Web Analytics Tools are Vast and Full of Features

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Ever since I read Adam Morgan’s book, Eating the Big Fish (2009), I’ve been hyper-aware of brand leaders and the brands that strive to disrupt the market called challenger brands. Google is by far a brand leader in pretty much everything it does with Google Analytics being no exception. Google Analytics is free, which is a huge plus for big and small companies. It also offers a variety of tools from which actionable insights are drawn. Google Ad tools even seamlessly integrate into Google Analytics and provide rich audience and demographic information, which is greatly prized by marketers. Packed with features, at the leading edge of technology, and free to use. That’s a big fish. Yet if you Google search web analytics tools, there are hundreds of companies out there. So why bother if you’re a little guy?

If you Can’t Beat them Join them

While exploring Google Analytics, one feature I wish it had was heat mapping. Heat mapping helps visualize user behavior and shows what users are clicking on the site. “Hotjar is a behavior analytics and user feedback service that helps you understand the behavior of your website users and get their feedback through tools such as heat maps, session recordings, and surveys” (Hotjar Blog, 2019). This company’s web analytics products integrates with Google Analytics to provide a complementary service that provides marketers with a deep look at consumer behavior. Hotjar’s rationale is that Google Analytics tells an overview, whereas the Hotjar product shows the customer’s actual behavior.

(Hotjar, n.d.)

From Hotjar’s product tour, aside from a variety of heat maps, it also offers recordings of user’s actual sessions. While this information can be found on Google Analytics, it’s not visual like the Hotjar product. Things that users heavily click on appear red hot, making it easy to identify what is popular and what is working. If I had an e-commerce site, I would find this feature to be very helpful in watching a consumer complete a purchase. Of course there are privacy issues that come to mind, but the company has work arounds for that as well. 

Similar to Google Analytics, Hotjar also has funnels. While it appears to show the same information of where consumer’s drop off, Hotjar’s funnels are a cleaner and visually appealing. You can even watch recordings of people falling off your funnel. I imagine that this is slightly helpful, but at a micro-level, perhaps not too much. 

Hotjar’s product tour continues to showcase interesting user feedback features like:

• Form Analysis – To track form completion, Google Analytics uses Events and behavior reports to track forms and it is up to the web analyist to interpret the data. Hotjar also tracks forms in a funnel format and also provides data to show improvement areas. 
• Feedback Polls – This feature allows Hotjar users to obtain feedback from users as they are on the page. When a user completes a behavior, it triggers a widget with a question for users to answer about their experience. The widget is customizable, so the experience on the site stays consistent. Hotjar also provides a dashboard with the results.
  Feedback polls can provide invaluable insight to web analysts who want to understand exactly why a user is behaving a certain way on a page. Questions can be vague like “Did this page meet your expectations?” to “What can we do to make this site more useful?” User research company, Qualaroo describes these types of surveys the answer to why users behave the way they do on websites and what can be done to improve conversions (Qualaroo, n.d.). 

(Hotjar, n.d.)

• Incoming Feedback – Similar to a feedback poll, Hotjar also has a quick way for users to leave their opinion about a part of a website using a simple widget with smiley faces. A dashboard provides this feedback in an easy to read manner. “See what people love and hate, identify issues, and find opportunities for growth” (Hotjar, n.d.).
  I would be skeptical about using incoming feedback unless something is trending very poorly for a reasonable amount of time. While users can leave comments in the widget, the opinions of one person could set off eager marketers down a wrong path. For example, if someone is deeply offended by the color green and negatively rates a page element solely because it is green, is that a reason to change the page? I believe this feature also puts a lot of weight on users actually knowing what they are looking at enough to distinguish between something they like and something that is not in anyone’s control. Perhaps this would be a better tool to use internally. 
• Surveys – Hotjar also provides standard customer surveys that can be deployed before a user leaves the site. This provides users with the ability to provide feedback in a familiar form. There is a response dashboard that sorts the responses by question, so marketers can easily discover insights. 

Hotjar’s product seems to go beyond Google Analytics numbers to provide feedback directly from users at the micro and macro level. Because Hotjar integrates with Google Analytics, it makes the web analytics experience richer and hopefully lead to more actionable insights. The products offered by Hotjar are not free, so companies who are invested in their user experience and want a seamless method for obtaining user feedback would be good candidates. 

So Why Challenge a Brand Leader?

In researching, many of these other web analytics tools strive to provide data and other features in a way that Google Analytics does not. Every entrepreneur has an idea that they believe will help their product stand out. So whether it’s providing a product that works in conjunction with the big fish, or a product that flies in the face of market perception, if it’s out there someone is using it to fulfill a need. 

References

eatbigfish. (n.d.) 10 types of challenger brand strategy. Eat Big Fish Blog. Retrieved from https://thechallengerproject.com/blog/2019/10-types-of-challenger-brand-strategy

Hotjar. (n.d.). Product Tour. Retrieved from https://www.hotjar.com/tour

Hotjar Blog. (2019, June 12). Your introduction to Hotjar: what it is, what it can do for you, and how it works. Retrieved from https://www.hotjar.com/blog/what-is-hotjar/

Morgan, A. (2009). Eating the Big Fish. Wiley.

Qualaroo. (n.d.). The Best Website Survey Questions To Ask. Retrieved from https://qualaroo.com/website-survey/

Thakur, D. (2017, July 20). 10 Good Reasons Why You Should Use Google Analytics. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@dineshsem/10-good-reasons-why-you-should-use-google-analytics-699f10194834