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8 Google Analytics integrations to get more web and product insights in 2023
As a business or website owner, you're probably familiar with the frustration of not fully understanding the 'why' behind user actions. Traditional Google Analytics (GA) metrics like page views, clicks, and bounce rates can only tell you so much.
So how can you dig deeper to gain a more comprehensive understanding of user behavior—and identify optimization opportunities? This is where GA integrations come in.
This article evaluates eight GA integrations and their ability to offer deeper, more comprehensive insights for optimizing your product or service. You'll walk away with an understanding of:
The distinct benefits and features of each tool or platform
How adding GA integrations to your tech stack improves user engagement, conversions, and revenue
Practical use cases for GA integrations
Understand your users and their behavior, better than ever
Take the guesswork out of your decision-making. Use Hotjar to learn how people use your website and what they actually want from it.
8 Google Analytics integrations to improve and optimize your product
While Google Analytics metrics tell you what’s happening on your website, GA integrations take this a step further by identifying the why and how behind it, answering questions like:
Why are users abandoning their shopping carts before checkout?
Why are particular product or service features not used as often as others?
How does a new website or product design influence user behavior?
GA integrations also offer advanced troubleshooting solutions—so you can make strategic, targeted decisions that enhance the user experience and drive business development and growth.
Integrating GA add-ons can elevate your product’s performance. Here are eight platforms to get you started:
1. Hotjar
That's us! ✌️ GA integrates with Hotjar’s an all-in-one behavior analytics and digital experience insights platform, built to:
Track website performance
Streamline the user experience
Understand the motivations behind user actions and engagement
If you're looking for a dynamic, one-stop-shop that offers a 360-degree view of both product performance and user experience, Hotjar is it.
Using Hotjar with GA provides a more dynamic understanding of the user experience by connecting measurable, numerical quantitative data with observational, visual qualitative data.
By filtering GA events like button clicks or form submissions in Hotjar (or vice versa), you can see beyond the problem and identify where pain points originate, why users are getting frustrated or stuck, and solutions for improvement.
Key benefits and features of integrating Hotjar and GA:
Expanded user insights: after using GA to pinpoint low-converting pages or user journey events that have a high bounce rate, review the corresponding heatmaps and session recordings in Hotjar to visually understand why users are struggling
Direct user feedback: identify users who have the highest conversion rates on your website in GA, and then use Hotjar Feedback and Surveys to gather direct input from them, offering more detailed insights into their specific interests, needs, and preferences
Pattern and trend detection: use Hotjar Trends in combination with customized filters, Events, and User Attributes to track and understand website patterns initially identified in GA
Centralized dashboard: quickly analyze user metrics and gain actionable insights with the Hotjar Dashboard, which visually aggregates GA data, eliminating the need to sift through individual data points
Detailed funnel analysis: track user segments or goals on your website in GA, and then use Hotjar's customizable funnel analysis to create and track funnels for each of these segments or goals, sharpening your understanding of the customer journey and identifying opportunities for improvement
See it in action: how to combine GA and Hotjar
Say you're a website developer at an ecommerce company, and you notice in GA that there's a high drop-off rate during the final step of the checkout process—but there's no additional insight into what's prompting this user behavior.
To investigate what's happening during this specific step of the user journey, you head over to the Hotjar Dashboard to review the heatmaps and recordings associated with this GA event.
While viewing the corresponding list of user flow heatmaps, you notice that many visitors are clicking on the 'Continue Shopping' button more often than the 'Checkout' button on your website, indicating that customers are likely confused by the checkout process.
You dig into your hypothesis further by observing the related session recordings, which reveal that users are struggling to find the 'Checkout' button, which is located below the fold of the page, and are instead rage-clicking on the 'Continue Shopping' button, located above the fold.
Based on these insights, you team up with a UX designer to create a new version of the checkout page, moving the 'Checkout' button to a more prominent location above the fold. Then you A/B test a new version of the checkout page design against the original, monitoring the drop-off rates of both pages in GA, and using Hotjar Trends and Heatmaps to keep a close eye on any changes in user behavior.
Optimize your website with Hotjar
Use Hotjar's tools to understand how real users interact with your website—and then improve it for them
2. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a web security and performance services platform that specializes in safeguarding websites from cyber attacks, malware, and spam. Security add-ons like Cloudflare also ensure users' personal information remains protected, which builds trust in your brand while simultaneously providing an enjoyable and secure browsing experience for your visitors.
By integrating with GA, Cloudflare provides additional insights into website security threats by analyzing suspicious traffic patterns and associated user behavior. This includes identifying the source of malicious website activity, tracking the impact of attacks on website traffic and user engagement, and offering proactive troubleshooting options to mitigate pending threats.
