Top 5 Digital Analytics Platforms: A Comprehensive Guide to Features and Benefits

Discover 5 of the top digital analytics platforms in this comprehensive guide. Learn about the features and benefits of Google Analytics 4, Adobe Analytics, Matomo, Mixpanel, and Snowplow. Make informed decisions with insights from these major players in the field of digital analytics.

To many marketers, and this is certainly my experience, the very definition of analytics has become synonymous with the platforms that provide digital analytics data like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics.

The truth however is that analytics as a discipline existed long before these platforms.

In the past, analytics primarily relied on spreadsheets, databases, and specialised software applications. Analysts and statisticians would manually collect, clean, and manipulate data to then perform data analysis using statistical techniques and create visualisations to communicate their findings.

But the process was time-consuming, clunky and complex. If you’ve ever done any kind of manual reporting or analysis, you will know exactly what I mean.

Then the rise of big data changed everything and the increasing complexity of data analysis meant more advanced and user-friendly analytics platforms were needed.

And so dawned the age of the digital analytics platform, but what exactly is an analytics platform anyway?

An analytics platform is a tool or piece of software that enables you to collect, process, analyse, and visualise data for the purpose of generating insights and making informed decisions. The analytics platform provides a centralised system for managing and understanding data across various sources and channels. Not to be confused with visualisation tools (which are very powerful in their own right), analytics platforms actually collect data, rather than simply connecting to existing data sources.

In this blog post I’ll be looking at the key features of 5 major analytics platforms, what they are and how they are used to generate value for their end users:

1. Google Analytics 4
2. Adobe Analytics
3. Matomo
4. Mixpanel
5. Snowplow

Read on to find out about each platform or just jump to the one most relevant to you.

Google Analytics 4

Key Features

• Event-driven data model for flexible tracking
• Cross-platform tracking for enhanced user insights
• Machine learning insights for predictive analytics and segmentation
• User-centric measurement with privacy controls
• Unified tracking for web and app properties

What is it?

The most popular and widely utilised analytics platform in the world, if you’ve ever worked with analytics data, it’s likely you’ve worked with Google Analytics, be that Universal or GA4. A big reason for that is because the standard version is completely free. You can create a google account and deploy GA4 on your website right now to start gathering huge volumes of data that can help you make data-driven decisions.

So what actually is it? Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a web analytics platform that collects data through cookies and other tracking technologies, to understand user sessions and track unique users across devices. It also employs user-centric identifiers, like user IDs, to associate data with individual users over time. You may have heard about GA4s ‘Event-based data model’ which essentially means data is organised into events that represent specific interactions, like clicks, pageviews or form submissions. These events are triggered as users engage with your website or app.

How is it used?

Easy to learn, complex to master, GA4 offers a broad range of functions that can sit at the core of your marketing and website strategy. Due to its highly flexible and customisable data model, the possibilities for what you can track are endless, provided you have the capacity to set it up.

Since GA4 allows you to track user behaviour and analyse page performance, one of its core uses lies in identifying areas for improvement. Conversion tracking enables you to understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and website elements, while audience segmentation means you can tailor content to specific user groups based on demographics and behaviours. E-commerce analysis provides insights into product performance and revenue, and you can perform funnel analysis to identify drop-off points in the user journey. Additionally, GA4’s new machine learning capabilities provide automated insights and predictive analytics. Bringing all these features together means you can make data-driven decisions to optimise user experience and drive better website and campaign performance.

Adobe Analytics

Key Features

• Customisable dashboards
• Advanced segmentation
• Social media analytics
• Sophisticated machine learning capabilities
• Integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud products

What is it?

The grandad of Analytics Platforms, there’s a strong chance that you may never have encountered Adobe Analytics or had the chance to use it. That’s likely because of its purchase price and set up complexity. While it does offer an affordable pricing model based on usage, enterprise businesses are probably going to pay upwards of $100k a year on this tool so its adoption is not to be taken lightly.

