Amazon CloudWatch vs. Amplitude Analytics vs. Google Analytics

For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.

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Amplitude Analytics is an excellent solution for anyone with a mobile app and you want to track what users are doing, are they completing conversion steps, and are they coming back more often. This all helps you visual your customer bases engagement and help project future engagement and create goals. This also helps with prioritizing products to address drop-off points in the product to increase conversions.

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Google Analytics is particularly well suited for tracking and analyzing customer behavior on a grocery e-commerce platform. It provides a wealth of information about customer behavior, including what products are most popular, what pages are visited the most, and where customers are coming from. This information can help the platform optimize its website for better customer engagement and conversion rates. However, Google Analytics may not be the best tool for more advanced, granular analysis of customer behavior, such as tracking individual customer journeys or understanding customer motivations. In these cases, it may be more appropriate to use additional tools or solutions that provide deeper insights into customer behavior.

• It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
• It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
• If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

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• Feature analytics - measuring frequency of usage
• Time taken by users to convert in funnels
• Actions that drive certain user behaviors in funnels via correlation
• Actions that lead to user drop off in funnels via correlation
• Comparing behavior of two custom user cohorts

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• Multiple reports to see website use and behavior
• Allows you to customize reports with days, weeks, months, and years
• You can build out a dashboard to easily view stats from multiple websites in one place
• You can share analytics reports via the dashboard, automatically emailed PDFs or in other formats

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• Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
• Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
• By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

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• Some offerings seem duplicative, like dashboards and notebooks, which only seem to differ in that one can subscribe to dashboards
• The messaging on valid vs invalid property types could be better explained to clarify which types (string, Boolean, integer, etc) are expected in particular scenarios. Though the type is usually set during event creation, we've often seen examples where the data received in production is different, leading to 'invalid type' errors

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• Data sampling is somewhat inaccurate on the free tier - this is addressed in premium but is expensive.
• Some of the UI is very similar in naming when presenting different data, some in-situ information might be useful.
• Gotchas around filtering and data validation.
• Implementation can be tricky, it can take a lot of time and expertise to get a full, accurate picture of your metrics.

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Great product Good value for the cost/initiate Support docs and FAQs are great - they limit the necessity of reaching out to in-person support. So when you do call them ... it is for a legit question/issue, no just a "where is it" or a "how to I do xyz123?"

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We will continue to use Google Analytics for several reasons. It is free, which is a huge selling point. It houses all of our ecommerce stores' data, and though it can't account for refunds or fraud orders, gives us and our clients directional, real time information on individual and group store performance.

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It's excellent at collecting logs. It's easy to set up. The viewing & querying part could be much better, though. The query syntax takes some time to get used to, & the examples are not helpful. Also, while being great, Log Insights requires manual picking of log streams to query across every time.

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It's a fairly straightforward platform that's beginner friendly. The biggest usability hurdle is most often created by your own team, as it's imperative to know what event sources are being sent to Amplitude and what those event names are. Within being properly onboarded by a team member it can be hard to get started using Amplitude. It takes time to understand what data your company may be sending to the product, the naming conventions of events (especially if there are old or deprecated events names

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Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, down to minute levels. That is it's greatest detriment: find the right information when you need it can be a cumbersome task. You are able to create shortcuts, however, so it can mitigate some of this problem. Google is continually refining Analytics, so I do not doubt there will be improvements

Alway up and running, or if there is a problem we can get back in the game right away. The reliability was a big selling point for me, and it was true when this company got it. Rollouts can be tough, but this was pretty seamless. Good support throughout the process, good documentation to handle questions/tips

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We all know Google is at top when it comes to availability. We have never faced any such instances where I can suggest otherwise. All you need is a Google account, a device and internet connection to use this super powerful tool for reporting and visualising your site data, traffic, events, etc. that too in real time.

No issues, problems, or negative remarks from us!! We had a plan, vendor support was rock solid, our data folks have experience, OCM supported as needed, and we got the rollout done on time, on budget, and with only minor hiccups. SInce the rollout, most of us have already forgotten the hiccups and generally speak highly of the product

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This has been a catalyst for improving our site's traffic handling capabilities. We were able to identify exit% from our sites through it and we used recommendations to handle and implement the same in our sites. We have been increasing the usage of Google Analytics in our sites and never had any performance related issues if we used Analytics

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

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I haven't used the Amplitude support other than their training docs so I can't speak too much to the in-person support but the docs are serviceable. Nothing too crazy but between the user tips, email notifications, and the decent number of docs I was able to get the support I needed to ramp up on the tool.

