AppsFlyer vs. Branch vs. Google Analytics

Appsflyer is excellent for running numerous campaigns across many clients and keeping track of real-time performance. Attribution is top-notch and the platform is up to date with the innovations in the area while keeping its effective & trustworthy information. Exporting reports could be a bit more friendly but all in all, a truly great MMP.

Incentivized

Branch well suited: Branch links are perfecting for embedding into our email service provider (SendGrid), paid media channels (Facebook, Google, ASA), organic media (Instagram, Facebook, content marketing, referral) and push notification platform (OneSignal) to be able to evaluate actions taken from users that clicked on those branch links. No matter the data from these links, they are accurate and are easily exported to our database and CRM to determine ROI, and find weak points in our major funnels.

Incentivized

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.

• Appsflyer does deep linking well. It was reliable and works better than any past partner we've used. We no longer invest time and resources in fielding internal flags about broken links.
• Appsflyer does particularly well at telling the story on industry landscape, identifying areas of opportunity for our brand to grow based on the depth and breadth of their experience in mobile.
• The Appsflyer team offers best in class customer service. The account managers are knowledgeable, responsive, bright, invested and a pleasure to work with.

Incentivized

• Click tracking: it integrated well with Facebook, Google, Clevertap, product, etc. to allow multiple stakeholders to use this one platform for tracking.
• Sale attribution: it has a robust fraud detection and event deduplication in place to attribute sales correctly.
• Smart URL: it offers different deeplinks to support basic user platforms, thus making the URL behavior smart and personalized for users.
• Referrals: it's a ready-made platform to easily launch your refer and earn program, with all checks of fraud detection in place.
• Social sharing: it offers various goats and cards for how a link will appear on various social media channels if shared, which is particularly helpful for marketing teams.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Supports download of only 200K rows of raw data for in-app events
• Supports download of raw data of in-app events for only 30 days duration max and for the last 90 days
• Custom reports are limited.
• Need to download raw data for deeper analysis
• Cannot look into parameter level events without raw reports

Incentivized

• Multiplayers redirection is important feature. In our marketing process for [our] Ace Tutor app https://www.acetutor.io, we have a referral reward campaign for which we want to aggregate clicks from lower level links to higher level links. For example, we created unique Branch Links for 10 marketing interns, and each intern wanted to create Branch Links for their own 10 delegates, the clicks of the Branch Links from these delegates would be automatically rolled up to the right intern's Branch Link, so we can make payment following the aggregation paths. Currently, Branch Links do not support this kind of multiplayer or multi-layer redirections.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

AppsFlyer works well with our use cases already, and is working on addressing the gaps (of trackers UI)

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The UI can be used by anyone with a little understanding of the business. However, may features are somehow hidden and the UI is a bit confusing for beginners. It's not so easy to know where each feature is. It is also not easy to figure out how certain values are calculated.

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It's very usable. Multiple teams in the company are using it, and it never takes more than 5 mins to explain to someone how to use this.

Incentivized

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

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.

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

Overall support is good, fast to respond and helps us with both tool related queries as well as publisher related escalations when it comes to fraud or attribution, as they step in and help justify on our behalf. They have a very small team though in India, it's time for them to scale up the team probably and assign exclusive support folks to large clients.

Incentivized

We have never had any issue with support response yet. In fact, they have a local POC in our city too, who routes the urgent matters to their escalation matrix.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Appsflyer is generally a more comprehensive and robust platform offering advanced analytics, detailed attribution, and strong fraud prevention features compared to its competition in the market. Also, Appsflyer is a pretty old and well-known name in the market.

Incentivized

Branch's links are the most consistent in the mobile space. They work across desktop and mobile, where AppsFlyer and Deeplink's didn't consistently perform in both places. Branch's measurement is more consistent across all customer touch points as well, which gives our marketing and growth teams the answers they need without any struggle.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

• Allows us to make sure that we're meeting our advertiser's performance and optimize accordingly. Which keeps our business on going.
• Allows us to stop spend on inventory that's not performing well to save money on those placements.
• Allows us to identify fraudulent inventory and get our money back from our traffic sources.

Incentivized

• Branch had given a profound impact on the way our users share their content.
• Users now have more easy access to content created.
• Users feel more motivated in creating content because they know that it is easy to share and get their content in the eyes of the target public.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized