Hotjar vs. Google Analytics

To stay competitive these days, you must maintain your company or agency up to date. You’ll need analytics software to keep track of how things are progressing if you want to do so. It’s not easy to pick the correct analytics tracker. The essential elements to look for in a tracker are the ability to reach targets quickly, analyze how your approaches function in the market and identify new chances. Hotjar and Google Analytics are two excellent analytics programs that do practically all of the work for you without your involvement. The two have some incredible qualities that complement each other, and by combining them, you may give your business a huge boost.

Lets look at both Hotjar and google analytics and compare the two. We will check if the two can work individually or is it best to complement the two.

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar is a heatmap service provider as well as an analytics platform. It offers some incredible features that set it apart from other analytics businesses such as Google Analytics.

Features of Hotjar

• Examine how visitors engage with your website.
• Examine whether any visitors had problems while interacting with your website.
• Collect direct input from users regarding their website experience.
• It is available in both free & premium editions, with the paid version catering to businesses with heavy traffic and advanced customization options. 

Hotjar is outstanding and unique heatmap software that tracks how users interact with a website and assists the owner in redesigning the layout. Hotjar offers a 15-day free trial to try out the program before purchasing it. After that, the customer must pay to continue receiving services.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that allows users to track how their business is performing using a variety of metrics such as activities, interest, and time spent in the form of graphs and plots. Google Analytics was founded by the Digital Behemoth Google with the primary purpose of promoting businesses all over the world. Google Analytics is suitable for consumers that only require basic data analysis and do not want to invest a lot of money. It works with WordPress, Shopify, and a slew of other popular platforms.

Features of Google Analytics

• Providing analytics of our website visitors in terms of demographics, geography, and other factors.
• Tracking internet traffic across our website and informing the source of such traffic.
• Channels of Distribution
• Ecommerce Performance of the Product
• Information about visitors in real-time
• Hits, bounces, location, and other visitor metrics
• Conversion, drop-off points, sales by SKU, and other e-commerce performance data
• Metrics on performance by page, browser, device, and so on.

Google Analytics has a fantastic combination of simple and useful capabilities to help you get your job done. It does, however, have a steep learning curve, which means that while a user can connect to it right away, it will take some time to become fully effective. Google Analytics is available for Windows, Mac, Android, Linux, iOS, and the Web right now.

Comparison: Hotjar vs. Google Analytics

1. Hotjar features a more comprehensive collection of sophisticated tools for gaining a deeper understanding of the business. While Google Analytics offers a very efficient integrated set of features that works very well with a low-range agency, it also includes heatmaps, feedback services built, and visitor records. These tools, however, are far less effective than Hotjar’s.

2. Hotjar has a high learning rate and a short learning curve, which means it starts functioning as soon as it receives the website, whereas Google Analytics has a wide learning curve, which makes it a little slower at first. Later on, however, it maintains a reasonable pace.

3. Hotjar is great for businesses and websites that need a comprehensive analysis of their websites and users’ interests, whereas Google Analytics is best for enterprises that only need basic data analytics and research.

4. Hotjar is not free, and to be more specific, it is not very affordable for a variety of businesses, but Google Analytics is completely free. It does not require any costly upgrades or hidden fees from any company.

5. Hotjar allows you to view real-time website engagements, however, Google Analytics does not allow you to record visitors.

Pros and Cons of Hotjar

Pros of Hotjar

• Hotjar’s heat-mapping feature is fantastic. When it comes to your website’s UX and CRO, it’s a good place to start. You can see how many users clicked on elements on a website, how far they scrolled, and how fast they moved their mouse.
• Hotjar is ideal for recording sessions. In video format, these record a user’s mouse movements, clicks, pages, and scrolling. You can use these to see what works well on a site and to look for any issues and blockages.
• Hotjar is wonderful because it keeps users’ information private; for example, if you’re watching a session video, you won’t be able to see what a user puts in a form field because Hotjar blanks it out.
• You may use Hotjar’s poll function to create polls on your website.

Cons of Hotjar

• Hotjar is generally used to create web-based interactions. On mobile apps, it’s not so simple to utilize.
• For a more comprehensive perspective, you would want to see Hotjar connected with Google Analytics.
• Hotjar is mostly used by smaller businesses. Pricing for larger businesses can rapidly become prohibitive.
• Customization of in-page user surveys – While it’s a terrific tool to be able to publish and update user surveys that appear on our website, the customization options (mainly UI) are restricted, causing the survey to stand out like a sore thumb, or seem like an advertisement or an error on our site. It would be fantastic if we could have a little more say over how the survey looks on our site.

Pros and Cons of Google Analytics

Pros of Google Analytics

• Visits, commerce, performance indicators, and other information are all split on the dashboard.
• User and property management are both rather straightforward.
• Exporting options that are useful for external integration and analysis.
• A variety of data display options so that it can be better comprehended or delved down into.
• A simple user interface for navigating historical data.

Cons of Google Analytics

• On the free tier, data sampling is relatively imprecise; this is remedied in premium, but it is costly.
• When presenting various data, some of the UI is very similar in naming, and some in-situ information can be useful.
• Filtering and data validation pitfalls.
• Implementation can be difficult; getting a complete, accurate view of your metrics might take a lot of effort and experience.

Conclusion

As we previously said, analytics software is essential for any website to stay competitive. It keeps the website up to date and informs the owner of which aspects need to be improved, such as the website layout, database, or design. Based on the preceding comparison of  Hotjar and Google Analytics, we may infer that Hotjar and Google Analytics have quite different uses yet are equally significant. 

Different companies select between these two based on their interests and budget. If you’re looking for a low-cost analytics solution with basic and effective capabilities to help your business expand, Google Analytics is the way to go. Hotjar, on the other hand, should be your first pick if you require innovative software with exceptional tools to keep you at the top of your market.

Also, check the difference between Hotjar and Mouseflow.