Google Analytics vs user behavior analytics tools
Published on January 29, 2020
Last modified on March 19, 2024
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for providing context to your website traffic, with data such as how many visitors you get, where those visitors are coming from, which pages they are going to, and how long they stay on your site.
All are useful information to know, for sure—but in itself, these types of data do not give the full picture or offer much insight into how visitors are actually experiencing your site.
User behavior analytics tools such as Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and VWO enable you to see further into your users’ site experience beyond page bounce and exit rates.
In most cases, they answer the why of the what that Google Analytics data provides.
These tools are also great at providing a visual way for you to understand your website data, especially since it can get confusing to look at different figures and percentages representing different metrics in a typical Google Analytics report.
With that said, however, it’s not really a case of Google Analytics vs these tools (and of which one you should use in your website).
In fact, a holistic approach to user behavior analysis and UX optimization strategy is taking the “basic” data that Google Analytics provides, supplementing them with additional data from user behavior analytics tools, and then implementing and testing changes on your website based on these newly gathered insights.
Set up goals in Google Analytics
When you create a new website, the bare minimum you would need to get some idea on how it’s performing is to set up Google Analytics, which tracks your site traffic and reports data in an intuitive dashboard.
But to see how it’s performing in terms of targets that actually matter to your business, you will need to set up “goals”.
Simply put, a goal is an action that you want your users to take in your website or webshop, like buying a product, signing up for an account, or submitting a contact form. In other words, your website conversions.
Setting up goals in Google Analytics enables you to hone in on the data that are relevant to the conversions you’re aiming for—like the top traffic sources that bring in the most converters, or the page that users often visit right before they make their way to your conversion page.
Most goals are easy to set up on your own, while some configurations may need the help of a developer depending on the complexity.
Go to your Analytics dashboard, click Admin in the sidebar, select Goals, and see your options from there.
Learn more about goals in Google Analytics here.
AUTHOR
Peter Skouhus
A Danish entrepreneur who owns 1902 Software Development, an IT company in the Philippines where he has lived since 1998. Peter has extensive experience in the business side of IT development, strategic IT management, and sales.