Most companies nowadays rely on the Internet in one way or another, either for promotion or for selling their products and services to customers. It’s easy to consider your website successful, but you need to track users and monitor their behavior to understand how well your website performs.
To gather actionable insights, you should use web analytics tools like our FullSession. It provides interactive heatmaps, session recordings, replays, website feedback forms, and advanced analytics.
Our UX analytics tool helps you find and fix issues with your product to ensure the optimal user experience. To see how FullSession works, you can get a demo or start your 14-day free trial.
If you want to evaluate other options, Google Analytics vs Amplitude analysis will probably rank high on your list. How do they differ? How can you use them? We’ll try to answer all these questions and explain why FullSession is better for your business.
Let’s start with some basics about Google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics?
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Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that lets you track website traffic, analyze website data and create custom reports. It helps you optimize your website performance, identify growth opportunities, and recognize issues so you can fix them before they affect your business.
A Google Analytics account lets you view your unique visitors, bounce rate, time on page, referer URL, search keywords, and more. You can also see which marketing channels drive traffic to your site most effectively and focus your efforts on those areas in the future.
It’s available as a web service, but to use it, you need to install a code snippet to your website. Many different industries and organizations rely on it. Marketing professionals, UX researchers, and software developers, among others, may also employ it.
What is Google Tag Manager?
Image source: Google Developers
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tool that makes it easier to develop and manage tags for Google Analytics. Using GTM, you can easily create, publish, and update your website tags without writing code or tracking changes manually. Instead, you define the tags you want to track—such as page views, clicks, and conversions—and then Google Tag Manager does the rest.
Today, Google Tag Manager is one of the most popular ways to integrate Google Analytics into your website and build a comprehensive view of your website performance.
Tagging is a critical part of SEO because it lets Google and other search engines know what kind of content is on each page. It allows them to more accurately understand how relevant your site is to the people searching for it, improving your ranking over time.
G4 will soon replace Universal Analytics
Image source: Neil Patel
It’s also worth noting that on October 1, 2023, the old Universal Analytics service will be deprecated and replaced with G4.
It is a free reporting and optimization tool for Google Analytics that gives users one-click access to their analytics data. G4 integrates with GA, allowing users to view detailed insights about their website traffic, and includes all their data in one place. Users can also set up custom events and goals and track progress.
What is Amplitude?
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Amplitude is a web analytics solution you can use to optimize a website across multiple platforms and devices. It provides you with useful data and gives you tools to understand user behavior better. You can make the necessary improvements to your digital product by analyzing user actions.
The entire Amplitude system consists of six different components. You can use some of them, or all of them, depending on your needs. These are
- Amplitude analytics – the core part of the system. It allows you to analyze your feature performance, user actions, and business outcomes.
- Amplitude recommends – focuses on the behavior of users, providing you with options to customize and personalize the customer experience.
- Amplitude experiment – helps you optimize your digital products via A/B testing – comparing two possible solutions.
- Amplitude academy – a resource repository with helpful guides, tutorials, and courses.
- Developer docs – a developer guide on APIs and SDKs.
- Amplitude data – This system part is currently in beta. It provides you with more tools to define, verify and track your data.
Since we covered the basics of Google Analytics and Amplitude, let’s explain their fundamental differences.
Google Analytics vs Amplitude: How these analytics tools compare
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