Over the previous few months, Amplitude has had many Google Analytics prospects reaching out to inquire about our analytics product. That is being pushed by the surprising sunsetting of GA Common. Since I do know extra about Google Analytics than most right here at Amplitude, I’ve change into the de facto particular person to assist with these conversations. Whereas many alternative matters floor in these conversations, there are a lot of questions that I’m requested repeatedly. So, on this publish, I’ll share the most typical questions I’ve obtained and a few brief replies. Please notice that this publish differs from my earlier publish, wherein I shared my solutions to questions in regards to the sunsetting of GA Common.
How tough is it emigrate from GA to Amplitude?
One of many chief considerations of present GA prospects is the work effort emigrate to a brand new platform. Many organizations are stretched skinny, and switching analytics distributors was not one thing that they had deliberate. Google’s hurried and surprising migration deadlines have triggered a lot pointless stress. Sadly, transferring from GA Common to GA4 will not be the flip of a change, so both approach, organizations utilizing GA Common should re-implement one thing.
The analytics is probably going carried out with Google Tag Supervisor (GTM) in case your digital property is a web site. If that’s the case, you probably have an analytics knowledge layer feeding knowledge into GA Common through GTM. If that’s the case, you need to use Amplitude’s free Google Tag Supervisor template (shopper facet and server facet) to re-use your entire earlier work and start sending the identical knowledge components into Amplitude. All you could do is about up your occasions and properties in Amplitude and add some new guidelines to GTM. We even partnered with BlastX to create a device that can assist you migrate your GA Common taxonomy to Amplitude, leveraging APIs from each distributors. Amplitude additionally affords a strong free plan to get you began, so you may leverage the GTM template and the taxonomy migration device to start sending knowledge to a free model of Amplitude inside hours.
In case your group has a cell utility, you need to change your GA or Firebase SDK with the Amplitude SDK. Because of this, I like to recommend beginning with the web site so you may rise up and working shortly, discover ways to use Amplitude, after which transfer on to the cell app. However the excellent news is that Amplitude started its life because the main cell utility vendor and is constantly the highest rated, so you realize you’ll be in good palms. You may mix web site and cell app knowledge into the identical Amplitude venture if you wish to see complete, multi-platform buyer journeys.
Amplitude has many different methods to implement that may usually be even simpler than Google Analytics. In case your group has a knowledge collector (homegrown or utilizing a CDP like Section, mParticle, or RudderStack), you may simply ship that knowledge into Amplitude. Amplitude additionally has integrations with knowledge warehouses like BiqQuery and Snowflake.
Can Amplitude Observe Ecommerce?
Monitoring eCommerce is a main use case for Google Analytics. GA prospects need to know the way usually guests take a look at merchandise, add them to the cart, and buy. GA affords a prescriptive “Enhanced Ecommerce” implementation configuration to trace this. If GA prospects observe the specific directions related to Enhanced Ecommerce, they will see a strong set of Ecommerce experiences with the GA interface. One of many distinctive options of the Enhanced Ecommerce implementation is that it affords a solution to monitor merchandise (objects) so that every product can have its personal knowledge set. That is usually known as a property/dimension array. GA dimensions can’t have nested arrays aside from the “merchandise” dimension included in Enhanced Ecommerce. This array consists of knowledge factors reminiscent of merchandise identify, model, class, value, low cost, and so forth. The GA merchandise dimension permits your group to have totally different dimension values for every Ecommerce product. So, leveraging GA Enhanced Ecommerce offers the advantage of getting pre-canned experiences, conversion metrics, and item-specific dimension values through a dimension array.
Are you able to monitor Ecommerce in Amplitude? After all! The primary distinction in Amplitude is that we don’t prescribe precisely how you could implement Ecommerce monitoring, and we don’t mechanically configure particular experiences and metrics. Whereas having experiences and metrics pre-built for you is engaging, it additionally means that you’re confined to how GA needs you to trace Ecommerce. Amplitude has best-practice Ecommerce implementation recommendations that mirror what you are able to do in GA, however we allow you to select how you need to implement them. You may add extra occasions and properties than GA affords or replicate what you had in GA. Additionally, whereas GA solely has one dimension array, Amplitude offers an limitless variety of dimension arrays! So you may monitor sub-dimensions (properties) anytime you’d like! Amplitude additionally has dashboard templates that may replicate the out-of-the-box experiences you might be used to in GA.
Can Amplitude Observe Advertising Channels and Campaigns?
One of many blessings and curses of being the most effective product analytics vendor out there is that it’s simple to get typecast. Amplitude is synonymous with product analytics, and its skill to energy progress for digital merchandise is unparalleled. However final 12 months, Amplitude, anticipating the forthcoming convergence of digital analytics applied sciences, added a large quantity of promoting analytics capabilities to the product. Since I’ve a advertising and marketing analytics background, considered one of my targets in becoming a member of Amplitude was to construct a “super-product” that would mix the most effective of promoting and product analytics. We all know that the first use case for Google Analytics is advertising and marketing efficiency. Google initially acquired Urchin to point out promoting prospects how their campaigns had been performing, so analytics round advertising and marketing and acquisition are core to GA’s DNA. The highest GA options utilized by entrepreneurs embrace:
- Acquisition Channels – Mechanically associating periods and occasions into the right advertising and marketing acquisition channel (e.g., Paid Search, web optimization, E-mail, and so forth.)
- Multi-Contact Attribution – Assigning totally different attribution fashions to advertising and marketing channels and campaigns to assist entrepreneurs see which channels and campaigns ought to obtain credit score for conversions
- Promoting Community Integration – Enabling entrepreneurs to view marketing campaign metrics like ad impressions, ad clicks, and ad price for campaigns mixed with the flexibility to view conversions from these campaigns to compute return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Ad Community Viewers Sharing – Enabling entrepreneurs to push a cohort of customers (audiences) to an promoting community for a marketing campaign or re-targeting
Whereas Amplitude had at all times excelled at analyzing web site and app utilization after the acquisition, we added Acquisition Channels, Multi-Contact Attribution, and Promoting Community Integration to the product so our industry-leading product analytics options could possibly be merged with these advertising and marketing analytics options. Whereas Amplitude was constructing these new advertising and marketing analytics options, we tried to enhance upon what was obtainable in GA. For instance, In Amplitude, you may have as many acquisition channels as you’d like. Maybe you need a high-level and extra detailed view (e.g., Paid Search-Google, Paid Search-Bing, and so forth.). We additionally made acquisition channels retroactive, so any adjustments will retroactively influence historic knowledge, not simply future knowledge. Amplitude has additionally added the flexibility to view touchdown pages, bounce charges, and so forth.
Amplitude eliminated the GA 90-day lookback window related to channels and campaigns for multi-touch attribution. In Amplitude, you need to use any lookback window to incorporate campaigns way back to you’d like. In GA, except you might be within the particular channel attribution report, you may solely assign an attribution mannequin within the basic settings space, which applies to all property experiences. In Amplitude, we can help you configure attribution for any occasion/metric you need in Knowledge Tables (Amplitude’s model of Discover). In Amplitude, you may see the identical occasion/metric side-by-side with totally different attribution fashions. This performance will not be at the moment obtainable in GA4.
Amplitude imports Google Advertisements impressions, clicks, and prices. We additionally constructed a further integration with Google Advertisements that means that you can view Google Ad campaigns utilizing all the wealthy marketing campaign metadata. In lots of circumstances, the brand new advertising and marketing performance we constructed surpasses what is on the market in Google Analytics.
Can I Ship Audiences from Amplitude to Google Advertisements?
Some of the well-liked options of Google Analytics is its tight integration with Google Advertisements. Should you discover an attention-grabbing phase of customers whereas utilizing GA, you may convert the phase into an viewers after which hyperlink your GA account to your Google Advertisements account. These audiences can be mechanically populated in Google Advertisements. There they are often re-targeted or used as a part of bidding methods. Nonetheless, this functionality solely works if you’re utilizing Google Indicators. Google Indicators is a approach that Google Analytics can determine nameless customers throughout totally different web sites in the event that they haven’t opted out of adverts personalization inside their Google account. However the usage of Google Indicators can have some privateness implications, and plenty of organizations (particularly in Europe) have disabled it inside Google Analytics. If Google Indicators is disabled, your skill to sync audiences from GA4 to Google Advertisements won’t work.
Inside Amplitude, we’ve got at all times had a sturdy approach of sending viewers cohorts to promoting networks by means of our lengthy record of accomplice integrations. This performance can create cohorts of customers and sync them to Google Advertisements. You may hyperlink Amplitude to your Google Advertisements account and select the ID to attach Amplitude customers to the identical customers in Google Advertisements. This linking is usually completed utilizing a hashed e mail tackle, a cell promoting ID, or a CRM/buyer ID. As soon as the person ID hyperlink is established, cohorts of customers can be synced to Google Advertisements and used there like another Google Ad viewers.
One other factor to notice is that Amplitude can sync cohorts of customers to many promoting platforms, not simply Google Advertisements. Google Analytics primarily sends audiences to Google Advertisements, nevertheless it doesn’t make it simple to sync audiences to different promoting networks.
Does Amplitude Have Built-in Experimentation Capabilities?
The Google Analytics neighborhood was not too long ago stunned to study that Google is shutting down its free experimentation/testing platform, Google Optimize. Most digital analysts perceive there’s a tight relationship between performing digital evaluation and experimentation. Analysts discover alternatives within the knowledge after which use experimentation to see if these alternatives result in elevated engagement or conversion. Then when working experiments or exams, they use analytics to measure the influence. These two applied sciences have a symbiotic relationship that may assist energy digital product progress.
Amplitude launched its experimentation product two years in the past and is totally built-in with the analytics product. Amplitude Experiment affords characteristic flagging, A/B testing, and all different experimentation options you’d count on. Whereas Amplitude Experiment isn’t free, its integration with Amplitude Analytics creates a synergistic impact for product progress.
Does Amplitude Scale? Have Knowledge Cardinality Points?
Although Google Analytics is a part of Google, which has a few of the finest know-how, GA will not be recognized for its scalability or pace. GA has lengthy been recognized for knowledge sampling, limitations on metrics and dimensions, and different reporting limitations. Inside the GA4 interface, there are some unusual limitations:
Keep in mind that these are simply some of the GA4 limitations and that many of the figures above are for the paid model of GA4 (limits on the free model are even worse)! Due to this, many high-volume web sites/apps desire to make use of merchandise like Amplitude. Amplitude purchasers like Sq., PayPal, and Doordash have knowledge volumes that GA would by no means be capable to deal with. Amplitude’s knowledge question system was purpose-built to ship unsampled knowledge in real-time.
GA advises that you just carry out extra complicated queries utilizing BigQuery or Looker Studio to beat these limitations. Which means that on a regular basis knowledge shoppers should discover ways to use the GA predefined experiences, however once they hit a restrict there, discover ways to use the Discover interface, and once they hit limits there, discover ways to use BigQuery (which requires SQL) or Looker Studio (which requires BI experience). Whereas that could be okay for the devoted digital analytics workforce, that looks as if loads to ask of informal knowledge customers, on a regular basis entrepreneurs, and product groups. In some circumstances, former GA purchasers have informed us their customers unknowingly ran queries in BigQuery that resulted in costly, unplanned payments!
Amplitude has one interface that handles reporting from elementary to super-complex questions. When you at all times have the choice of sending your knowledge to BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or another knowledge warehouse, Amplitude customers can do virtually something they want proper throughout the interface. And Amplitude doesn’t cost for queries or restrict the variety of experiences that may be run. Amplitude removes most of the limitations talked about above, and in relation to scalability and cardinality, Amplitude can tackle knowledge units of just about any dimension.
What About Privateness and GDPR?
After I converse to European organizations, GDPR comes up usually. Google has come underneath hearth for privateness regulation in a number of European international locations, and a few have even deemed GA “unlawful” in its present type. I keep away from discussing privateness laws and like to defer these inquiries to our privateness officer and webpage. Nonetheless, I can say that Amplitude has a European knowledge middle (based mostly in Germany), which helps maintain EU knowledge from being transmitted to the US.
What Does Amplitude Try this GA Does Not?
Whereas many of the questions I obtain are individuals probing to see if they might lose something in the event that they migrated to Amplitude, I’m sometimes requested what Amplitude affords they haven’t had with GA. Happily or sadly, that could be a comparatively lengthy record. I plan to spend a while documenting this extra sooner or later, however as a teaser, listed here are a few of my favorites:
- Collaboration/Knowledge Storytelling – Amplitude has vastly emphasised making digital analytics a workforce sport. We allow this by offering a spot throughout the product to share movies, photographs, charts, graphs, wealthy textual content, and annotations – multi functional easy-to-read interface known as Notebooks. Notebooks are like Confluence pages inside our product, the place every thing associated to an evaluation lives in a single place. We’ve Areas, a group of all evaluation artifacts for a venture or a workforce. And all Amplitude experiences/dashboards have inline dialogue threads so workforce members can share their ideas in step with the evaluation. We even have native integrations with Slack, Jira, Notion, and Miro for groups that leverage these instruments.