Still, Adobe Analytics is one of the most popular and widely used analytics platforms in the world and is often compared to Google Analytics due to its prominence in the field. Adobe Analytics is part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud suite and offers customisable dashboards, advanced segmentation, and social media analytics, along with integration with other Adobe Marketing Cloud products. While Google Analytics focuses on ease of use and making data analysis accessible to a broad range of users, Adobe Analytics caters more to larger enterprises with comprehensive marketing needs. Additionally, Adobe Analytics has sophisticated machine learning capabilities to uncover complex patterns and trends in user behaviour.

How is it used?

Adobe Analytics employs a server-side data processing model, enabling accurate data collection and analysis. Just like GA, it’s used to analyse and measure websites, mobile apps, and digital channel performance. However, Adobe Analytics offers several capabilities that Google Analytics doesn’t, like its’ advanced multichannel data collection and real-time analysis which enables deeper insights into customer behaviour across multiple touchpoints, including websites, mobile apps, and offline interactions. Additionally, Adobe Analytics provides precise segmentation using machine learning and artificial intelligence, enabling you to create highly targeted audience groups for personalised marketing campaigns. The platform’s integration with the broader Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem further enhances its capabilities, offering seamless data sharing and cross-channel analysis. Features like these are why Adobe Analytics is often the preferred choice for large enterprises seeking powerful analytics tools to drive data-driven decision-making, but it comes at a hefty price.

Matomo

Key Features

• Emphasis on data ownership and customer privacy
• Compliance with data regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, PECR)
• Open-source and self-hosted platform
• Advanced behavioural analytics
• Consent-free tracking and user privacy preference

What is it?

The ethical data professionals choice, Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is a powerful and privacy-conscious analytics platform that stands as an alternative to GA. What sets Matomo apart is its emphasis on data ownership and customer privacy. Unlike many other analytics tools, Matomo ensures that you own 100% of your website data, providing complete control and privacy for customers. It complies with various data regulations, including GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PECR, making it a reliable choice for businesses that are conscious about data compliance. One of the key advantages of Matomo is that it is open-source and self-hosted, meaning you can host it on your own server, ensuring that user data remains within your infrastructure and is not shared with third-party companies. Matomo has a commitment to data privacy and its mission is to be an ethical and privacy-focused analytics solution.

How is it used?

Matomo combines traditional web analytics with advanced behavioural analytics, offering features like Heatmaps, A/B Testing, Form Analytics, and Session Recordings to provide a comprehensive view of the entire customer journey and enhance user experience. It also offers consent-free tracking, meaning users have the choice to opt-out of tracking, respecting their privacy preferences. Matomo offers detailed reports that provide insights into various aspects of your website, such as the search engines and keywords visitors used, their language, preferred pages and downloaded files. Users can access a user-friendly interface to navigate through the data and gain valuable insights to improve website performance, optimise marketing campaigns, and enhance the overall user experience for website visitors. Matomo’s flexibility and customisation options make it suitable for organisations of all sizes and industries. It caters to users seeking a more ethical alternative to Google Analytics, where data is not used for third-party purposes and consent-free tracking is possible.

Mixpanel

Key Features

• Enhanced Data Model: Events, Users, and Properties
• User-Centric Tracking: User IDs for individual users
• Conversion Funnel Analysis: Track user journey
• User Segmentation: Categorize users based on criteria
• A/B Testing: Experiment and compare features/strategies

What is it?

Doing cool stuff before it was cool, Mixpanel stands as one of the most prominent and widely used analytics tools in the world. However, Mixpanel offers a distinct approach to tracking customer behaviour and interactions with digital products. The tool’s data model is built on three key concepts: Events, Users, and Properties. Events represent interactions between users and products, Users are the specific individuals completing the interactions, and Properties are attributes defining the specifics of an event or a user. Through a veritable plethora of reports, Mixpanel allows you to view and analyse data about users and events, and gain a deeper understanding of customers in order to optimise the user experience.With Mixpanel, you can still gain insights into user sessions and track unique users across various devices using cookies, but the platform employs user-centric identifiers, such as user IDs, to associate data with individual users over time. Just like GA4 (you can see the pattern here), Mixpanel uses an event-based data model, organising data into events that represent specific user interactions, like clicks, pageviews, or form submissions. This was actually one of Mixpanel’s stand out features before Google caught up.

