Session replay and heatmaps with FullStory or Hotjar
GA4 tells you that 71% of people abandoned your checkout. It cannot tell you why. Session replay and heatmaps can. I choose the right tool for your traffic and budget, install it with privacy controls in place, and then do the part most people skip: watching the sessions and writing up what to change.
FullStory or Hotjar installed through GTM with PII masking
Heatmaps, scroll maps and funnel analysis on your key pages
Ranked, evidenced list of UX fixes with expected impact
What is included
- Tool selection. Hotjar for most SMEs: affordable, quick to read. FullStory where you need full-text search across every session, frustration signals at scale, or a product team who will live in it. I have no commercial relationship with either.
- Privacy-first install. Deployed through Google Tag Manager behind consent, with form fields, card inputs and personal data masked at source. Written retention and access rules.
- Funnel and page analysis. Click, move and scroll heatmaps on landing pages, product pages, checkout and enquiry forms. Rage clicks, dead clicks, error clicks and U-turns surfaced automatically and reviewed by me.
- Session review. I watch recordings in volume, segmented by device, traffic source and outcome, and record what visitors are trying to do and where the site stops them.
- Findings report. Each issue evidenced with a clip or heatmap, an estimate of how many visitors it affects, and a specific recommended change. Ranked by expected impact against effort.
- GA4 integration. Hotjar and FullStory events pushed into GA4 so you can quantify what the recordings reveal.
Questions this answers
- Why do mobile visitors add to basket and then leave?
- Which form field is killing our enquiry rate?
- Does anyone read below the fold on the landing page we pay for traffic to?
- Are visitors clicking on things that are not links?
- Where does our pricing page lose people?
How long it takes
- Install and configuration: two to three days.
- Data collection: two to four weeks depending on traffic.
- Analysis and findings report: one week.
Questions about this service
Hotjar or FullStory: which should an SME choose?
For most SMEs, Hotjar. It is cheaper, faster to learn and covers heatmaps, recordings, surveys and funnels well. Choose FullStory when you need to search every session for a specific element or error, when you have a product or engineering team who will use it daily, or when volumes are high enough that automatic frustration detection pays for itself. Microsoft Clarity is a free third option worth knowing about for low-traffic sites.
Is session replay legal under UK GDPR?
It can be, with the right controls: consent before recording, personal data masked at capture, a documented retention period, and a privacy notice that mentions it. I install both tools so that keystrokes, form inputs and sensitive elements are never recorded. If your site handles health, financial or children's data, I will advise additional controls or recommend against recording some pages.
How much traffic do I need for heatmaps to be useful?
Heatmaps on a page with a few hundred visits a month will already show clear patterns. For funnel analysis and confident conclusions about checkout or forms, a few thousand monthly sessions is comfortable. Below that, recordings are still valuable because you watch each one individually.