- Conversion Funnels – Amplitude’s conversion funnels are second to none! They bring about a lot energy to conversion evaluation. Whereas GA has conversion funnels, there’s a lot extra you are able to do with Amplitude conversion funnels (you may see a comparability right here). Amplitude’s conversion funnels additionally apply machine studying to assist information you thru the occasions inflicting funnel conversion or drop-off. As soon as you employ Amplitude conversion funnels, it’s laborious to return to what’s obtainable in GA!
- Retention Reporting – In GA, there are some elementary retention experiences. They can help you view what number of customers returned after X variety of days, weeks, or months. You may as well apply segments to those experiences. However in Amplitude, retention reporting is taken to a complete new degree. Amplitude has a Lifecycle report that exhibits new, present, lively, and dormant customers. As well as, Amplitude affords superior N-Day retention, unbounded retention, retention developments over time, and plenty of extra. There are 20+ permutations of retention experiences that in GA must be manually recreated through SQL in BigQuery. Amplitude places the ability of superior retention in an interface that knowledge customers of any degree can use.
- Knowledge Governance – In Amplitude, we take knowledge governance significantly! A lot in order that we acquired a complete knowledge governance firm and built-in it into our product. In Amplitude, it’s simple to see your full monitoring plan, spot knowledge high quality points, monitor knowledge spikes and gaps, and so forth. Amplitude prevents customers from creating duplicate segments and metrics so that they don’t proliferate and muddle your analytics implementation. Amplitude’s knowledge governance options make it simple to mix occasions and properties and repair any knowledge errors with out re-implementing them. Amplitude additionally offers significantly better debugging instruments than GA (no extra having to hunt and end up in Debug!). We additionally supply strict management over occasions and properties, and unplanned/rejected occasions don’t rely towards your consumption!
- Person Profile and Profile API – Amplitude offers a person profile for every recognized and nameless person. This person profile exhibits all recognized attributes of the person and their full occasion stream. Whereas GA means that you can view person occasions in Debug mode, Amplitude’s person profile offers all person occasion historical past and the properties related to every occasion. As well as, utilizing the Amplitude Id API, you may enrich the Amplitude person profile of any person. Whether or not including buyer attributes out of your CRM system or knowledge warehouse, you may complement the info collected on the internet and cell with different buyer knowledge. That is particularly helpful in circumstances the place you might need to monitor PII however can’t accomplish that in JavaScript or the SDK as a result of privateness rules. As soon as person profiles have been enriched, analytics experiences can use any added knowledge factors. For instance, you may add the variety of youngsters every buyer has and later examine a conversion funnel for individuals who do and don’t have youngsters. The chances are countless.
- Direct Buyer Help – Google Analytics defers coaching and help to companions. Typically, you can’t discuss on to Google if in case you have a product challenge. At Amplitude, we provide direct help to paying prospects and supply on-demand help to these utilizing our free merchandise. Paying prospects are assigned a buyer success supervisor who meets with purchasers recurrently to make sure they’re profitable with our merchandise. Amplitude additionally offers on-demand product coaching and affords stay courses if wanted. And our product workforce loves to speak to prospects who’ve concepts about how we will enhance our merchandise!
I might go on, however these are a few of my favourite product differentiators…
How Does Amplitude’s Price Evaluate to Google Analytics?
Whereas many Google Analytics prospects use the free model, a few of its limitations cause them to the paid model (GA4 360). Because the paid model of GA4 360 is usually bought by means of a accomplice, there might be some variability in pricing, however typically it begins at $50,000 for about 25 million occasions (GA4 has moved to event-based pricing vs. mounted value for GA360).
Amplitude affords an identical event-based pricing mannequin however a Month-to-month Tracked Person (MTU) pricing plan with limitless occasions can also be obtainable. We additionally supply a strong free plan and a particular Scholarship plan for startups. So, basically, Amplitude pricing is similar to that of GA4 360.
How Do Business Analysts Price Amplitude vs. Google Analytics?
Amplitude was not too long ago rated larger than Google Analytics in Forrester’s 2022 Digital Intelligence Platform Wave Report. Forrester rated Amplitude as having a stronger general providing and technique imaginative and prescient.
You may study extra about this report and our rankings right here.
