Humcommerce Review: eCommerce Analytics, Heatmaps, Recordings + More

If you want to optimize your eCommerce store, you need to be able to understand how shoppers interact with your store, where they fall off in funnels, and just generally what contributes to sales…and what gets in the way.

To do that, you need data. And getting that data, of course, requires analytics.

Humcommerce is an all-in-one analytics tool that aims to help you “boost conversions on your eCommerce store” and “understand exactly how visitors interact with your website so you can convert more visitors into buyers.”

That’s the words straight from their landing page, and it’s a pretty good summary of what they’re trying to do.

It gives you an all-in-one tool for heatmaps, screen recordings, funnel analysis, form analytics, and more. Essentially, it combines behavioral analytics (heatmaps, screen recordings) with traditional analytics (the stuff you’d find in Google analytics).

And in my Humcommerce review, I’ll dig into this tool and help you decide whether or not it’s the right solution for your eCommerce store.

Here’s Everything That Humcommerce Does

Ok, as I mentioned above, Humcommerce is first off a general analytics tool that lets you view information about everything that’s happening at your store. Think of this part kind of the same way that you’d think of Google Analytics.

It also hooks in to WooCommerce to show you general eCommerce analytics and goals without any setup (which Google Analytics doesn’t do). And if you need more flexibility, you can set up your own goals and conversion funnels.

Another helpful feature lets you bring in search keywords from Google Search Console into your analytics.

Then, it combines behavioral analytics with tools to help you:

Create heatmaps that track clicks, movements, and scroll
Record entire visits and play them back
Analyze forms to see where people drop off

How Much Does Humcommerce Cost?

Humcommerce has a free plan that’s full-featured. The only limits are that it:

Handles 1,000 page views per month
Lets you take 50 screen recordings per month
Stores data for 6 months

While those limitations might not let you use it on a busy store, it’s great because you can test out every single feature for free before you pony up any money.

If you need to exceed those limits, plans start at $9 per month for:

10,000 page views
100 recordings
12 months of data retention

Humcommerce pricing

How To Set Up Humcommerce With Your WordPress Site

Humcommerce has a dedicated plugin at WordPress.org that makes it super simple to get set up with Humcommerce.

To use the plugin, all you need to do is go to the HumCommerce area in your WordPress dashboard and enter your Site ID in the box (you can get your site ID from the Humcommerce interface):

Humcommerce review setup process

Hands-on With The Humcommerce Dashboard: What I like

Once you set up the Humcommerce tracking code, you’ll do pretty much everything else via the Humcommerce dashboard.

Here’s some of the most helpful functionality.

General Analytics

First off, you get all those general analytics that you’re familiar with if you’ve ever used Google Analytics.

I’m talking about things like:

Acquisition – referrers, search engines, social, etc.
Behavior – entry pages, exit pages, site search, link clicks, etc.
Visitors – devices, operating systems, locations, etc.

One thing that I like here is the detailed Visitor log. It automatically syncs up with your heatmaps and site recordings to let you view them (more on those in a second):

Visitor log

And you can also view a detailed visitor profile that shows users visits in detail, as well as their lifetime revenue and other eCommerce activity:

ecommerge log

Another thing that I like is that it tracks outbound clicks and downloads by default. While you can do that with events in Google Analytics, Humcommerce does it by default from day one.

I’m really only showing you a tiny fraction of the metrics here because I don’t want to write a book. But you have a lot of general analytics for user actions – I encourage you to check them out for yourself.

eCommerce Analytics

Humcommerce also connects to WooCommerce to offer you a dedicated Ecommerce analytics area.

As with the general visitor log, you get a dedicated Ecommerce log that lets you see what’s happening at your store. For example, you can see that it points out both abandoned carts and successful orders:

ecommerce analytics

You can also see data on products and sales, as well as an overview tying everything together.

Create Goals And Funnels

Goals are things that you want visitors to do. One example of a goal that Humcommerce automatically tracks is orders.

But beyond that, you can also add your own goals and choose when to mark them as complete. You can trigger goal completions with these options:

Visit a URL (either a specific URL or a URL that meets a certain pattern)
Visit a URL with a certain page title
Send an event
Download a file
Click on a link to an external website

Goal creation

For example, if you want a goal to be people signing up for your email list, you could trigger the goal when someone hits your signup confirmation page.

Once you define your goal completion, you can also set up a funnel on the same page. A funnel is a defined series of actions that you expect users to take going up to your goal.

