Branch vs. Firebase vs. Piano Analytics

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

Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.

Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.

Incentivized

When it comes to web analytics AT Internet is well suited. We introduced AT Internet in 2017 after an evaluation project with other professional analytics solutions. Starting with our corporate website we quickly rolled it out to our customer experience platform, our webshops, and our corporate intranet based on SharePoint 2013. Especially the use in our intranet brought significant improvements over the standard analytics features SP 2013 is offering. The ATI tag systems with their flexibility allow us to include company-specific properties and thus making it possible for us to analyze our intranet usage on segments such as locations, branches, and so on.

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

• Analytics wise, retention is extremely important to our app, therefore we take advantage of the cohort analysis to see the impact of our middle funnel (retargeting, push, email) efforts affect the percent of users that come back into the app. Firebase allows us to easily segment these this data and look at a running average based on certain dates.
• When it comes to any mobile app, a deep linking strategy is essential to any apps success. With Firebase's Dynamic Links, we are able to share dynamic links (recognize user device) that are able to redirect to in-app content. These deep links allow users to share other deep-linked content with friends, that also have link preview assets.
• Firebase allows users to effectively track events, funnels, and MAUs. With this simple event tracking feature, users can put organize these events into funnels of their main user flows (e.g., checkout flows, onboarding flows, etc.), and subsequently be able to understand where the drop-off is in the funnel and then prioritize areas of the funnel to fix. Also, MAU is important to be able to tell if you are bringing in new users and what's the active volume for each platform (Android, iOS).

Incentivized

• A very strong, supportive team who are keen to develop the relationship and deliver business value
• Excellent 'real-time' data availability through rapid data processing
• Powerful tools for analysing content consumption and usage patterns
• A range of API options to deliver data in the format required
• A process of continuous evolution in the data tools provided

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

• Attribution and specifically multi-touch attribution could be more robust such as Branch or Appsflyer but understand this isn't Firebases bread and butter.
• More parameters. Firebase allows you to track tons of events (believe it's up to 50 or so) but the parameters of the events it only allows you to track 5 which is so messily and unbelievable. So you're able to get good high-level data but if you want to get granular with the events and actions are taken on your app to get real data insight you either have to go with a paid data analytics platform or bring on someone that's an expert in SQL to go through Big Query.
• City-specific data instead of just country-specific data would have been a huge plus as well.

Incentivized

• Integrations with outside vendors: there are many ways to integrate data from outside vendors, however you can't display this information in every application unless you create a custom field, which can sometimes be limiting.
• Access rights: there are two places to assign access rights and each place has slightly different functionality. You can get really granular with what each person has access to, but it is easy to miss a check box and have to go back and correct it.
• Visualizations across applications: there are some really cool visualizations in the oldest application they support that includes predictive traffic estimates, automatic multi-period variations, etc., that aren't available yet in the newer applications.

I gave this rating because I think that AT Internet is a good tool, user-friendly easy for onboarding and simple dashboards, however the majority of people use Google Analytics, especially media agency, it is easier for them to use Google Analytics.

Incentivized

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

I don't use the Firebase UI much, but rather connect it to GA4. GA4 has a great event model but the GA4 UI and analysis capabilities are limited. It's harder to measure product usage type of engagement but if you have the time and resources to leverage the GA4 to BiqQuery export you'll have all the raw event data you'll need for deep analysis, segmentation, and audience activation.

Incentivized

Overall the experience is very good, it's quick, relaiable and does everything I would want. The only problems I have are matching the correct stats to what I want. It can be painful trying to find the right thing and the explanations are not always the clearest. That's the only issue i've found though.

Incentivized

I don't have any exemple in mind where AT Internet interface hasn't been available, i have always been able to use AT Internet when i needed it. The only issues to notice is that it happens sometimes that real time or D-1 datas are partially delayed.

Incentivized

All excel reports are downloaded very quickly, even if the query is more than 20 000 lines.

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

Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.

Incentivized

I have not used the Support Team thereby I am unable to review how their Support Teams works. However, in an instance where I had an issue, my concerned department contacted their support team and I was provided with the solution of the problem I was facing within a short span of time.

Incentivized

The in-person training unfortunately does not match to our expectations, was too much focus on digital basis and not on AT Internet functionnalties and how to use it. We paid for one day and only 15 minutes at the end was focused on our real needs in terms of media analytics.

Incentivized

No online training

Incentivized

The support team helps us to implement AT Internet.

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

Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.

Incentivized

AT Internet shows a deep understanding of our business objectives and provide us with ideas on how to solve them. They grant us enough time to try their tools and to be sure the tools are helpful. The data we've got in the Analyzer was manually checked and it was completely correct. Their roadmap was clean and aligned with our strategy

Regarding AT Internet possibilities, it could be adapted to small or large organizations, easy to set up. We can add sites in makets that we launch e-commerce.

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

• Makes building real-time interfaces easy to do at scale with no backend involvement.
• Very low pricing for small companies and green-fields projects.
• Lack of support for more complicated queries needs to be managed by users and often forces strange architecture choices for data to enable it to be easily accessed.

Incentivized

• Unfortunately, I do not have precise results to give, but the statistics provided by AT Internet make it possible to carry out in-depth analyses and to make good decisions.
• You just have to know how to find the information and interpret it.

Incentivized