How Does Amplitude Differ from Google Analytics?
- Amplitude lets you decide what information is important, while Google decides for you.
- Amplitude was built for product teams, whereas Google Analytics was built for websites.
- Amplitude offers built-in guidance to help everyone understand how to view data, while Google Analytics requires separate documentation.
- Amplitude prioritizes collaboration, while Google Analytics makes it difficult to share views with teammates.
It Lets You Decide What’s Important
You need a tool that allows you to decide what information is essential for your team. Google Analytics assumes that the default view for everyone should be sessions and bounce rate, followed by traffic insights and details like the time of day someone visited the site. These metrics might seem like the most important for your team—unless you’re running a simple content website like YouTube, they’re unlikely to answer questions about how people actually use your product.
Every view in Google Analytics is structured based on how it thinks you want to see your data: sessions, pageviews, channels—all appearing by default. If you want to see more than just page visits and traffic sources, you need to apply complex filters or set up custom events. Neither of these processes is particularly intuitive, and your team will likely spend a lot of time reading documentation to get it right.
Amplitude was designed with the idea that product teams should define what’s important to them. Your team decides what to track and implements it through a simple tracking call, sending only the data that matters to Amplitude. You then choose the views that are relevant to your needs. Every chart in Amplitude follows a standardized format, so you start with the behavior you want to analyze and refine your audience accordingly. You control the data you send and the views you prioritize.
Built for Product Creators
If you’re working on a digital product, you want a tool designed specifically for that use case. Amplitude was built for product teams, while Google Analytics was built for website owners.
Google Analytics focuses on sessions, pageviews, and traffic because it was created for content-based websites. It tracks unique visits to each page URL—but what if your app doesn’t use URLs? What if you need to track button clicks, transactions, forum interactions, or literally anything other than page views? That becomes much more complicated.
For example, if you want to track how many users clicked a button in your app, you must manually configure a goal. Understanding user behavior—how people are actually interacting with your app—is an afterthought in Google Analytics.
Amplitude, on the other hand, directly supports product teams with features like:
- Drilling down into a chart to segment information in multiple ways. Want to see which users didn’t convert or where they went instead? Simply click on your chart.
- Viewing an individual user’s journey, analyzing event flows, and understanding real user behavior in your app—good luck finding that in Google Analytics.
- Setting up launch dashboards that reflect your team’s success metrics, so you can track how well a new feature is performing.
With Google Analytics, all of this is far more complex than it should be. Choosing a tool built for product teams makes setup and analysis significantly faster.
Offers Built-In Guidance
Understanding what a metric means isn’t always easy or intuitive, and this is a major pain point for many organizations. Amplitude includes several built-in guidance mechanisms to ensure that your team is on the same page.
Google Analytics, on the other hand, requires separate documentation to align your team.
Amplitude allows you to rename chart elements so that everyone understands them. You can add clear descriptions to analyses for extra context. You can also use dashboards and notebooks to provide deeper insights into what your team should take away from the data.
Choosing a tool designed to make data accessible and understandable empowers your team. It turns data from a small, secretive specialty into an organization-wide superpower.
Prioritizes Collaboration
When evaluating analytics tools, you want something that enables your team to communicate and collaborate around data.
Your team can’t act on data they can’t access. Amplitude makes collaboration simple, while Google Analytics makes it ridiculously complicated.
Amplitude understands that you want to analyze and act on data together as a team. That’s why the platform was built with collaboration in mind. Our dream of real-time collaboration on data is now a reality.
Conclusion
Choosing a tool that prioritizes collaboration makes it easier for your team to work with data effectively. Amplitude is built for product creators who want to decide what information matters and collaborate to act on it.
Google Analytics makes all of that significantly harder.
