Mouse vs. eye

We sometimes get the question what the difference is between Brainsight and Hotjar's Heatmaps. The key difference is that Hotjar heatmaps are based on mouse-tracking: they measure movements, clicks and scrolling behavior of website visitors. Hotjar (owned by Contentsquare) provides interesting insights with these trackers: where visitors click the most, 'rage-clicks' (clicking behaviour on unclickable elements), how people navigate through the website, or how far they scroll down on a page. Hotjar provides this information really clear in separate heatmaps.

An example of a Hotjar heatmap showingclicks below:

Difference with Brainsight Heatmaps

Brainsight heatmaps are based on predictive eye-tracking data. This means that insights coming from Brainsight heatmaps are focused on where people intuitively look at on your website, ad, post or video. When uploading and analyzing a landing page, you'll learn which elements attract attention from users when they land on your page, which elements are distracting from the main message or flow and how much attention for instance your CTA gets. In other words: you can predict what stands out and what doesn't, guiding you in the visual design hierachy.

An example of a Brainsight eye tracking heatmap: showing attention hotspots below:

Because Brainsight and Hotjar are based on different data sets and deliver different insights, they are perfectly supplementary to each other. For example, if you feel that your clicks on the main CTA are too low (as seen in your Hotjar heatmaps), you can analyze how much attention that CTA receives with Brainsight heatmaps. Perhaps some of the elements that are less interacted with are not that noticable by your audience; Hotjar can't provide this type of information.

Also, you can analyze which other elements might distract too much attention from your goal (i.e. the CTA). Create multiple design variants, pre-test them and compare the heatmaps again to work towards a better converting or more intutive design. After that you can post-test it again with the click-heatmaps from Hotjar to see if the expected effect has been realized.

For a more in-depth read about how to use Hotjar in combination with Brainsight, check out our other blog on this topic.

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