Amplitude-Analytics-vs-Google-Analytics

Amplitude Analytics and Google Analytics are web analytics platforms designed to help businesses monitor, visualize, and analyze data about how users interact with their products and websites. Amplitude Analytics is aimed primarily at helping businesses understand user engagement with web products and applications, while Google Analytics is optimized for tracking website traffic and usage. 

On TrustRadius, Amplitude analytics is more popular among users from midsize businesses and enterprise organizations, while Google Analytics is preferred by small and midsize businesses. The popularity of Google Analytics’ robust free edition among individuals and start-ups and the comparative depth of Amplitude Analytics’ tracking system for user interactions likely explains this divide.

Features

Although both Amplitude Analytics and Google Analytics can help businesses view and understand user engagement with their website, they each provide unique benefits.

Amplitude Analytics is relatively simple to use and understand for non-analytics experts. Its reports and charts are designed to be easily understood and shared with stakeholders. The product also makes it straightforward to see the results of specific user events, such as form fill conversion rate and abandonment rate. Trendline analysis tools help teams locate trouble spots in their sales funnel. Amplitude Analytics also allows users to archive historical data, allowing analysts to track trends, important events, or even a single user’s interaction from years in the past.

Google Analytics offers a wide range of functionality in its free version, including a robust integration with Google Ads. It offers real-time traffic data, and users can tag or annotate interactions for later analysis or searching. Google Analytics’ ecommerce features help teams segment out performance at the SKU level. It also allows tracking of multiple social media campaigns from a single dashboard, giving marketing managers a quick overview of campaign performance. Highly customizable reports and data visualizations help users understand their data and communicate highlights to managers and executives.

Limitations

However, Amplitude Analytics and Google Analytics both have a few limitations to consider. 

Users on TrustRadius report that Amplitude Analytics can suffer from speed and overall performance issues, especially when accessing dashboards or reports that pull a lot of data. Multiple users mention slowdowns and lagging when using the product. Also, although Amplitude Analytics is generally easy to learn, users on TrustRadius highlight that certain UI design choices are confusing, such as a button only showing extra options when a user hovers their cursor over it. Finally, filtering some specific kinds of traffic or data may be difficult, especially for users that aren’t intimately familiar with the code required to monitor necessary events.

While Google Analytics is free to use, reviewers on TrustRadius report that it is notoriously unfriendly to new users. Its UI can present an overwhelming amount of data to users who don’t yet know how to navigate it, and Google offers minimal training and support for free users. Unless you pay a hefty price for the Analytics 360 plan, you’ll be reliant on community support and training. This can leave new users confused, especially when Google Analytics adds new features or changes its UI with little warning. Overall, free users should be prepared for a do-it-yourself experience with Google Analytics, from initial configuration to data filtering to code integration.

Pricing

Amplitude Analytics uses a tiered pricing model. Their pricing begins with the Free tier, which offers core analytics functionality, self-service tutorials, and basic customer support. The Growth tier adds behavioral and predictive analytics, advanced customer support, and SSO. The Enterprise tier adds automation features, user roles and permissions, and anomaly detection tools. Pricing is available via request from Amplitude.

Google Analytics offers two tiers: the free Analytics tier and the paid Analytics 360 tier. The Analytics tier offers core monitoring and analytics functionality, with limitations on the number of viewers and metrics per tracked property. The free Analytics tier also relies on sampled data, while the paid Analytics 360 plan allows users to see the raw website traffic data. The Analytics 360 tier removes many data limitations, guarantees data freshness, and adds Salesforce integration and dedicated customer support and SLAs. Pricing details are available via a quote from Google.