Hotjar vs. Google Analytics

Google Analytics Pros & Cons

Google Analytics is a service for analyzing user behavior on the Internet. It is a must have for website owners and internet marketers. Here are the top benefits:

• Scalable cross-platform analytics built around events.
• In the new resource, ML and NLP functions are available to all GA users.
• The priority is to maintain confidentiality, including getting rid of the need to set cookies.
• Seamless integration with all Google products.
• Cross-platform user identification. In the new resource, you can see the entire path of the user, that is, all his actions on different devices and platforms.

Disadvantages are also present.

• Learning the tool takes time.
• The product has problems with data protection.
• It needs a cookie notice.

Google Analytics is a pretty simple tool, but if you have no time to master it, it is better to choose another option.

Hotjar Pros & Cons

Hotjar positions itself as an analysis tool for user experience. Hotjar is suitable for all companies and websites, whether e-commerce, B2B, SaaS, blog, personal website, or NGO.

Pros:

• Price scale directly to the level of page views you have to track.
• Recordings provide an incredibly detailed analysis of visitor behavior.
• Hotjar does not require programming experience to use.

There are several Hotjar disadvantages:

• No warnings or notifications are available.
• Survey designs are unattractive and intrusive to customers.

These options are both good, but if you don’t want to spend extra time learning, the second one will suit you better.

About Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is a next-generation analytics tool designed for the future. It's built to help businesses navigate their customers' complex, multi-platform journeys while prioritizing user privacy. Unlike Universal Analytics, which was built for a generation of online measurement anchored in desktop web, Google Analytics 4 operates across platforms, does not rely exclusively on cookies and uses an event-based data model to deliver user-centric measurement.

With Google Analytics 4, businesses can see unified user journeys across their websites and apps, use machine learning technology to surface and predict new insights, and, more importantly, it's built to keep up with a changing ecosystem. It's designed with your key objectives, such as driving sales or app installs, generating leads or connecting online and offline customer engagement.

For example, UK-based fitness apparel and accessories brand Gymshark used Google Analytics 4 to measure across its website and app, allowing the Gymshark team to better understand how users moved through the purchase funnel. As a result, they reduced user drop-off by 9%, increased product page clickthroughs by 5% and cut down their own time spent on user journey analysis by 30%.

Google Analytics 4 also offers data-driven attribution to analyze the full impact of your marketing across the customer journey, predictive capabilities to offer guidance without complex models, and greater value from your data with machine learning generating sophisticated predictive insights about user behavior and conversions.

It also offers expanded integrations with other Google products, like Google Ads, working across your combined web and app data, making it easy to use Analytics insights to optimize your campaigns. Moreover, Google Analytics 4 includes privacy controls such as cookieless measurement and behavioral and conversion modeling, making it more privacy-centric than Universal Analytics.

In conclusion, Google Analytics 4 is an advanced tool that provides unparalleled insights. It tracks the entire customer path across multiple platforms. It leverages AI and machine learning to provide more detailed insights into how users interact with your website and app. It's more powerful than Universal Analytics. Businesses must move to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible to build the necessary historical data before Universal Analytics stops processing new hits.

About Hotjar

Hotjar and Google Analytics 4 help website owners gain insights about user behavior, needs, and feelings. Hotjar is a people-first, self-funded, fully-distributed company with more than 200 employees working remotely throughout Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Trusted by over 1 million websites in 180+ countries, Hotjar helps website owners understand how users behave on their site, what they need, and how they feel fast. The company helps website specialists, experts, and businesses understand users' behavior through heatmaps, recordings, feedback, surveys, and funnels. Hotjar helps these professionals observe and visualize user behavior, get feedback with context, and connect with users to understand why users do what they do. Hotjar helps website owners measure conversions, learn why users drop off and extract the most meaningful parts of their insights. Hotjar integrates with thousands of popular apps, allowing website owners to automate their work and save time. Hotjar has a Microsoft Teams integration that allows customers to bring user feedback into their Microsoft Teams conversations. Hotjar is available on multiple plans with unlimited team members and multi-device support. Hotjar is easy to install and provides reliable customer support.