Over the previous few months, Amplitude has had many Google Analytics clients reaching out to inquire about our analytics product. That is being pushed by the sudden 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 individual to assist with these conversations. Whereas many alternative subjects floor in these conversations, there are various questions that I’m requested repeatedly. So, on this publish, I’ll share the commonest questions I’ve acquired and a few brief replies. Please word that this publish differs from my earlier publish, during which I shared my solutions to questions concerning the sunsetting of GA Common.

How tough is it emigrate from GA to Amplitude?

One of many chief considerations of present GA clients is the work effort emigrate to a brand new platform. Many organizations are stretched skinny, and switching analytics distributors was not one thing they’d deliberate. Google’s hurried and sudden migration deadlines have induced a lot pointless stress. Sadly, shifting from GA Common to GA4 will not be the flip of a swap, so both means, organizations utilizing GA Common must 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. In that case, you possible have an analytics knowledge layer feeding knowledge into GA Common through GTM. In that case, you should utilize Amplitude’s free Google Tag Supervisor template (consumer aspect and server aspect) to re-use your whole earlier work and start sending the identical knowledge components into Amplitude. All it’s good to do is ready up your occasions and properties in Amplitude and add some new guidelines to GTM. We even partnered with BlastX to create a software that can assist you migrate your GA Common taxonomy to Amplitude, leveraging APIs from each distributors. Amplitude additionally presents a strong free plan to get you began, so you may leverage the GTM template and the taxonomy migration software to start sending knowledge to a free model of Amplitude inside hours.

In case your group has a cell utility, it’s essential to substitute 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 rapidly, 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 persistently the highest rated, so you recognize you can 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 typically be even simpler than Google Analytics. In case your group has an information collector (homegrown or utilizing a CDP like Phase, 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 major use case for Google Analytics. GA clients need to understand how typically guests take a look at merchandise, add them to the cart, and buy. GA presents a prescriptive “Enhanced Ecommerce” implementation configuration to trace this. If GA clients comply with the express directions related to Enhanced Ecommerce, they will see a strong set of Ecommerce studies with the GA interface. One of many distinctive options of the Enhanced Ecommerce implementation is that it presents a solution to observe merchandise (gadgets) so that every product can have its personal knowledge set. That is typically referred to as a property/dimension array. GA dimensions can’t have nested arrays apart from the “merchandise” dimension included in Enhanced Ecommerce. This array consists of knowledge factors reminiscent of merchandise identify, model, class, worth, low cost, and so on. The GA merchandise dimension permits your group to have totally different dimension values for every Ecommerce product. So, leveraging GA Enhanced Ecommerce supplies the good thing about getting pre-canned studies, conversion metrics, and item-specific dimension values through a dimension array.

Are you able to observe Ecommerce in Amplitude? In fact! The principle distinction in Amplitude is that we don’t prescribe precisely how it’s good to implement Ecommerce monitoring, and we don’t mechanically configure particular studies and metrics. Whereas having studies and metrics pre-built for you is attractive, it additionally means that you’re confined to how GA desires you to trace Ecommerce. Amplitude has best-practice Ecommerce implementation strategies 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 presents or replicate what you had in GA. Additionally, whereas GA solely has one dimension array, Amplitude supplies an limitless variety of dimension arrays! So you may observe sub-dimensions (properties) anytime you’d like! Amplitude additionally has dashboard templates that may replicate the out-of-the-box studies you might be used to in GA.

Can Amplitude Observe Advertising and marketing Channels and Campaigns?

One of many blessings and curses of being the most effective product analytics vendor available in the market is that it’s straightforward to get typecast. Amplitude is synonymous with product analytics, and its capability to energy progress for digital merchandise is unparalleled. However final yr, Amplitude, anticipating the forthcoming convergence of digital analytics applied sciences, added a large quantity of advertising and marketing analytics capabilities to the product. Since I’ve a advertising and marketing analytics background, one in all my objectives in becoming a member of Amplitude was to construct a “super-product” that would mix the most effective of selling and product analytics. We all know that the first use case for Google Analytics is advertising and marketing efficiency. Google initially acquired Urchin to indicate promoting clients 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 embody:

