Blog Content ROI: Using Hotjar For Heatmaps & Visitor Recordings

Many startups are often hesitant to throw time and effort into writing blog content because they do not fully understand how to measure the return-on-investment.

Whether the content is being produced to boost consumer confidence or enhance search engine optimization, your startup’s blog can make a positive impact at several different levels of your sales funnel. To be able to calculate return-on-investment, you must first understand the primary purpose of your blog content.

Do you want your blog content to develop and strengthen relationships with existing and new customers?

Do you want your blog content to establish your startup as an industry thought leader?

Do you want your blog content to create more indexed pages and inbound links on your website - improving your search ranking?

Do you want your blog content to be organically shared across social media platforms - driving attention to your website?

Inevitably, the purpose of your blog content will be to receive all these benefits. Unfortunately, there isn’t a ’one size fits all’ way of evaluating the positive impact of blog content for your startup. You will need a variety of tools at your disposal to gain a well-rounded picture of your blog content’s performance.

Today, we are going to explore Hotjar, a software-as-a-service application that gives you a visual understanding of user behavior on your startup’s website.

Hotjar can collect qualitative data on your website’s performance using heat maps and visitor recordings to illustrate on-screen user behavior. The results are often stunning, giving you insight on your website’s strengths and shortcomings by drawing from every single user experience.

Hot Or Cold? Introducing Heat Maps Into Your Content Writing Strategy 🔥❄️

Hotjar’s heatmaps can be utilized in an effective content marketing strategy to precisely pinpoint where users click on your website pages. They will also show you how far users scroll down pages of your website. This can help you to measure your content’s ability to engage an audience.

Heat maps have been used for decades to graphically illustrate data patterns and clusters. Across multiple contexts, they have proven to be an exciting way to present data. Let’s face it, they certainly beat spreadsheets!

To measure the success of your blog content, Hotjar offers a range of different heat maps, each collecting unique types of data. Hotjar’s click heat maps can show you where about users are clicking on a page of blog content? Are they clicking on your call-to-action in the closing sentence of your content? If they are not, this indicates weaknesses in your content’s ability to drive conversions.

Have users been clicking on keyword anchor text throughout the blog content? If they have, this presents a high level of engagement and interest in the content’s subject matter. You should make a note of well-performing anchor text key phrases and consider writing about these in future pieces of content.

Hotjar’s move heat maps enable you to see where users have most frequently been moving their mouses on your page content. This can be used to interpret where users have spent the most time on your page content.

Is there a particular cluster of paragraphs that users have spent a surprising amount of time hovering over? This could indicate heightened interest in topics explored within your blog content.

How does the intensity of the heat clusters change as you scroll down the page? You should try to identify the point at which the average user disengages with your content. This will help you to produce blog content engineered to keep your audience scrolling for more, whilst they gain value from consumption.

It’s important to note that Hotjar’s move heat maps only measure the actions of desktop traffic, due to the way in which we interact with touchscreen mobile devices. Hotjar does offer desktop and mobile heat maps to help you compare performance across multiple devices.

Hotjar’s scroll heat maps allow you to track more general movement through the page content. Rather than giving focused points of interest, scroll heat maps can give you an overall sense of how quick your blog content goes through hot to cold, with a colorful gradient to illustrate this.

The data from Hotjar’s scroll heat maps is presented by analyzing the number of visitors to the blog content page against the depth each visitor scrolled to on your page. From this, you receive an average if how many users scrolled to each portion of your page.

Hotjar can also calculate the average fold on your page. The average fold is the average location which would be visible as a user opens the page, before they've done any scrolling. In other words, it’s the portion of the page viewable upon landing. This helps you to visually comprehend how soon you need to engage users to ensure they scroll further.

A Fresh Perspective. Introducing Visitor Recordings Into Your Content Writing Strategy 🔍👀

There simply isn't a more accurate way of measuring a user's actions on your website than seeing a screen recording. It's a genius concept and you should take full advantage of this user experience technology to leverage your startup’s blog content.

By understanding how users are interacting with your blog content, you will be able to address user experience issues regarding the website design or written page content that could be hindering the success of your call-to-action conversion rates.

These recordings of user sessions are essentially renderings of real actions taken by visitors as they browse through your startup’s website. The recordings have the ability to capture mouse movements, clicks, taps, and scrolling across multiple pages of blog content on both desktop and mobile devices.

Every user session is recorded in real-time. Upon playing the recording, you can watch the user’s actions unfold at the same speed and pace as they happened. This helps to give you a sense of how your audience is experiencing the blog content.

Header Image Credit: VectorJuice