In today’s world, it’s more important than ever for custom manufacturers to understand the online journey of potential buyers before they make initial contact with their company. With so many industrial buyers looking for the best products, services and solutions for their specific needs, a finely-tuned website is no longer optional, it’s the difference maker in attracting high quality leads.
But, where do you look for insight? How can you determine which areas of your website engage visitors and those that fall short? Enter Hotjar.
The “all-in-one” platform for understanding and analyzing how visitors interact with your website can lend custom manufacturers insight into areas needing the most improvement, as well as those driving conversions. Hotjar’s heat mapping, recording, funnel, form analysis, and user feedback tools are invaluable resources for making changes based on user behavior.
Hotjar’s heatmap software is its most widely used feature. It allows you to see where a random sample of visitors have clicked, moved, or scrolled on a specific webpage, and on which device (desktop, tablet, phone). For example, a heatmap of clicks on your homepage via desktop might look like this:
Based on the hot-cold meter, you can clearly see what areas interest users’ most. In this case, the highest number of clicks are centered on the ‘blog’ button, indicating that people who land on the homepage are generally searching for helpful content. Heatmap results can lead to a number of insights, including (to name a few):
A custom manufacturer, for instance, might find that users are trying to click an image of a machine on their homepage. If the image isn’t clickable, it would be a smart idea to link the photo to a ‘products’ page, explaining the equipment in-depth. Additionally, if you’re showcasing the ‘markets you serve’ at the bottom of your page, and find that users are dropping off the page relatively quickly, consider moving the section above the fold. These seemingly small adjustments could be the difference between a potential buyer leaving your site, or sticking around and converting on your website.
The ability to playback recordings of individual user sessions is helpful for analyzing interactions with your website on a micro-level. Rather than analyzing an aggregate of clicks using a heatmap, recordings allow you to watch individual’s sessions in real time.
Where does the user pause on the site? What causes them to explore more site pages? How do users interact with your website forms? You’re able to address these questions and make subsequent adjustments based on these behavioral patterns.
This is especially helpful for custom manufacturers, who have a resource library of helpful, specialized content. Through analysis of recordings, you might find that some of your forms have too many fields or an unclear question discouraging visitors from downloading the content. With the ability to filter users by specific pages visited (e.g., a landing page), you’ll be able to see how many users are leaving before answering a specific questions on the form. If this is a pattern, you’ll want to make adjustments and playback future recordings to ensure your updates are assisting in conversions.
As you can see, recordings are a powerful tool that can enhance user experience and ultimately boost conversion rates on your website.
For more in-depth insight into where users are dropping off on site pages, Hotjar lets you set up a conversion funnel:
In this example, there’s a significant dropoff on the landing page indicating that there could be an issue with the landing page form fields, or that the content offer could be made more clear. If you’re in a similar predicament, be sure to target these “top of funnel” page adjustments before making changes further down the funnel.
You can also set a custom date range to show differences in user interactions over time, which is especially helpful for analyzing the results of your adjustments. For example, if an injection molding company created a funnel for their latest “metal-to-plastic conversion” eBook, they might decide to wait several weeks before analyzing the results of their landing page changes. This would allow the company to compare the changes side-by-side with a previous date range.
Additionally, the form tool allows you to see user interaction with each form field. You’re able to see how long it took visitors to fill out each field, the total number of interactions with each field, number of successful or failed submissions, the form conversion rate, and more. This insight points out specific areas of the form needing improvement, and is a direct way to analyze your form efforts.
Hotjar models its features on drivers (what brings users to your site), barriers (what causes them to leave), and hooks (what persuades visitors to act). While the features above are critical to understanding these three aspects, Hotjar has also rolled out easy customer feedback solutions, making it possible for you to place polls and surveys on your site asking customers to explain their experience on your website. While the questions are ultimately up to you, these features can prompt you to make adjustments based on actual feedback.
For custom manufacturers, Hotjar provides valuable insights on how to keep industrial buyers engaged. Whether it’s making changes to reflect user interactions on your homepage, creating a poll on a site page, or improving the top of your funnel, Hotjar’s dynamic capabilities can transform your manufacturing website into a well-oiled lead gen machine.
Topics: Marketing Automation, Website Design
