Choose your fighter; React & Share, Hotjar, Google Analytics. Content writers have two tools to figure out if their work is satisfying readers: feedback and analytics. But which tool do you need to make sure that you’re going beyond vanity metrics to determine the quality of reader experience?
Trick question. Whilst prioritising experience quality is a move in the right direction, it’s important that experience is underpinned by the two key players – accessibility and privacy. To tick all three boxes, we’re diving deeper into how using React & Share, Hotjar and Google Analytics simultaneously across your website will help communications teams to nail the full trifecta and generate informative content for everyone.
React & Share vs Google Analytics
Everyone uses Google Analytics. Or at least, they say that they use Google Analytics. The reality is that Google Analytics, albeit a free tool, is a tricky piece of kit, delivering a myriad of quantitative data with no true qualitative insights to let you know just how accessible and informative your content is. Where Google Analytics functions well as an analytics tool, React & Share goes beyond the numbers, focusing on feedback to get under the skin of your customers’ true content sentiment.
We know that not everyone has the time to sit down with their tool or delve into a dashboard, be it in Google Analytics or React & Share, and we’re also fans of lightening the load where we can. Unlike Google Analytics, React & Share delivers reports to pick up on the most viewed, most reactive and most engaging content to let you know what your audience is accessing and how they truly feel about the information that you’re publishing.
React & Share vs Hotjar
Like Google Analytics, Hotjar is an analytics software used to see just how individuals interact with your website. However, in contrast to Google Analytics, Hotjar also collates feedback from readers to gain deeper insights into website experience. Hotjar simultaneously straddles the what and the why behind user data, tracking user journeys and reviewing user sessions to follow interactions.
So, where does React & Share slot in? Whilst being able to watch recordings is no doubt useful, Hotjar isn’t equipped to provide actionable feedback to users to prioritise direct interaction. Hotjar tracks user mouse behaviour around your site, providing insights into conversations and business-focused metrics rather than how informative your content is. At React & Share, we balance quality and actionability to zone in on trust and engagement measurements instead of revenue and conversions.
Accessibility
This is the biggie. Conversations surrounding accessibility have ramped up in recent years, and some tools and organisations are still dragging their feet and refusing to address this crucial issue. Many external comms teams are often guilty of creating content that excludes a large portion of their readership by ignoring Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, using unclear language and dismissing descriptive headings.
Without qualitative feedback tools, such as React & Share or Hotjar, content producers are unable to know if audiences understand the information that they are reading and no doubt seeking for a highly practical and essential reason. A simple reaction widget, asking your readers whether they found the language clear, informative and useful will uncover issues surrounding access that you may not even know you had.
Delving deeper into the practicalities involved in creating accessible content we learned that, at the time of writing, Hotjar as a tool is not compliant with recently updated Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are in place to make content “more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these”.
In putting accessibility at the top of the list, and complying with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, React & Share supports users to ensure that their content is accessible and usable for all.
Privacy
Unlike React & Share or Hotjar, Google Analytics is free, with a hidden cost – your data is in their hands. Audiences that engage with Google Analytics tracked websites will have a cookie installed in their browser, a cookie owned by Google. Hotjar holds a clear stance on privacy, promising to never share or sell data to advertisers or third-party services, enabling their users to sleep soundly.
In stark contrast to Google Analytics, React & Share will install a cookie owned by you, the customer. We don’t store any reader data aside from the bare minimum needed to let you track reader behaviour — and that doesn’t include any personal data. Ultimately, with React & Share, you hold ownership of your data and secure the privacy of your users – and you’re not sacrificing any functionality to do it.
Layering up
Phew, that was a lot of information in one space. There’s a lot to consider when creating content for a wide variety of audiences, with varying access needs and the shared desire for privacy.
Whilst approaching the goal from different angles, React & Share, Hotjar and Google Analytics all strive to help you get to know your readers better. We hope that we’re presented a solid case for you to layer up your analytics and feedback tools to meet the ever-evolving needs of audiences, whilst always elevating the core rights to reader accessibility and privacy.
Get in touch to find out more about how React & Share can help you to serve your customers better with human-centric data and quality content feedback.
