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 sudden sunsetting of GA Common. Since I do know extra about Google Analytics than most right here at Amplitude, I’ve turn into the de facto individual to assist with these conversations. Whereas many various matters floor in these conversations, there are numerous questions that I’m requested repeatedly. So, on this submit, I’ll share the most typical questions I’ve obtained and a few quick replies. Please word that this submit differs from my earlier submit, by which 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 they’d deliberate. Google’s hurried and sudden migration deadlines have brought about a lot pointless stress. Sadly, shifting from GA Common to GA4 is just not the flip of a swap, so both method, 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 doubtless have an analytics information layer feeding information into GA Common by way of GTM. In that case, you should utilize Amplitude’s free Google Tag Supervisor template (shopper facet and server facet) to re-use all your earlier work and start sending the identical information components into Amplitude. All it’s essential 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 instrument that can assist you migrate your GA Common taxonomy to Amplitude, leveraging APIs from each distributors. Amplitude additionally affords a sturdy free plan to get you began, so you may leverage the GTM template and the taxonomy migration instrument to start sending information to a free model of Amplitude inside hours.
In case your group has a cellular software, you should substitute your GA or Firebase SDK with the Amplitude SDK. For that reason, 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 cellular app. However the excellent news is that Amplitude started its life because the main cellular software vendor and is persistently the highest rated, so you recognize you may be in good fingers. You may mix web site and cellular app information into the identical Amplitude undertaking 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 an information collector (homegrown or utilizing a CDP like Section, mParticle, or RudderStack), you may simply ship that information into Amplitude. Amplitude additionally has integrations with information warehouses like BiqQuery and Snowflake.
Can Amplitude Monitor Ecommerce?
Monitoring eCommerce is a major 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 sturdy set of Ecommerce reviews with the GA interface. One of many distinctive options of the Enhanced Ecommerce implementation is that it affords a approach to observe merchandise (objects) so that every product can have its personal information set. That is usually known 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 information factors resembling merchandise title, model, class, worth, 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 gives the good thing about getting pre-canned reviews, conversion metrics, and item-specific dimension values by way of a dimension array.
Are you able to observe Ecommerce in Amplitude? After all! The principle distinction in Amplitude is that we don’t prescribe precisely how it’s essential implement Ecommerce monitoring, and we don’t routinely configure particular reviews and metrics. Whereas having reviews and metrics pre-built for you is attractive, 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 gives 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 reviews you’re used to in GA.
Can Amplitude Monitor Advertising Channels and Campaigns?
One of many blessings and curses of being one of the best product analytics vendor out there is that it’s straightforward to get typecast. Amplitude is synonymous with product analytics, and its skill to energy development for digital merchandise is unparalleled. However final 12 months, Amplitude, anticipating the forthcoming convergence of digital analytics applied sciences, added an enormous quantity of promoting analytics capabilities to the product. Since I’ve a advertising analytics background, one among my targets in becoming a member of Amplitude was to construct a “super-product” that would mix one of the best of promoting and product analytics. We all know that the first use case for Google Analytics is advertising efficiency. Google initially acquired Urchin to point out promoting prospects how their campaigns had been performing, so analytics round advertising and acquisition are core to GA’s DNA. The highest GA options utilized by entrepreneurs embrace:
- Acquisition Channels – Mechanically associating classes and occasions into the right advertising acquisition channel (e.g., Paid Search, website positioning, E mail, and so forth.)
- Multi-Contact Attribution – Assigning totally different attribution fashions to advertising 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 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 may very well be merged with these advertising analytics options. Whereas Amplitude was constructing these new advertising analytics options, we tried to enhance upon what was out there in GA. For instance, In Amplitude, you may have as many acquisition channels as you’d like. Maybe you desire 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 impression historic information, not simply future information. Amplitude has additionally added the power 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 should utilize any lookback window to incorporate campaigns way back to you’d like. In GA, except you’re within the particular channel attribution report, you may solely assign an attribution mannequin within the basic settings space, which applies to all property reviews. In Amplitude, we mean you can 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 is just not at present out there in GA4.
Amplitude imports Google Adverts impressions, clicks, and prices. We additionally constructed an extra integration with Google Adverts that permits you to view Google Ad campaigns utilizing all the wealthy marketing campaign metadata. In lots of instances, the brand new advertising performance we constructed surpasses what is obtainable in Google Analytics.
Can I Ship Audiences from Amplitude to Google Adverts?
One of the vital widespread options of Google Analytics is its tight integration with Google Adverts. In the event you discover an attention-grabbing section of customers whereas utilizing GA, you may convert the section into an viewers after which hyperlink your GA account to your Google Adverts account. These audiences shall be routinely populated in Google Adverts. 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 Alerts. Google Alerts is a method 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 Alerts can have some privateness implications, and lots of organizations (particularly in Europe) have disabled it inside Google Analytics. If Google Alerts is disabled, your skill to sync audiences from GA4 to Google Adverts is not going to work.
Inside Amplitude, we have now all the time had a sturdy method of sending viewers cohorts to promoting networks by means of our lengthy checklist of accomplice integrations. This performance can create cohorts of customers and sync them to Google Adverts. You may hyperlink Amplitude to your Google Adverts account and select the ID to attach Amplitude customers to the identical customers in Google Adverts. This linking is usually achieved utilizing a hashed e mail tackle, a cellular promoting ID, or a CRM/buyer ID. As soon as the consumer ID hyperlink is established, cohorts of customers shall be synced to Google Adverts and used there like every other Google Ad viewers.
