Case Study: Hotjar achieves clean, trusted data and a culture of experimentation with Segment

How Hotjar used Segment to build a culture of clean data

Hotjar, founded in 2014 to help teams understand user behavior, had grown to 90+ people and thousands of customers by 2019, but internally struggled with unreliable analytics. Incorrect event records, loose naming conventions and no clear data governance left teams distrustful of reports and reliant on engineering to answer basic questions, blocking data-driven decision making.

Hotjar rebuilt its stack around Segment (with Redshift, Mixpanel and Mode), deliberately wiping unreliable historical data and creating a single source of truth. The new, governed pipeline let teams combine qualitative feedback with clean quantitative metrics, measure CAC and retention, run year‑over‑year reports, and experiment with new tools easily. Within a year the company saw renewed trust in data, a company-wide shift to starting projects with analytics, and a much more active analytics backlog as teams embraced data-driven work.

Hotjar

Andrew Michael

Head of Business Intelligence