1. GA4
1.1. Main negative reviews are very old, main positive revies are VERY new (may-june 2021)
1.2. query your data in a very flexible way
1.3. User reviews
1.3.1. Pros
1.3.1.1. Beautiful interface
1.3.1.1.1. Simple and easy to use
1.3.1.1.2. A lot of depth to dashboards and reporting
1.3.1.1.3. Excellent overview of trends and patterns
1.3.1.2. The user journey can be tracked using this platform which makes it of great use for businesses.
1.3.1.3. seeing variation between the source of traffic and the overall conversion rate to make sure I see what I can improve in my marketing strategy and adapt the marketing efforts.
1.3.1.4. Google Analytics is a very effective tool when you consider the price.
1.3.2. Cons
1.3.2.1. The sampling done by Google makes data mining impossible
1.3.2.1.1. f using for large traffic volumes be aware of their sampling
1.3.2.1.2. complicated to interpret and also complex for team members with no prior analytical skill, the level of understanding is not elementary level,
1.3.2.2. The integration with the website can be clunky
1.3.2.3. Some features are complex to use and needs proper guidance to make full use of it.
1.3.2.4. Post-click attribution only limits the understanding of media and advertising effort, reducing them to organic and giving a biased view of that support to the online site.
1.3.2.5. I dislike that there's no spam filtering for bots who may have access to the website,
1.3.2.6. Most obviously, its nearly impossible to tie specific traffic/customer journey's to specific purchases or leads
1.3.2.6.1. , there currently is no way (as far as I know) to tie a user ID from google analytics with a customer on your site.
1.3.2.7. It misses some of the advanced features that other tools have .The reporting function is not very good and intuitive. Also there is very limited support.
1.4. "Very Detailed, Slightly Overwhelming"
2. Amplitude
2.1. Both negative and positive reviews are up to date (spring-summer 2021)
2.2. 25 of the Fortune 100 and 45,000 products use Amplitude
2.2.1. how users are navigating through your application, which features engage them the most, or how to improve long-term user retention
2.3. User reviews
2.3.1. Pros
2.3.1.1. I can quickly generate charts and share the links with my teammates
2.3.1.2. I feel like there is a lot of data being collected that's really valuable.
2.3.1.3. features that I use the most are: conversion funnels, retention and cohorts
2.3.1.4. The ease with which you can get the data visually
2.3.1.5. Notebooks and annotations in Amplitude are one of the best features.
2.3.1.5.1. These really help to externalize interpretations and learnings from the data so I can share with team members across disciplines - product, engineering, marketing, support, biz dev, etc.
2.3.1.6. I like the user journey feature and the predictive cohorting.
2.3.1.6.1. I also really like how responsive the Amplitude team is to suggestions/ questions, and how the team is committed to improving the product.
2.3.1.7. Go beyond metrics like pageviews and clicks. See every path users take in a single view and zoom in to understand the context and intent behind their actions.
2.3.1.8. Beautiful visualization of user flows, segmentation, and funnel analysis.
2.3.2. Cons
2.3.2.1. The data source is only mobile-based. I can't add my data from my SQL base.
2.3.2.2. there are limitations to the things I can do with that data.
2.3.2.2.1. I'm not able to do much or any analysis with it. Also, some of the UI isn't the most intuitive
2.3.2.2.2. It's a very powerful tool, but I don't think it can be used as the only system for customer success or even client engagement.
2.3.2.3. The way event filtering works: We cannot be specific about user events when building cohorts:
2.3.2.3.1. We can include all people that had event X where property is Y, but we will also have people with properties U, V, W... I have trouble filtering users by these events by working with the csv file.
2.3.2.4. Extremely complicated to set up and even debug on an ongoing basis.
2.3.2.5. The problem with the platform is that when you try to make things a little more complicated than the average user you encounter limitations, which an SQL query would solve.
2.3.2.6. A lot of the success comes down to your organization's implementation of the front end events.
2.3.2.6.1. Some time spent up front on event strategy and implementation is essential to really getting the most out of Amplitude. Data governance is key before you start analyzing it in Amplitude.
2.3.2.7. I don't like how I can't export all data from all stages of the pipeline, they make it hard to extract any data from the platform.
2.3.2.8. 1. You can't join tables at all. I think having that freedom is essential for any comprehensive analysis
2.3.2.8.1. 2. You are stuck with how Amplitude handles revenue events (which isn't always correct)
2.3.2.8.2. 3. You can't build your own models on Amplitude. If the goal of the tool is to replace data scientists, I don't think it is there yet.
2.3.2.8.3. 4. You can't add cohorts to the notebooks
2.3.2.8.4. The tool gives you a lot of insight. It requires a well structured database to receive data from. However, it is not very flexible and you can't manipulate your tables at will.
2.3.2.9. It cannot do complex tasks. We have to use bigquery + chartio for that combo.
2.3.2.10. Everytime you change the tagging, the tagging does not change for historical data. As a result, your analysis can be a bit skewed.
2.3.2.11. The queries and data filtering. That is pretty limited
2.3.2.12. If you're coming from something that allows SQL and more pure forms of data manipulation, eg. DataStudio, Amplitude has some pretty big draw backs
2.3.2.12.1. f I want to view event data for average week on week, Amplitude can do that but only for the week as it defines it. Want the last 7 days vs the 7 prior? You'll have to export your data to csv and do the math yourself.
2.3.2.13. It's an excellent tool for beginners, but there are a few downsides to the platform.
2.3.2.13.1. Data analysis is limited to being event-based.
2.3.2.13.2. It is difficult to get simple KPIs in a starightforward manner.
2.3.2.13.3. Not a lot of options to customize the look and feel of your charts.
3. Main dif btw Amp VS GA4
3.1. GA4 provide queries, BigQuery storaging,
3.1.1. flexible way to build cohorts and segmentation
3.1.2. combine data from different sources
3.2. GA4 provides opportunity to grow into ML strategies
3.3. Amp is better in UX
3.3.1. nice Notebooks with pre-built reports
3.3.2. Good for real-time user analytics, including funnels, retention, flexible user segmentation, and revenue analysis.
3.4. Amp is better in events setup
3.4.1. it's good for mobile (product) analytics
3.4.2. GA4 also can setup "events" but it is really the hard way
3.5. Problem with heatmaps in them both
3.5.1. Amp have NO heatmaps
3.5.2. GA4 can provide heatmaps after hardcore setup process with GTM, JS, verifying data, and GDS reporst creating, e.t.c.
3.5.3. Both leads us to use Microsoft Clarity
4. Final decision
4.1. We use both tools to cover all business needs and build complex robust solution
4.2. GA 4 covers
4.2.1. Mainly marketing analytics
4.3. Amplitude covers
4.3.1. Mainly product analytics