One other factor to notice is that Amplitude can sync cohorts of customers to many promoting platforms, not simply Google Adverts. Google Analytics primarily sends audiences to Google Adverts, 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 information after which use experimentation to see if these alternatives result in elevated engagement or conversion. Then when working experiments or assessments, they use analytics to measure the impression. These two applied sciences have a symbiotic relationship that may assist energy digital product development.
Amplitude launched its experimentation product two years in the past and is absolutely built-in with the analytics product. Amplitude Experiment affords 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 development.
Does Amplitude Scale? Have Knowledge Cardinality Points?
Despite the fact that Google Analytics is a part of Google, which has a number of the greatest expertise, GA is just not recognized for its scalability or velocity. GA has lengthy been recognized for information 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 choose to make use of merchandise like Amplitude. Amplitude shoppers like Sq., PayPal, and Doordash have information volumes that GA would by no means be capable to deal with. Amplitude’s information question system was purpose-built to ship unsampled information in real-time.
GA advises that you simply carry out extra complicated queries utilizing BigQuery or Looker Studio to beat these limitations. Because of this on a regular basis information customers should discover ways to use the GA predefined reviews, 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 staff, that looks as if quite a bit to ask of informal information customers, on a regular basis entrepreneurs, and product groups. In some instances, 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 basic to super-complex questions. Whilst you all the time have the choice of sending your information to BigQuery, Snowflake, or every other information 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 reviews that may be run. Amplitude removes lots of the limitations talked about above, and relating to scalability and cardinality, Amplitude can tackle information units of just about any dimension.
What About Privateness and GDPR?
After I communicate to European organizations, GDPR comes up usually. Google has come beneath fireplace for privateness regulation in a number of European nations, 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 information middle (based mostly in Germany), which helps hold EU information 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’d lose something in the event that they migrated to Amplitude, I’m often requested what Amplitude affords they haven’t had with GA. Happily or sadly, that may be a comparatively lengthy checklist. I plan to spend a while documenting this extra sooner or later, however as a teaser, listed below are a few of my favorites:
- Collaboration/Knowledge Storytelling – Amplitude has tremendously emphasised making digital analytics a staff sport. We allow this by offering a spot throughout the product to share movies, photographs, charts, graphs, wealthy textual content, and annotations – multi function easy-to-read interface known as Notebooks. Notebooks are like Confluence pages inside our product, the place every little thing associated to an evaluation lives in a single place. We now have Areas, a set of all evaluation artifacts for a undertaking or a staff. And all Amplitude reviews/dashboards have inline dialogue threads so staff 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 may be 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 arduous to return to what’s out there in GA!
- Retention Reporting – In GA, there are some basic retention reviews. They mean you can view what number of customers returned after X variety of days, weeks, or months. You may also apply segments to those reviews. 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 lots of extra. There are 20+ permutations of retention reviews that in GA must be manually recreated by way of SQL in BigQuery. Amplitude places the ability of superior retention in an interface that information customers of any degree can use.
- Knowledge Governance – In Amplitude, we take information governance significantly! A lot in order that we acquired a complete information governance firm and built-in it into our product. In Amplitude, it’s straightforward to see your full monitoring plan, spot information high quality points, monitor information spikes and gaps, and so forth. Amplitude prevents customers from creating duplicate segments and metrics in order that they don’t proliferate and litter your analytics implementation. Amplitude’s information governance options make it straightforward to mix occasions and properties and repair any information errors with out re-implementing them. Amplitude additionally gives a lot better debugging instruments than GA (no extra having to hunt and end up in Debug!). We additionally provide strict management over occasions and properties, and unplanned/rejected occasions don’t depend towards your consumption!
- Person Profile and Profile API – Amplitude gives a consumer profile for every recognized and nameless consumer. This consumer profile exhibits all recognized attributes of the consumer and their full occasion stream. Whereas GA permits you to view consumer occasions in Debug mode, Amplitude’s consumer profile gives all consumer occasion historical past and the properties related to every occasion. As well as, utilizing the Amplitude Id API, you may enrich the Amplitude consumer profile of any consumer. Whether or not including buyer attributes out of your CRM system or information warehouse, you may complement the info collected on the net and cellular with different buyer information. That is particularly helpful in instances the place it’s possible you’ll need to observe PII however can’t accomplish that in JavaScript or the SDK as a consequence of privateness rules. As soon as consumer profiles have been enriched, analytics reviews can use any added information factors. For instance, you may add the variety of kids every buyer has and later evaluate a conversion funnel for many who do and shouldn’t have kids. The probabilities are countless.
- Direct Buyer Assist – Google Analytics defers coaching and help to companions. Most often, you can not discuss on to Google you probably have a product difficulty. 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 shoppers usually to make sure they’re profitable with our merchandise. Amplitude additionally gives on-demand product coaching and affords dwell courses if wanted. And our product staff loves to speak to prospects who’ve concepts about how we are able to 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 make them the paid model (GA4 360). For the reason that paid model of GA4 360 is usually bought by means of a accomplice, there could be some variability in pricing, however usually it begins at $50,000 for about 25 million occasions (GA4 has moved to event-based pricing vs. fastened worth for GA360).
Amplitude affords the same event-based pricing mannequin however a Month-to-month Tracked Person (MTU) pricing plan with limitless occasions can be out there. We additionally provide a sturdy free plan and a particular Scholarship plan for startups. So, generally, Amplitude pricing is similar to that of GA4 360.
How Do Business Analysts Fee Amplitude vs. Google Analytics?
Amplitude was not too long ago rated increased 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.