Cloudflare's security analytics dashboard integrates GA data to identify and analyze incoming security threats. (Image Source)
Key benefits and features of integrating Cloudflare and GA:
Web Application Firewall (WAF): use Cloudfare's WAF tool to protect your product from common web attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Then, use its GA integration to analyze specific types of WAF events and identify curated solutions.
DDoS Protection: defend your website against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)—also known as volumetric attacks—by using GA data to monitor unusual website traffic or performance. Then use Cloudflare to analyze outlier patterns, identify different sources of DDoS attacks, and block malicious actions.
SSL/TLS protection: encrypt your web traffic with Cloudfare's SSL/TLS protection tool, preventing online tampering like data theft and digital eavesdropping, which threatens user security and decreases your website's SERP ranking. Integrate with GA to track and identify threats like mixed content warnings, insecure cookie settings, and invalid SSL/TLS certificates.
3. Optimizely
If you're looking for a tool with advanced developer functionality and experiment versatility, Optimizely is the way to go. With a comprehensive suite of web experimentation features, Optimizely is an exciting testing playground to see how changes influence product performance and the overall user experience.
When integrated with GA, Optimizely is especially useful for testing many different iterations of your product all at once—like different text, features, colors, and button sizes—and then pinpointing what combination suits specific audience segments through multivariate testing (MVT).
Optimizely supports MVT, which identifies which page elements in which combination are most engaging to users (Image source)
Key benefits and features of integrating Optimizely and GA:
Experimentation toolbox: choose from an expansive range of experimentation options that don't require coding support. A/B test two versions of a page, conduct multivariate testing (MVT), or accelerate new feature validation with feature experimentation, and watch how each difference impacts product performance in GA.
Machine learning: reduce the time it takes to capture statistically significant results from experiments with Optimizely's Stats Accelerator. Using machine learning, this tool reduces the time to statistical significance by monitoring ongoing experiments and automatically adjusting traffic distribution, showing more visitors the variations with the highest likelihood of reaching statistical significance.
Behavioral targeting: apply GA dimensions to target features or page experiments with different attributes like location or demographics. Then, accelerate quality assurance (QA) experiments and key learnings by auto-testing the variations on specific user sets.
Pro tip: integrate Optimizely with Hotjar to get even more experimentation insights.
Optimizely's A/B and MVT tests provide valuable insights into user preferences—but don't reveal the comprehensive 'why' behind them. This is where Hotjar comes in handy, giving a more in-depth, thorough overview, and empowering you to make effective product decisions.
Hotjar’s Optimizely integration enables you to target Surveys alongside your experiments
4. SEMrush
Perhaps one of the most popular search engine optimization (SEO) tools, SEMrush is a particularly useful web analysis software for conducting keyword research, analyzing competitor SEO profiles, tracking SERP positions, and researching local SEO.
When integrated with GA, SEMrush becomes an even more powerful tool for businesses to optimize their digital marketing strategies. By leveraging SEMrush's advanced SEO features and competitor analysis tools, you:
Improve your search engine results page (SERP) rankings
Increase online visibility
Drive more website traffic
Generate high-quality leads
Key benefits and features of integrating SEMrush and GA:
SEO Checker: optimize landing pages with SEMrush's On-Page SEO Checker, which integrates data from GA to provide customized advice to rank your site higher for target keywords—based on the top 10 ranking pages for that keyword and the performance of competitor pages
Backlink tracking: sync your domain's real-time backlinks in GA with SEMrush's Backlink Audit to improve your site’s SERP rankings by identifying low-quality backlinks or missed opportunities for link building
Position tracking: track keyword improvement opportunities and optimize the SERP ranking for specific keywords with SEMrush's Position Tracking tool. Test new keywords to see how they impact website traffic and user behavior in GA.
Site auditing: use the Site Audit tool to analyze your page's technical SEO—like crawlability, internal linking, and site architecture—and identify how performing pages are impacting SEO and the user experience
Bonus tip: use Hotjar Surveys to improve ecommerce SEO and product descriptions.
By asking users open-ended questions, surveys help pinpoint content gaps, reveal new topics and keywords, and identify additional competitors.
Surveys offer a constant stream of suggestions, taken directly from your target audience, to identify new content opportunities and consequently improve your product's SEO
5. Salesforce
Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps businesses manage user interactions and streamline the sales process.
When integrated with GA, Salesforce provides businesses with deeper insights into user behavior and website interactions, enabling you to optimize your marketing campaigns and prioritize your sales outreach to high-engagement users.