• Acquisition Channels – Mechanically associating periods and occasions into the proper advertising and marketing acquisition channel (e.g., Paid Search, website positioning, E-mail, and so on.)
• 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 value for campaigns mixed with the power 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 all the time 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 out there in GA. For instance, In Amplitude, you may have as many acquisition channel views as you’d like. Maybe you need a high-level and extra detailed view (e.g., Paid Search-Google, Paid Search-Bing, and so on.). We additionally made acquisition channels retroactive, so any adjustments will retroactively impression historic knowledge, not simply future knowledge. Amplitude has additionally added the power to view touchdown pages, bounce charges, and so on.

Amplitude eliminated the GA 90-day lookback window related to channels and campaigns for multi-touch attribution. In Amplitude, you should utilize 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 normal settings space, which applies to all property studies. In Amplitude, we can help you configure attribution for any occasion/metric you need in Information 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 present out there in GA4.

Amplitude imports Google Advertisements impressions, clicks, and prices. We additionally constructed a further integration with Google Advertisements that permits you to view Google Ad campaigns utilizing the entire wealthy marketing campaign metadata. In lots of circumstances, the brand new advertising and marketing performance we constructed surpasses what is obtainable in Google Analytics.

Can I Ship Audiences from Amplitude to Google Advertisements?

One of the crucial fashionable options of Google Analytics is its tight integration with Google Advertisements. For those who discover an fascinating section of customers whereas utilizing GA, you may convert the section into an viewers after which hyperlink your GA account to your Google Advertisements account. These audiences will likely be mechanically populated in Google Advertisements. There they are often re-targeted or used as a part of bidding methods. Nevertheless, this functionality solely works in case you are utilizing Google Indicators. Google Indicators is a means that Google Analytics can establish nameless customers throughout totally different web sites in the event that they haven’t opted out of adverts personalization inside their Google account. However using Google Indicators can have some privateness implications, and lots of organizations (particularly in Europe) have disabled it inside Google Analytics. If Google Indicators is disabled, your capability to sync audiences from GA4 to Google Advertisements is not going to work.

Inside Amplitude, we’ve all the time had a strong means of sending viewers cohorts to promoting networks by 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 often carried out utilizing a hashed e mail tackle, a cell promoting ID, or a CRM/buyer ID. As soon as the consumer ID hyperlink is established, cohorts of customers will likely 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 straightforward to sync audiences to different promoting networks.

Does Amplitude Have Built-in Experimentation Capabilities?

The Google Analytics group was not too long ago shocked to be taught 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 impression. 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 presents characteristic flagging, A/B testing, and all different experimentation options you’ll count on. Whereas Amplitude Experiment isn’t free, its integration with Amplitude Analytics creates a synergistic impact for product progress.

Does Amplitude Scale? Have Information Cardinality Points?

Despite the fact that Google Analytics is a part of Google, which has a number of the greatest expertise, GA will not be identified for its scalability or pace. GA has lengthy been identified for knowledge sampling, limitations on metrics and dimensions, and different reporting limitations. Throughout the GA4 interface, there are some unusual limitations:

Do not forget that these are simply some of the GA4 limitations and that a lot 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 favor to make use of merchandise like Amplitude. Amplitude shoppers like Sq., PayPal, and Doordash have knowledge volumes that GA would by no means be capable of deal with. Amplitude’s knowledge question system was purpose-built to ship unsampled knowledge in real-time.

GA advises that you simply carry out extra complicated queries utilizing BigQuery or Looker Studio to beat these limitations. Which means that on a regular basis knowledge customers should discover ways to use the GA predefined studies, however after they hit a restrict there, discover ways to use the Discover interface, and after 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 crew, that looks as if loads to ask of informal knowledge customers, on a regular basis entrepreneurs, and product groups. In some circumstances, former GA shoppers 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 all the time have the choice of sending your knowledge to BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or another knowledge warehouse, Amplitude customers can do virtually something they want proper inside the interface. And Amplitude doesn’t cost for queries or restrict the variety of studies that may be run. Amplitude removes lots of the limitations talked about above, and in relation to scalability and cardinality, Amplitude can tackle knowledge units of just about any measurement.