How is it used?

Just like GA and the other platforms in this post, Mixpanel’s primary application is in product optimisation and tracking user behaviour within digital products. However, Mixpanel also excels in conversion funnel analysis, empowering you to create and monitor conversion funnels that track the user journey from initial interaction to the desired action, such as sign-ups or purchases. User segmentation is another key use case for Mixpanel, enabling you to categorise users based on specific criteria, such as distinct behaviours, location, or other attributes. Mixpanel’s segmentation capabilities offer greater flexibility, user-centric insights, real-time views, cohort analysis, and more advanced analytics compared to Google Analytics.

Mixpanel also boasts A/B testing capabilities that enable you to run experiments and compare the effectiveness of different features or marketing strategies. While Google Analytics also provides A/B testing capabilities through integration with other tools, Mixpanel’s focus on individual user behaviour and deep user analytics makes it that much more powerful for sophisticated A/B testing and experimentation. It’s also possible to gain insights into individual customer journeys over time and understand how customers interact with the product at different stages.

Snowplow

Key Features

• Open-source, enterprise, event-level analytics platform
• Data model based on Events, Users, and Properties
• Integration with multiple channels and platforms for a single customer view
• Real-time granular behavioural data and BI-ready data
• Wide range of trackers for various data collection scenarios and use cases

What is it?

Arguably the most powerful and flexible analytics tool of all, Snowplow is an open-source, enterprise, event-level analytics platform that collects data from a multitude of platforms for advanced data analytics. It uses a data model based on Events, Users, and Properties to track interactions between users and products. The platform offers a single customer view by integrating data from multiple channels and platforms, allowing you to create custom event and entity definitions. It allows you to create and operationalise rich, first-party customer behavioural data directly from your data warehouse or data lake in real-time. The platform can be integrated with various third-party applications like Mailchimp, Marketo, Zendesk, and Olark. Snowplow also excels in conversion funnel analysis, user segmentation, and A/B testing, providing real-time insights into user behaviour. With a focus on individual user behaviour and deep analytics, Snowplow is a powerful tool for data-driven decision-making and analytics democratisation, allowing you to own and control your data analytics infrastructure without product limitations.

How is it used?

Snowplow Analytics offers several key use cases that set it apart from Google Analytics. Unlike Google Analytics, Snowplow allows you to generate granular behavioural data in real-time and deliver it to your data warehouse. What this level of customisation enables is the ability to build sophisticated data applications such as churn prediction, recommendation engines, and custom attribution modelling, going way beyond the standardised reporting provided by Google Analytics. Snowplow also delivers BI-ready data in real-time directly to your data warehouse, eliminating the need for manual data preparation tasks like nested table structures or stateful joins. This enables teams to focus more on data insights and analysis rather than data wrangling, which can be incredibly time-consuming when exporting data from Google Analytics.

With Snowplow, you can also adjust session lengths to reflect the dynamics of user engagement in a way that fits your business requirements. In contrast, Google Analytics offers fixed session expiration rules, which might not be ideal for all industries and business models. Snowplow also offers a wide range of trackers, allowing you to track events not just on websites and mobile applications but also on games, software, and even hardware. This flexibility makes Snowplow suitable for various types of data collection scenarios and use cases.

TLDR: Key Takeaways

• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a popular web analytics platform with an event-driven data model, cross-platform tracking, and machine learning insights.
• Adobe Analytics is a widely used analytics platform focused on customisation, advanced segmentation, social media analytics, and integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud products
• Matomo is an ethical and privacy-conscious analytics platform with an emphasis on data ownership, compliance with data regulations, and consent-free tracking.
• Mixpanel offers a powerful data model based on events, users, and properties, along with conversion funnel analysis, user segmentation, and A/B testing capabilities.
• Snowplow is an open-source, enterprise analytics platform with a data model based on events, users, and properties, delivering real-time granular behavioural data and offering integration with various channels and platforms.

This Article was originally posted on analytics-activation.co.uk