Pairing Hotjar and Google Analytics on a higher education website

Google Analytics has a lot going for it as a web analytics tool. Since my work experience has been working with tight-budget nonprofits, I appreciate that the basic GA package is free to use. In my work in higher education, I’ve worked for units within a large university that don’t manage systemwide admissions or donations (to name two big-picture organizational goals). This often means leaner staffing and smaller marketing communications budgets; however, these units also have business goals and specific audiences to reach to achieve them. Keeping in mind the perspective of one college within a university, I propose keeping GA and using a complementary tool to share more user experience insights than GA can provide alone: Hotjar. 

Google Analytics: What it can and can’t do on its own

First, let’s go over the powerful advantages of using GA. As mentioned above, GA has a free version that can do almost everything a small- to medium-size business needs to view key website metrics, with the upgraded (and paid) Google Analytics 360 offering more customization and higher traffic limits. Free GA collects real-time data, allows for advanced segmentation and goal-setting, generates custom reports (including conversions and social reporting), and can export its data (“Is Google,” n.d.). 

As in most cases, with a “freemium” product comes another price: a difficult learning curve that requires a lot of information to be digested in a short period, just to get started. As Joe (2019) said, GA “is like learning a new sport such as surfing—when you first stand up on a surfboard you’re like ‘hooray, I can surf now!’ but then you realize getting beyond the basics of riding the whitewater is a steep learning curve.” There’s a reason Google offers training courses through its Analytics Academy and a certificate through its Google Analytics Individual Qualification program. It’s all free, as is the platform itself, but it’s telling that it’s worth it for Google to create and maintain these services for its customers—and potential advertisers. As Adam Heitzman wrote in Search Engine Journal (2021), passing the GAIQ exam and adding the certification to your resumé or LinkedIn profile is a “career booster” that can impress employers (especially those companies who want to display the coveted Google Partners Badge). Heitzman (2021) also recommended Udemy’s paid Google Analytics courses for a different take, including some tailored for GAIQ exam prep.

GAIQ certification requires renewal every 12 months, no doubt partly because GA undergoes constant updates, as noted by Dáire Summerville with GA competitor Leadfeeder (2021). This often entails changes to the “menus, metrics, and features” (Summerville, 2021), which exacerbates a difficult user interface described by some of GA’s competitors as “confusing” and “complex” (Ofiwe, 2021) and even “difficult…to wade through” (Shah, 2020). This also explains why many digital marketing agencies, including WebFX, leap at the chance to offer ongoing GA consulting services (“Is Google,” n.d.). 

Figure 1: Heap outlines GA pros and cons—including GA’s emphasis on measuring acquisition over "activation and retention" ("Alternatives," n.d.).

More to the point, GA has functionality drawbacks. Privacy issues can lead to incomplete data gathering (Sellers, 2020). According to GA competitor Heap, what GA does best is track “activities related to [user] acquisition” as opposed to “what they do while [they] are there” (“Alternatives,” n.d.; see fig. 1). What GA can do regarding conversions and events requires some work, so I’d argue that Heap is overstating its case here, and that the drawbacks are mostly for out-of-the-box or beginner uses of GA. Ofiwe (2021) acknowledged this in her assessment of GA for Semrush’s blog, saying, “To track additional [beyond standard web] metrics, you’ll have to set up a tag via Google Tag Manager and add the code to our webpages.” A final addition to the list of things one has to add on is GDPR compliance. GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation, contains security and privacy rules relevant to all websites who interact in almost any way with the European Union: through customers, clients, visitors, you name it. Though the U.S. doesn’t have its own version, it’s safe to assume that any major company is going to have some overlap with Europe, so everyone is rushing to get up to speed. If you’ve been seeing more websites asking for your permission to use cookies, this is an effort to come into compliance with the GDPA. However, GA has to have this turned on in the back end, or you can limit your data sharing (Summerville, 2021). 

Hotjar: Bringing UX intelligence to the analytics toolkit

Hotjar has an entire blog post devoted to its functionality alongside GA, which is both smart search engine optimization and a testament to the two tools’ complementarity (Hotjar Team, 2022). This is where I found that Hotjar brought some needed functionality to Google Analytics, which is specifically helpful for an integrated marketing communications team that’s part of a large university. Hotjar focuses on a website’s user interface (UI) and user experience (UX), and those are both extremely important for higher education. 

Figure 2: Side by side images show the most-seen areas of a webpage (left) and which receive the most interaction (right) (Hotjar Team, 2022).

Before I get to that, to introduce Hotjar: it’s behavior analytics that can explain the reasons behind GA’s metrics. Say you have a page with a high bounce rate. This can happen for a lot of reasons, so how do you determine why it’s happening? Hotjar can help with on-page analytics. Two of the most common are heatmaps “showcasing ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ interaction spots (which in turn help you notice trends and optimization opportunities to drive more engagement where you want it)” (see fig. 2) and session recordings that create a video to “reconstruct your users’ journey across the website” (Hotjar Team, 2022). Hotjar can also be used to solicit feedback through on-page surveys and an interactive widget (see fig. 3). This is qualitative data, which provides a nice partner to GA’s quantitative data, as pointed out by Mark Tietbohl (2022). 

Figure 3: An example of a visitor using Hotjar’s incoming feedback widget to leave comments on specific areas of your site (Hotjar Team, 2022).