What About Privateness and GDPR?

Once I communicate to European organizations, GDPR comes up typically. Google has come below hearth for privateness regulation in a number of European international locations, and a few have even deemed GA “unlawful” in its present kind. 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 hold EU knowledge from being transmitted to the US.

What Does Amplitude Do this GA Does Not?

Whereas a lot of the questions I obtain are folks probing to see if they might lose something in the event that they migrated to Amplitude, I’m sometimes requested what Amplitude presents they haven’t had with GA. Fortuitously 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/Information Storytelling – Amplitude has vastly emphasised making digital analytics a crew sport. We allow this by offering a spot inside the product to share movies, pictures, charts, graphs, wealthy textual content, and annotations – multi functional easy-to-read interface referred to as Notebooks. Notebooks are like Confluence pages inside our product, the place the whole lot associated to an evaluation lives in a single place. We now have Areas, a group of all evaluation artifacts for a venture or a crew. And all Amplitude studies/dashboards have inline dialogue threads so crew members can share their ideas consistent 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 create 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 utilize Amplitude conversion funnels, it’s exhausting to return to what’s out there in GA!
• Retention Reporting – In GA, there are some elementary retention studies. They can help you view what number of customers returned after X variety of days, weeks, or months. It’s also possible to apply segments to those studies. However in Amplitude, retention reporting is taken to an entire new degree. Amplitude has a Lifecycle report that reveals new, present, lively, and dormant customers. As well as, Amplitude presents superior N-Day retention, unbounded retention, retention traits over time, and lots of extra. There are 20+ permutations of retention studies 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. You may view an impartial comparability of GA4 and Amplitude retention reporting right here.
• Information Governance – In Amplitude, we take knowledge governance significantly! A lot in order that we acquired a whole knowledge governance firm and built-in it into our product. In Amplitude, it’s straightforward to see your full monitoring plan, spot knowledge high quality points, monitor knowledge spikes and gaps, and so on. 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 straightforward to mix occasions and properties and repair any knowledge errors with out re-implementing them. Amplitude additionally supplies 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 in opposition to your consumption!
• Consumer Profile and Profile API – Amplitude supplies a consumer profile for every identified and nameless consumer. This consumer profile reveals all identified attributes of the consumer and their full occasion stream. Whereas GA permits you to view consumer occasions in Debug mode, Amplitude’s consumer profile supplies all consumer occasion historical past and the properties related to every occasion. As well as, utilizing the Amplitude Identification API, you may enrich the Amplitude consumer profile of any consumer. Whether or not including buyer attributes out of your CRM system or knowledge warehouse, you may complement the information collected on the internet and cell with different buyer knowledge. That is particularly helpful in circumstances the place you might need to observe PII however can’t accomplish that in JavaScript or the SDK as a result of privateness rules. As soon as consumer profiles have been enriched, analytics studies can use any added knowledge factors. For instance, you may add the variety of kids every buyer has and later examine a conversion funnel for individuals who do and would not have kids. The chances are countless.
• Direct Buyer Assist – Google Analytics defers coaching and assist to companions. Usually, you can not discuss on to Google if in case you have a product concern. At Amplitude, we provide direct assist to paying clients and supply on-demand assist to these utilizing our free merchandise. Paying clients are assigned a buyer success supervisor who meets with shoppers usually to make sure they’re profitable with our merchandise. Amplitude additionally supplies on-demand product coaching and presents reside lessons if wanted. And our product crew loves to speak to clients 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 Value Evaluate to Google Analytics?

Whereas many Google Analytics clients use the free model, a few of its limitations cause them to the paid model (GA4 360). For the reason that paid model of GA4 360 is often bought by a accomplice, there may 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. fastened worth for GA360).

Amplitude presents an identical event-based pricing mannequin however a Month-to-month Tracked Consumer (MTU) pricing plan with limitless occasions can also be out there. We additionally supply a strong free plan and a particular Scholarship plan for startups. So, generally, Amplitude pricing is similar to that of GA4 360.

How Do Trade Analysts Charge 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 be taught extra about this report and our rankings right here.