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The Google reps respond very quickly. However, sometimes they can overly call you to set up an apportionment. I'm very proficient and sometimes when I talk to reps, they give beginner tutorials and insights that are a waste of time. I wish Google would understand my level of expertise and assign me to a rep (long-term) that doesn't have to walk me through the basics.

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Virtual Not bad considering the timeframe and turnaround. The biggest benefit was for my end-users to hear a voice (other than mine/ours! LOL) telling them about the new features and capabilities. The in-person training was really good for having an expert that knows the answers and could refer to past experiences, problems, solutions. THey were a great resource to ease the transition ... basically a "you are gonna be okay with this change ... you got this etc.!" kinda vibe

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Good enough to get strong baseline. I always make sure our our users go to and/or focus on the vebndor-provided support docs rather than any formal training. Our instructors come and go, but written policy and how-to docs live much longer in a corporate setting. That said, the online training is sufficient. I like that the training curric is stacked and progressive.

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love the product and training they provide for businesses of all sizes. The following list of links will help you get started with Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented by Google Analytics.

1. How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners – Mahalo’s how-to guide for beginners.
2. A beginner’s guide to Google Analytics – A free eBook walking you through Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented.
3. Getting to Know Your Google Analytics Dashboard – The title says it all! This is a brief post with one goal: to introduce you to the Google Analytics dashboard.
4. Google Analytics for Beginners: How to Make the Most of Your Traffic Reports– This guide doesn’t cover setup, but it does a great job of helping you to better understand the data being presented.
5. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 1: Setup – A video presentation that walks you through Google Analytics setup.
6. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 2: Essential Stats – A video presentation that introduces you to some of the most important data being presented in Google Analytics.

My team members all have background as data analysts, so Amp was pretty easy to for them. There was sufficient online training available. We also used the available support documents. The actual rollout went well. We did significant testing beforehand. We did a phased rollout, with partial silent rollout (part of OCM's plan) for the smallest line of business. THe silent one was "silent" b/c it was done without fanfare or public notices ... it was just a "we're doing some things, it wont impact your work or workday

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I think my biggest take away from the Google Analytics implementation was that there needs to be a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it before you start. Originally the analytics were added to track visitors, but as we became more savvy with the product, we began adding more and more functionality, and defining guidelines as we went along. While not detrimental to our success, this lack of an overarching goal resulted in some minor setbacks in implementation and the collection of some messy data that is unusable.

Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed

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Amplitude Analytics provides much more granular data than Google Analytics and gives you much more flexibility in how you can segment and splice the data. It also provides the ability to create closed funnels, which I have yet to find out how to do in Google Analytics. Amplitude has a very similar interface to Mixpanel, with a few handy additions, like the ability to name and categorize your events.

I have not used Adobe Analytics as much, but I know they offer something called customer journey analytics, which we are evaluating now. I have used Semrush, and I find them much better than Google Analytics. I feel a fairly nontechnical person could learn Semrush in about a month. They also offer features like competitive analysis (on content, keywords, traffic, etc.), which is very useful. If you have to choose one among Semrush and Google Analytics, I would say go for Semrush.

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It is a good product. You have to pay for quality ... kinda like buying a Lexus or a Toyota instead of a Buick or a Chevy

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Like all the other grades, it was mostly an easy implementation ... we have experience people, the rollout in general is well planned, and the vendor was very supportive

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Google Analytics is currently handling the reporting and tracking of near about 80 sites in our project. And I am not talking about the sites from different projects. They may have way more accounts than that. Never ever felt a performance issue from Google's end while generating or customising reports or tracking custom events or creating custom dimensions

• Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
• Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
• Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.

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• It collects data of great importance which allows to make product improvements.
• It easily identifies problems a user may have with the product.
• The flow of users who have used the product has improved, thus being able to generate more income thanks to the improvements and new functions.

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• It has helped us gain understanding of what is going on on our website.
• It has helped us determine areas that need fixing (i.e. pages with extremely high bounce rates may need to be redone).
• It has helped us understand our biggest avenues for bringing traffic to the website and business in general.
• It has helped guide our website redesign.

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