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Hey there, Measure geeks, Julian here, back with another video.
And today we're going to take a look at two analytics tools that have been around
for awhile Hotjar and Google Analytics.
Now, GA is obviously the standard for web analytics, for
many website owners out there.
And you might be asking yourself, why would I even
switch to something like Hotjar?
Well, as you will discover in this video, This is actually the wrong
question to ask because these tools are quite different, but also
quite complementary to each other.
But before we dive in, I want to mention that this video is made possible by
Hotjar and they have been gracious enough to give every viewer of this
video a three months business account.
So check out the link in the description down below.
Now, let me go over to my computer and show you how I normally use
Google Analytics and Hotjar together.
Right.
So here we are inside of our Google Analytics account, and obviously we
have the Google Analytics tracking code installed on our page and it's
gathering all this nice data for us.
But before we start diving into this data, we should have a question in
mind that we would try to answer.
And oftentimes you might want to start out with something general, like
how do users behave on our website?
How do they use our website?
Google Analytics has a few reports that we can get insights from.
So for example, if you're under the behavior reports, we can look into
site content, and then the all pages report, which should show us which
pages are most used by our users, which ones do they visit most often?
So naturally we have our homepage.
A product page and then other pages right here, page that I'm interested in is
the page with a high page value that are the pages that help convert users and
in the path of the user converting on our website and naturally for us, this
is our premium product Measure Masters.
So we have a landing page here, which explains this product.
Further on how to sign up to it and then to use user converts from there.
So obviously this is a very important page for us.
So let's dig into it a little bit.
I can click on this one and this will now filter my data just down to this page.
And we can click here on navigation summary to get a bit of an overview
where I use us coming from what's the previous page path, the next page path.
And how much traffic did we get to this page and also how many
exits happened on this page?
Okay.
So we might be thinking that's all great data that we have right here,
but it really just shows us what is happening on the website, but not
really why it is happening .For that we would need to have some more context
to understand the behavior of the user.
On the website correctly.
Now Google Analytics can't really give us a data.
It doesn't have the tools, but behavioral analytics tools like Hotjar can
actually show us this data quite nicely.
So let's sign up to Hotjar here.
So on our landing page, you can just sign up to Hotjar really easily click
the link in the description below.
If you want to take part in this offer of three months, Hotjar business for
free no credit card needed really cool offer, and you can simply go and sign up.
It goes really quickly.
I'll go through the Google account here.
And then I'm basically already in, I can answer some questions here
and, enter our site URL
and then you need to install it via Google Tag Manager.
For example, I already have installed all place the code
manually, and you should be all done.
Let's go and do this later.
And you should be entering your Hotjar dashboard.
Now I have Hotjar installed already on another account.
So let me switch over to that.
In my second account here, we can see what Hotjar has now available.
We get access to these different reports.
Now it might seem like, uh, quite small, but in the end they hold a lot of value.
So let's see what we can find out about our Measure Masters
page and the users who visited.
So we'd go over to heat maps here, and this is the first visualization
tool that they have available, where we can look at heat maps of our page.
We can filter based on what page we are interested in.
And then we see our website, a screenshot of it, but overlaid different
data points that make it clear what is actually happening on a website.
So we have clicks move and scrolls.
Now, when we look at clicks, we can see that the navigation
is obviously used quite a bit.
We have our call to action here, which is nicely clicked.
And then.
Hopefully also our videos, which Hotjar can't track really
because they are in an I-frame.
But then we also have our call to actions here, which makes it seem
that our website is used correctly.
At least from what I can see here on our heat map, but we
can also look at the moves.
So sometimes users use their mouse to read certain things on the website.
It doesn't seem to be the case.
Quite as often here.
And obviously we also can look at scrolls.
So how far do you user scroll down the page?
You could be using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to track that
data, but it isn't as visual as we can see it here, which for landing page
optimization makes it quite clear where you should place the call to action.
If you have above the fold, which they ever told us here, If you find
out that this is not the case for your landing page, then you might
have a really good argument here to move the call to action around.
So in the heat maps, you can really find some evidence.
If you're suspecting your page structure is not conversion optimized.
And if you find anything that's out of balance, then it's a
great argument to show to your client to change something here.
So for us, it seems to be working and let's dig deeper into the
other tools that we have available.
Because this might be a snapshot of this page, but users actually have
different pathways to that page.
And that might also influence how they use it.
And we can look at these pathways by looking at recordings.
Now recordings are essentially videos of your user going through your website.
And you can see the exact path that he texts through the website
or the clicks, the scrolls and whatever he's seeing on the screen.
No matter if he's on a mobile device or a desktop device, and this can
yield like really great information, because you can view your website
from your visitors perspective, and that can help you to understand the
experience that the user goes through, how he interacts with the website.
But then also if there are any blockers that prevent him from moving through
your desired funnel, Before we start now clicking on any random video here.
These can be quite boring to watch because they are not narrated YouTube videos.
Hotjar has the ability to let a segment right here, but they also have a great
fit filter functionality from anything.
If you're looking at a specific page that the user visited to the
technology, but then also behavioral filters like rage clicks or U-turns.
Which can be quite insightful to watch.
I'm interested in our Measure Masters page.
So we go over here, put in measure-masters and apply this.
And then you have your recording seer available and can start watching a video.
I have one already favorited here.
So I'm going to go over and let's take a look at this one.
