comprehension, but also conversion, can be built off the back of this.

This data can likely be backed up by the ‘Conversion Funnel’ feature, which shows you the dropoff rate at each step of the transaction process, helping you identify where potential customers are dropping out and whether pricing, trust signals, user experience, or technical issues might be standing in the way. If you see issues in this space, you can then think about the clarity of communications across the website and wider marketing efforts connected to price and logistics.

Summary

When traffic is becoming harder and more expensive to acquire, understanding why visitors aren’t converting can be one of the most valuable insights available.

Hotjar is a very informative tool that is easy to set up and use, especially when looking at Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). It can help to identify key obstacles in the transaction process, as well as technical bugs on your website.

Used alongside analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, it can also uncover friction points, highlight opportunities for improvement, and support smarter decisions about your website experience.