You define the URLs in your funnel. And then you can measure where your funnel “leaks” between when a visitor lands and when they complete the goal.

It doesn’t have to be a single URL, either. You can base your funnel pages on:

URL path
Page title
Search query
Custom event

Target URL

Create Heatmaps

Heatmaps are helpful because they let you view click, movement, and scroll data for large numbers of users. They aren’t as detailed as screen recordings (that’s next), but they’re able to aggregate data over hundreds or thousands of visitors.

When you create a heatmap, you’re able to choose the number of page views to analyze and which URLs to use. You can either target a single URL or use other rules (including Regex):

Then, you can choose the sample rate, as well as some other basic settings.

You also get some options for excluding content from your heatmap screenshots. You can either exclude existing CSS selectors. Or, you can add the data-humdash-mask attribute to hide them that way. This helps ensure that you don’t get any sensitive data in your heatmaps:

Then, once you get some data, you can view heatmaps for:

Click
Move
Scroll

And you can also switch between different devices.

For example, you can see that people click on the product zoom button and the add to cart button a lot (as you’d expect):

Heatmap

Take Screen Recordings

If you want more information than the aggregate heatmaps can give you, you can also take complete screen recordings. This is kind of the opposite – you get a lot more data and insights, but you don’t get the aggregate data.

So – for best effects, you should combine the two (which Humcommerce makes it easy to do).

Creating a screen recording is a lot like a heatmap. You choose:

How many sessions to use
Your sampling rate
The URL to trigger the recording (I say “trigger” because the recording will follow users to different pages)

Two new additions are:

An option to specify a minimum session time so that you don’t record visitors who bounce right away.
An option to capture keystrokes, which Humcommerce rightfully warns you might be considered collecting personal information via the GDPR

You also get that same option to hide certain data with the data-humdash-mask attribute:

Then, once you get some screen recordings, you’ll be able to play them back right in your browser:

Screen recording

Those lines indicate different actions, like mouse movement or scrolling.

Analyze Forms

I’ll show you one last thing (though this is by no means a list of every single feature).

In the Forms area, Humcommerce lets you set up form analytics.

You can choose whether to track all forms, or specific implementations of a form. And you also get the ability to track form conversions by page visits, rather than form submissions. As the interface points out, this is more accurate than tracking form submits because “A form may be submitted several times when a visitor has to correct form validation errors”:

Then, you’ll be able to see which fields:

Take the longest to fill out
Have the highest drop-off rate

And you can also see your overall form conversion rate, of course.

Humcommerce Could Improve With A More Accessible Interface

One area where I think Humcommerce could improve is its interface usability.

In a time when a lot of new analytics tools are building ease of use and sleek dashboards into their pitch, Humcommerce doesn’t feel like it’s keeping pace with that trend.

While the interface gives you a ton of control, it sometimes feels like it uses lengthy text instructions as a replacement for just designing a more intuitive interface.

For example, take this page on creating a funnel. All of this text is actually inside the interface:

There's too much text

I understand that it’s trying to make things easy, but, in my opinion, it feels like it’s solving the wrong problem.

I would rather see a more user-friendly interface design with some basic microcopy along with better external help documentation (which is lacking – I couldn’t really find external help docs beyond a few blog articles).

For example, Google Analytics feels much easier to use because it sticks to simple microcopy and then links out if you need more (though Google Analytics doesn’t exactly win the usability awards either):

Google analytics

Humcommerce Review: Final Thoughts

Humcommerce undoubtedly gives you access to a lot of analytics. Additionally, it eliminates the need to use multiple tools. For example, instead of using a general analytics tool and a heatmaps tool, you can just use Humcommerce.

With that being said, I think it could be more helpful to more people if the interface got some love.

If you’re the type of person who wants to be able to dig in to every little thing and use Regex patterns to set up your goal pages, you might be happy with the interface as-is.

If you’re a non-technical user who’s just looking for some easy-to-access insights into the most important aspects of your store, you might feel a little overwhelmed by the interface as it is now, though.

The good thing is this:

It has a fully-functional free plan and the setup process takes less than a minute, so it’s easy to try it out for yourself and see if you like the kinds of insights it can turn up for you.

Go To Humcommerce

About Colin Newcomer

Colin Newcomer is a freelance blogger for hire with a background in SEO and affiliate marketing. He helps clients grow their web visibility by writing primarily about digital marketing, WordPress, and B2B topics.