Adobe Dynamic Tag Management (discontinued) vs. Hotjar

Dynamic Tag Management allows you to tag any data elements on a page in order to track every aspect of your customer's journey. Its ease of use and the ability to deploy tags without having to involve a web developer leaves marketing to iterate without the lag time of a code release. I haven't found any areas where improvement is needed.

Incentivized

Hotjar is well suite for organizations that want to get a good glimpse into user behavior on their websites. The tool is easily installed through Google Tag Manager, and then users simply select which pages or paths they want the tool to analyze. After a few days, users can start seeing patterns develop, helping them understand what areas of the user journey flow they need to test out and improve. Hotjar is primarily for web-based experiences, not for mobile applications and other non-web digital applications.

Incentivized

• Manage web analytics tags!

• Heat mapping is great on Hotjar. It is a good place to start when you are looking at the UX & CRO on your website. You can see the % of people clicking on elements on a page, how far they scroll, and mouse movements.
• Hotjar is great for session recordings. These record the mouse movements, clicks, pages and scrolls of a user in video format. You can watch these to investigate what works well on a site and identify potential roadblocks and bugs.
• Hotjar is great as it ensures that users details are anonymous; for instance, if you are watching a session recording, you cannot see what a user types in a form field, as Hotjar blanks this out.
• Hotjar has a poll function, so you can have polls on your website.

Incentivized

• Single Page Applications: While it's greatly improved over the years, being able to accurately target certain actions on single page applications. In particular, applications built on React are difficult. The addition of a hash change trigger was quite useful, but more is definitely needed.
• Data Elements: Great new tool, but I need it to be easier to create. I'm not an inherently technical individual, and the main benefit of tag management is reducing the need for technical people.

Incentivized

• The video recording feature is very slow to use. I know there is a very powerful process going on (saving your CSS and the DOM movements you make) but anyway it's slow to use.
• Hotjar itself is heavy and has effects on your load times. This is a very important issue and I hope they're working on that.
• Adding more segmentation would be nice. For example, being able to connect your API or more information to show relevant polls or feedback buttons to certain users. Aggregated info is hard to process.

Incentivized

As it interfaces so well with AMO, we shall be utilizing the DTM for any future client additions.

Even though the heat maps and user recordings were useful, our website was significantly slowed down after we installed Hotjar, so much so, that it took over a minute for our blog to load. The data that we gathered was not worth the length that it took our website to load.

Incentivized

It is easy to use at a basic level, however without JavaScript resource you will struggle.

So easy and simple to use! Straightforward anyone in the team is able to easily go in and set up anything in Hotjar. The UI is really simple. Whenever you give feedback to Hotjar they continously take on board the feedback and improve the tool.

Incentivized

Although it is a newer product to Adobe, they seem to truly care about our challenges and are very proactive in making sure that we have the most knowledgeable support available in a timely manner.

Hotjar is a SaaS-based company, and as such has a good support service. Users can quickly submit support tickets through Hotjar's online portal. Enterprise customers get access to additional support members and have SLAs to support their larger, more complex needs. Overall, Hotjar is extremely reliable and I've never had to reach out to customer support.

Incentivized

It was quite seamless with the outstanding support from our Adobe account manager.

The one thing GTM has over DTM is that there are a bunch of hosted pixels by companies like Facebook. Otherwise, it's incredibly inferior. The DTM UI is easier, more intuitive, and more comprehensible. Debugging is easier as well, and the triggers are better defined in DTM. Version control is far superior and it's so easy to tell what tags are firing and when. I went from DTM to GTM when switching jobs and was so relieved when my new company made the switch to DTM. I'm much happier and it's much easier now.

Incentivized

Compared to Sprig and Usabilla, Hotjar has robust functionality. Again, as stated earlier, the ability to summarize rage clicks, trigger recordings for a/b experiments, and run intercept surveys on mobile is very useful. Hotjar is also noticeably more intuitive to use than Usabilla, with a cleaner interface and navigation.

Incentivized

• Excellent ROI investment "if" strategy and roll out are prioritized appropriately. Because this is a custom solution, Adobe does not provide this level of guidance.
• From a project management timeline perspective, if the team rolling this out tries to tag everything, then they will quickly run out of time and overextend resource hours.

Incentivized

• Our UX team can now use hard data to back up and validate design decisions that we make. Our role as usability experts is becoming more respected and integral to business objectives because we now have data that can back up our field of study and prove that our roles are demonstrably useful and necessary.
• HotJar allows our small team of 3 UX designers to get research data as if we were a much larger team. Instead of painstakingly using our time to do guerrilla research, endless user observations, and other types of manual testing, we can now get a significant portion of our data from HotJar.
• Using HotJar is actually giving our team a sense of excitement and enjoyment in our day-to-day usability work. Instead of seeing UX as a chore, HotJar is making data gathering and analyzing more fun, because we can see tangible results from a much larger pool of user/user-data than we could in the past.

Incentivized