And as you can see, the user is going through our website.
You can see the mouse movements.
Then he goes over to our landing page scores a little bit down and then reads
with his mouse pointer, this text.
So apparently it's pretty important to get that text, right.
These elements.
And then on the third element, he leaves the website.
So that might be something we want to be making others aware of.
So we can at any point share a recording to the parties
involved or to your stakeholders.
We can also go ahead and any time, stop the recording at the point
where we see that our funnel is failing and input a comment here.
Later on that can help us to identify our recordings and find
the evidence that we are looking for to form a proper hypothesis.
You can also codify your recordings.
So you can batch them up and look at them all together.
And this player also has the added functionality that you can
talk with the recording speed.
So you can go through many recordings in rapid succession.
So you'll be able to see any kind of patterns in many of
these different recordings.
So I think you can see how recordings can be super valuable because we
get an over the shoulder view of the user going through our website.
So now we have a pretty good understanding.
We're looking at heat maps then also at our recordings, what is going on on
website, but that's always an outside view and we form our own opinion
together, even more conclusive evidence.
Why not just ask the user about his experience and that's what we
can do with the survey feature.
So surveys are a crucial part, I'd say in your analytics stack, because
here you can actually walk up to the user and ask them a question.
And that can be quite powerful when you try to get an insight and all you
need to do with Hotjar to run little surveys, especially pertaining to when
the user is actually on your website is to go over to the surveys here, put
in a name, and then you can create a survey, a pop-up survey, a full-screen
survey, or an external link survey.
So you would have a little pop-up, for example, that comes up like
a Tosta widget here, and you can ask any question you want.
And which question do you actually ask?
Hotjar some really cool suggestions here.
Probably something that I've tested and refined over the years.
And you have a question bank that you can just drag and drop in here.
So how did you find out about our site?
And it's now a question within our survey, and we can ask our
users how they found out about us.
Moving on when you are going through this set up here, you
can target specific users.
You can say when does actually should show up, but then also forward your response.
And this can be super powerful when you want to react to something that the user
put into one of these feedback surveys.
So you can forward your response to Slack or via email.
And this is actually something you can also see, see your client in.
If there are certain complaints that you want to make sure that the client actually
sees this makes Hotjar very actionable on the data that we can gather in the tool.
And later on, once you have it all together, we can go
ahead and look at the results.
So we ran two surveys here, one directly on our Measure Masters page, where
we ask, is there anything preventing you from signing up at this point?
And some people said, yes.
Um, we got.
Various answers here, price.
I want to learn to blow price too high.
Um, I'm an SEO.
Is this also useful to me?
And that might give us some ideas here to change, maybe our website,
our landing page, to answer some of these questions and make sure that the
user understands what they're actually getting, but you don't have to use
service just on the landing page itself.
We also ran a survey earlier.
To understand our users better.
So we had here this quick question survey, where we ask, what is your measure
skill level and who do you work for?
So we understand a little bit better what our users are, and this
table form is maybe not as useful.
So you can go over to the results here and can look at a chat form.
So our users apparently are like in the middle, we have less
pro users than total beginners.
And who you work for mainly in-house marketers in a company.
Then we have freelancers and agencies.
So what is the number one problem that you're trying to solve?
And there's a nice tech cloud here quite overwhelmingly.
People need help with tracking.
So having that on our page makes it easier later on to segment our
traffic and also create new products maybe, or offerings that we want to
bring to the Measure School crowd.
So a lot of questions that you might have asked inside of Google
Analytics might be somewhere in the data, but it's kind of hard to read
with a survey feature like that.
You can just go up to your users and actually ask them and gather evidence.
And that's why I think all of these different tools really help us to know
our users better, to know how they behave and get a feeling for what we
might want to change on our website.
So really quite a bit of insights here.
Now you might be asking yourself, what can I do now with everything that we have
discovered in Hotjar and Google Analytics?
Well, there's several paths to actually go down from here, but
with all the research that you have done to this point, hopefully now
you come up with a very hot, strong hypothesis, very strong recommendations.
What you would be changing on your website?
I would get all that evidence and show it to people and actually show them
visually your heat maps, your session recordings that you have gathered.
So they can also understand where you're coming from and how you would
be changing the website for the better.
And if you need more data, obviously you could run an AB test, with tools
like Google Optimize, or Optimizely, but certainly don't forget to keep measuring
your results, Google Analytics, and Hotjar integrate well with these tools and you'll
be able to follow along what the users are doing, and if they are receiving your
new website the way you wish they would.
Okay.
So for the final question in conclusion, which one is better
Google Analytics or Hotjar?
Well, I hope I was able to show you.
In this video that it's not really a question of either or, but both
work well together in parallel and they have their own strengths.
So Google Analytics is the King of aggregate data and
measures everything in numbers.
But if you want to zoom in and get a qualitative data view, a tool
like Hotjar should be in tandem with Google Analytics, but okay.
If you're still not sure if this combination actually makes sense for
you, I'd recommend to just try it out.
Hotjar was gracious enough to give Measure School viewers here at
three months business account to start gathering data right away.
And I think it's a great opportunity for you to understand your users
better with all the heat maps, the surveys and the recordings
that you can run on this account.
So you can set up today with the link in the description down below.
And that's already it for this week's video.
If you enjoyed it, please click that thumbs up button to give the
video some algorithm love, and I hope to see you in the next one.
My name is Julian, till next time.