How we helped Hotjar achieve a 94% decrease in CPA on YouTube.

262%
growth in view rate
94%
decrease in CPA
1257%
growth in CTR

About Hotjar

Hotjar is a powerful solution that  offers product experience insights. It reveals how online users behave and what they feel strongly about, so that product teams can deliver real value to them.

Hotjar is trusted by 900,000+ websites across 180+ countries—including industry leaders like Microsoft, Adobe, HubSpot, and other similar brands.

The challenge

Hotjar know their ICP well; hotjarian’s talk daily with their customers to identify (and then tackle) key pain points, as well as discover (and then maximize) what makes their customer tick. The Hotjar marketing team strive to build a great customer journey, and since they knew their ICP used the platform daily, they wanted to experiment with using YouTube specifically, in order to delight their ICP at the very top of the funnel.  

Hotjar partnered with Hey Digital to assist new potential users to learn about hotjar as a solution, so that they can then engage, and ultimately take action with Hotjar—as early as possible.

The core challenge was to prove or disprove key hypothesis by way of bold, fast and iterative experiments bi-monthly. In order to get an in-depth analysis ICP behavior, and surpass current benchmarked results.

Our approach

At Hey Digital, we build experiments from the ground up and scale them significantly to deliver the best results. Keeping Hotjar’s goals in mind, we strategized and executed successful ad campaigns—transparently and collaboratively.

Below are a few things we did during the months that we believe were key in Hotjar’s success.

Google Ads

Learnings from YouTube Keywords

Our first experiment for Hotjar’s YouTube campaigns was to test keyword-based targeting. To begin with, we collected three sets of keywords.

The first sprint generated results, however, it was not up to our expectations. We used the metrics to analyze the loopholes in our targeting, ad creatives, and copies.

After strenuous efforts of analyzing the results and data, we teamed up with Hotjar to come up with a reinforcement strategy, which is as discussed below.

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The YouTube “UGC + Prospecting” Experiment

By collaborating with Hotjar, we came up with an interesting approach to our YouTube brand awareness campaign. We introduced a User Generated Content (UGC) explainer video for prospective Hotjar ICP-based audiences.

Tailored YouTube Placements
To target Hotjar’s ideal customers, we granularly collected a list of YouTube channels that ranked for our high-value keywords, generating a list of 1000+ Youtube placements.

Custom Intent Audiences

Further, we also included two sets of custom intent audiences targeting the high value and relevant search queries for Hotjar’s user persona. These audiences ran in parallel with the placements ad group as an A/B test so that we hit the bull’s eye this time.

By combining tailored targeting with our short UGC explainer videos, we increased the view-rate of prospecting campaigns by 262%. Our UGC also captured the user’s attention beautifully, making them take instant action. This increased the CTR by 1257%!

The boosts in performance ultimately led to a 94% decrease in the cost per account creation (A/B test vs our initial benchmark prospecting campaigns).

This collaboration was a wonderful learning experience for the entire team at Hey Digital, as well as the Hotjar marketing team, and allowed for Hotjar’s next sprint of internal experiments to go forward with increased understanding of their ICP, campaign learnings and evidential data, continuing to improve performance.

Undoubtedly, we couldn’t have done this without Hotjar’s collaborative nature and our team’s never-settle approach.

Results

YouTube campaigns bring about a pool of ideal prospects that most SaaS companies are yet to tap into. And those who have already discovered its potential, are still struggling to get their desired results.

Hey Digital takes pride in helping Hotjar reach its expectations and going above and beyond. Our hypothesis-based strategies helped Hotjar surpass their goal, achieving a +104% in conversion rate to installs, -94% in CPA, -69% in CPC, +1257% in CTR and +262% in view rates.

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