Key benefits and features of integrating Salesforce and GA:
Predictive lead scoring: assign user lead scores in Salesforce based on high-engagement behavior you identify in GA to prioritize CRM follow-up with leads who are more likely to convert
Email content optimization: integrate GA data like click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rates with the Salesforce Connect tool to analyze what content and key messaging resonates most with your target audience
Personalized CRM recommendations: use Einstein Analytics, Salesforce's advanced AI tool, to dig deeper into user behavior like search and purchase history, to test personalized CRM campaigns
6. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is a visitor tracking and analytics software that specializes in identifying potential users who have shown interest in your products or services—but haven't yet made contact—including business-to-business (B2B) leads and individual, anonymous visitors.
When integrated with GA, you can use Leadfeeder insights to optimize B2B lead generation, identify new audiences, and build user personas.
Key benefits and features of integrating Leadfeeder and GA:
ID anonymous visitors: identify website visitors who don’t fill out a contact form or provide any other identifiable information in GA
Firmographic profiles: improve B2B audience targeting with detailed insights about the companies visiting your website, including their location, industry, size, name, and website activity
Real-time lead alerts: quickly identify high-priority leads in GA and take action while they're still engaged with your site with real-time alerts sent directly to your email or CRM platform
Bonus: address high cart abandonment rates and re-engage with users by sending Hotjar Surveys as emails.
Cart abandonment emails have a 39.07% user open rate—and a 23.33% click-through rate—making email marketing one of the most powerful tools in cart abandonment recovery. Check out this link to learn how to send surveys via email.
An example of a cart abandonment survey, from Hotjar
7. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a customer analytics platform that’s particularly useful when you’re working with a product or service that involves multiple customer touchpoints before a user converts.
Through its Data Pipeline feature, Mixpanel integrates with GA to analyze user events, even across multiple devices, to map out a comprehensive user journey. Using these insights and observations, Mixpanel identifies common, multi-touch user journeys and high-impact touchpoints.
Integrate Mixpanel's event tracking and properties tracking with GA to get a more comprehensive view of user behavior across multiple touchpoints (Image Source)
Key benefits and features of integrating Mixpanel with GA:
High-impact touchpoint analysis: based on GA events, determine which touchpoints, such as a product feature or a web page, have the greatest influence on user conversion to prioritize your optimization efforts
Multi-touch user journey timeline: filter user actions like GA button clicks, form submissions, or video plays, to map out common multi-touch paths that users take before converting to streamline obstacles
Automatic event tracking: track user actions without needing to manually define or code each individual event
See it in action: how to combine GA and Mixpanel
Let's say you're a digital marketer at a subscription-based mobile app company, and your task is to evaluate the user journey to identify opportunities that’ll increase subscriptions. But how can you identify (and also prioritize) the most high-impact touchpoints?
Using Mixpanel to analyze GA event data, you segment users based on common characteristics like age, location, and behavior—and then review the multi-touch journey for each segment.
You notice in Mixpanel that users who engage with a specific tutorial video or read a certain blog post are more likely to convert to a paid subscription. You share these insights with your marketing team, so they can increase the promotion of this content in their channels.
You also decide to use Mixpanel's A/B testing feature to see if changes in the content—such as a different version of the tutorial video or blog post length—drive more conversions, by continuously monitoring the results in GA.
8. CallRail
CallRail is a customer insights tool ideal for businesses that frequently interact with users over the phone.
By integrating CallRail with GA, qualitative call data—like users' phone behavior—is connected with quantitative GA data—like call source, duration, and outcome—enabling you to spot call patterns and further tailor your product or service to better meet user needs.
Key benefits and features of integrating Leadfeeder and GA:
Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI): CallRail's DNI feature enables you to track the calls generated from your website by swapping the phone number on your website with a unique tracking number. The GA integration then tracks these calls as conversions, empowering you to track the ROI of your marketing campaigns.
Call Highlights: use the Call Highlights feature to identify significant moments in a call, like a customer mentioning a specific product or service. This data is then filtered into GA as an event, enabling you to track user needs over time—and tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
GA Call Tags: categorize the call with call tags that sync with GA, to quantify the caller's interests and track their user journey
Use GA add-ons to improve your product performance and optimize the user experience
Integrating GA add-ons into your tech toolkit is a fast and effective way to enhance your product or website.
Combining traditional GA data with more detailed integration tool insights also provides a deeper understanding of your user, empowering you—and your team—to make data-driven decisions to optimize the user experience, leading to improved engagement, conversions, and, ultimately, revenue.
Understand your users and their behavior, better than ever
Take the guesswork out of your decision-making. Use Hotjar to learn how people use your website and what they actually want from it.
FAQs about website GA integrations
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