In fact, Hotjar pointed out many times that GA’s quantitative data can be used to produce research that can point to more UX testing needed from Hotjar or in-person focus groups. One specific way this matters in higher education is when seeking internal buy-in during a redesign. In a college setting, academic leaders and faculty members often have set ideas of what they want to see in a webpage, though this is backed mainly by their own instincts and not subject area expertise (I say this with all due respect, since many are quite web-savvy, though just as many are certain that they understand more than they do!). The Hotjar Team (2022) said that GA can be used before a redesign to “identify pages that you need to handle with extreme care,” as well as afterwards to see if performance is living up to expectations, whereas you’d use Hotjar to catch any bugs and to conduct qualitative feedback both before and after the redesign. In addition, since Hotjar has a friendly interface and offers a qualitative element to hard numbers, it can help convince entrenched doubters “how people really use your website” (Hotjar Team, 2022).

The reason to focus on UX on higher education websites 

Returning to the point I made earlier about UX on college websites, higher education audiences both expect and need a positive digital experience. This applies both to prospective and current students—in other words, UX can determine whether you or a competing institution can attract, satisfy, and retain your key customers, most of whom are in “the most tech-savvy generation” to date, Gen Z (Speer, 2021).

Now that COVID-19 has forced higher education to move more online than ever, from classes to on-campus services to socialization, student expectations have risen in kind. As UX librarian Kelly Dagan wrote on Medium last summer (2021), “In this remote environment, the shortcomings of our existing systems and processes [in higher education] are more apparent—and more damaging—than ever.” Dagan also noted that a bad UX can impact faculty, who are already stressed and overworked due to the pandemic, since they “shouldn’t also have to navigate poorly designed platforms and labyrinthine processes” to move courses online or adapt their syllabi. What UX does, Dagan explained, is offer “a broad and empathetic toolkit” to complement—there’s that word again—the quantitative information that higher ed often leans on. A little empathetic hot fudge on the quantitative ice cream, basically. The key, Dagan pointed out, is to “triangulate” UX with these other methods. They taste best together!

I appreciate that Dagan called out web accessibility as something that UX can help ensure, since that is a major factor for higher ed institutions that are required to follow strict standards. Speer (2021) wrote about how MIT and Harvard were both sued over website accessibility, specifically video accessibility. To be frank, this can be a hurdle when working with professors, who sometimes want to upload all the PDFs of their research, their CVs, and their homemade fliers, most of which will run afoul of accessibility guidelines due to PDFs’ notorious accessibility pitfalls; see Pennsylvania State University’s guide as an example (“PDF Issues,” n.d.). 

Still, this returns us to a key audience for higher ed websites: faculty. Leah Zitter (2021) pointed out that the digital education tools professors use could stand some UX upgrades, and this applies equally to front-end college websites. If a faculty member can’t find what they’re looking for, whether it’s a resource for a student or a form to apply for internal funding for teaching, this can lead to employee dissatisfaction and trickle down to the student experience. Plus, this leads to the old canard of internal communications: the entire company benefits when its internal constituencies are satisfied and connected to the mission and brand. What better way to gain this buy-in than through an easily navigable, beautiful, and successful website?

Whether you work in higher education or another industry, how important do you think it is to focus on UX-related analytics to measure website performance? Thanks for reading!

References

Alternatives to Google Analytics and GA 360. (n.d.). Heap. Retrieved from https://heap.io/topics/google-analytics-alternatives 

Dagan, K. (2020, Apr. 24). Why UX in higher education is more important than ever. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/swlh/why-ux-in-higher-education-is-more-important-than-ever-7eccd476ae85 

Heitzman, A. (2021, June 4). How to get a Google Analytics certification (and is it really worth it?). Search Engine Journal. Retrieved from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-analytics-certification/283621/ 

Hotjar Team. (2022, Jan. 27). Hotjar vs Google Analytics. Hotjar. Retrieved from https://www.hotjar.com/blog/hotjar-vs-google-analytics/ 

Is Google Analytics free? (Plus 5 benefits of using Google Analytics). (n.d.). WebFX. Retrieved from https://www.webfx.com/martech/tech/is-google-analytics-free/ 

Joe. (2019, Aug. 10). Seventeen places to learn Google Analytics free in 2019 (from beginner to pro). What’s the Host. Retrieved from https://www.whatsthehost.com/17-places-to-learn-google-analytics/  

Ofiwe, M. (2021, Sept. 23). Top 9 (free and paid) alternatives for Google Analytics to get your site data. Semrush Blog. Retrieved from https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-analytics-alternatives/ 

PDF issues and recommendations. (n.d.). Pennsylvania State University. Retrieved from https://accessibility.psu.edu/pdf/pdfissues/ 

Sellers, A. (2020, Oct. 5; updated 2021, Dec. 2). Eleven best Google Analytics alternatives for your website. HubSpot Blog. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/website/best-google-analytics-alternatives 

Shah, A. (2020, Apr. 6). Nine types of web analytics tools—and how to know which ones you really need. Parse.ly. Retrieved from https://blog.parse.ly/web-analytics-software-tools/ 

Speer, H. (2021, Mar. 24). Thirteen higher education UX best practices. Eri Design. Retrieved from https://www.eridesignstudio.com/insights/ux-best-practices-for-higher-education-websites/ 

Summerville, D. (2021, Oct. 1). Twenty-two Google Analytics alternatives for 2021. Leadfeeder. Retrieved from https://www.leadfeeder.com/blog/google-analytics-alternatives/ 

Tietbohl, M. (2022, Jan. 22). Discussion 2 and writing assignment 1 [announcement post]. IMC 642: Web Metrics and SEO. Reed College of Media at West Virginia University. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/announcement?method=search&context=mybb&course_id=_174310_1&viewChoice=2 

Zitter, L. (2021, July 30). Five higher education UX mistakes to avoid EdTech Magazine. Retrieved from https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2021/07/5-higher-education-ux-mistakes-avoid