Hey Oliver Review: Website Chat Tool for Sales & Analytics

What Is Hey Oliver?

Hey Oliver is a website chat tool that positions itself squarely in the sales and conversions space. Rather than being just another live chat widget, it bundles visitor tracking, marketing campaigns, audience segmentation, and lead scoring into one platform.

The tool was available as a lifetime deal on AppSumo starting at $49 for a single code, which gets you three websites with features like 10 audience groups, 12 months of browsing history, five concurrent campaigns, and up to five team members. Stacking codes scales things up — two codes bumps you to five websites with 20 audience groups and 10 team members, while three codes maxes out the per-site features at 40 audience groups, 24 months of history, and 10 concurrent campaigns.

Anything beyond three codes simply adds more websites at five per code, up to a maximum of 45 websites if you go all-in with 10 codes. It's a fairly generous stacking structure if you're managing multiple client sites.

The Chat Widget (aka "Bubbly")

Hey Oliver calls its front-end chat widget "Bubbly" — a slightly quirky name, but it gets the job done. The widget sits in the corner of your website and includes smooth entry animations when it appears. Visitors can click to open a full chat interface that shows available team members at the top.

Beyond basic chat, the widget can display marketing campaign notifications, a contact form for visitors who prefer not to chat, and a frequently asked questions section. You can also embed social media links and phone numbers at the bottom of the widget, giving visitors multiple ways to reach you.

One particularly useful feature is the ability to display promotional offers directly inside the widget. For example, you could prompt visitors to enter their email in exchange for a discount coupon — a nice touch for driving conversions without relying on a separate popup tool.

Setting Up and Customizing Your Account

Getting started with Hey Oliver means heading to the settings page to configure your account basics — company name, time zone, and notification emails for your team. You can also exclude specific IP addresses from tracking, which keeps your own browsing activity from skewing the analytics data (similar to what you'd do in Google Analytics).

The installation process is straightforward: copy the tracking code snippet from your account settings and paste it before the closing body tag on your website. If you've ever installed Google Analytics or a Facebook pixel, it's the same process. The code needs to appear on every page where you want the chat widget to show up.

One notable limitation right out of the gate is the lack of native integrations. If you want to push lead data to your email marketing platform like Mailchimp or ConvertKit, there's no direct connection. Hey Oliver does offer an API key and a Zapier integration, but the API requires coding knowledge, and Zapier adds another layer of complexity and cost.

Customizing the Bubbly Widget

The Bubbly settings give you a decent amount of control over how the chat widget looks and behaves. You can change the interface color, badge color, and swap out the icon from a selection that includes options like a comment bubble, alarm, lamp, and group icon.

The module system is where things get interesting. You can toggle individual features on or off — chat, campaigns, FAQ, and contact forms — and reorder them via drag and drop. Want your FAQ section to appear first and contact form second? Just drag them into position. You can also rename the module labels, so instead of "Campaigns" you might use something more visitor-friendly like "Updates."

Chat-specific settings let you configure default messages for when you're online and offline, set notification sounds (or turn them off entirely), and control whether admin email notifications fire on every chat or only when you're not logged in. Each team member can set their own name, avatar, and online/offline status.

Live Visitor Tracking and Profiles

The dashboard provides a quick overview of website metrics including new visitors, page views, and first-time viewers, presented in a clean chart with color-coded lines. But the real power is in the live view, where you can watch visitors navigate your site in real time.

Clicking into a visitor's profile reveals a wealth of information: their country, browser, number of pages viewed, referring source (Facebook, Google, direct visit), and their landing page. The browsing history tab shows every page they've visited along with time spent on each, giving you a detailed picture of how they're engaging with your content.

This level of detail is most valuable in B2B scenarios where you're dealing with a smaller number of high-value leads. If someone has spent significant time on your services page and came from a Google search, you know they were likely shopping around — and you can tailor your conversation accordingly. As visitors fill out forms and interact with campaigns, their profile data becomes increasingly rich.

Marketing Campaigns and Email Responders

Hey Oliver's marketing campaigns aren't traditional email drip sequences — they're more like targeted notifications that appear inside the chat widget. You can create several types: plain text announcements, button-only CTAs that link to specific pages, or email collection forms for things like discount coupons.

Setting up a campaign involves choosing your audience targeting, writing your message (with support for images and bulleted lists), selecting a position (centered or bottom-right, though centered didn't always work in testing), and configuring display timing with delays and auto-hide intervals.

Where things get a bit clunky is the email responder setup. If you want to send an automatic email when someone submits their information — like that 10% off coupon — you need to create the email template separately under Tools > Email Responders before linking it to your campaign. The email builder itself is surprisingly capable with a drag-and-drop page builder, but the workflow of bouncing between different sections to connect everything isn't ideal.

Audience Segmentation and Lead Scoring

The audience section is where Hey Oliver flexes its analytical muscles. The "Find People" feature works like a search engine for your website visitors, letting you build complex filters based on page targeting, audience demographics, device type, referral source, and behavioral data.

For example, you could search for visitors who've been to your services page at least three times in the past seven days and spent more than a minute there each visit — a highly engaged group that's likely worth reaching out to directly. These filter combinations can be saved as groups (up to 10 per website) for ongoing monitoring.

Lead scoring adds another layer, letting you assign point values to different actions like form submissions, page visits, or campaign interactions. The idea is that when you're getting too many leads to personally engage with each one, you can prioritize the most active visitors. It's a legitimate enterprise-level feature, though it requires careful setup to be truly useful.

Action Tracking, Form Tracking, and Custom Tags

For users who want to go deep on tracking, Hey Oliver offers action tracking, form tracking, and custom tags — though all three require some technical know-how. Action tracking lets you monitor specific interactions like button clicks by setting up unique identifiers in both your website code and the Hey Oliver dashboard.

Form tracking works similarly, allowing you to connect up to three website forms to Hey Oliver by identifying the submit button and form elements, then mapping form fields to visitor profile fields. It's powerful for building out contact profiles, but you need to be comfortable editing your site's HTML.

Custom tags take things even further, requiring you to modify your tracking code snippet with additional parameters. This is firmly in power-user territory. While Google Tag Manager can accomplish many of these same things, having it built into your chat platform means the data flows directly into visitor profiles alongside chat history and campaign interactions.

Final Verdict: Rating 7.1/10

Hey Oliver earns a 7.1 out of 10. There's clearly been a lot of thought put into building a platform that combines chat with deep analytics and marketing automation, and the feature set is genuinely impressive for a lifetime deal at this price point.

The biggest strengths are the visitor tracking, audience segmentation, and the ability to create targeted marketing campaigns that appear right inside the chat widget. For B2B businesses with high-value leads, the combination of live visitor monitoring and lead scoring could be genuinely powerful.

However, the user experience needs significant work. You'll find yourself juggling multiple tabs and clicking through disconnected sections to set up what should be a simple workflow. The chat functionality had some odd behavior during testing — auto-replies firing when the operator was set to online — and the lack of native integrations with email marketing platforms is a real limitation. There's also a legitimate concern about long-term viability; the platform doesn't look polished enough yet to guarantee it'll thrive once the AppSumo deal momentum fades.

If you're a data-hungry marketer who's comfortable with slightly rough interfaces and wants an all-in-one chat-plus-analytics tool, Hey Oliver has a lot to offer. If you just need reliable live chat without the analytics overhead, simpler options like Crisp or Tidio might serve you better.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.