Amplitude Tracking: How Does It Work and Are There Better Alternatives?
What’s Amplitude tracking? How do you set it up? What are its strengths and weaknesses?
These are the main questions we explore in this article.
You will also learn about two alternative product analytics solutions for event tracking; Userpilot and Google Analytics 4.
Let’s dive right in!
TL;DR
- Amplitude is an analytics platform that enables businesses to monitor user interactions throughout the customer journey.
- It provides features such as (custom) event tracking, customer segmentation, and multiple analytical reports, for example, funnel and cart analysis.
- Amplitude tracking is based on events. All user actions, like ad interactions or page views, are events. You can also track custom events.
- Implementing event tracking in Amplitude involves a three-step process: defining key events, collecting customer data via SDKs or third-party integrations, and analyzing the gathered information to extract actionable insights.
- Amplitude has a 4-tier pricing structure. There’s a free Starter plan, a Plus plan (from $49 a month), and custom-priced Growth and Enterprise plans.
- While Amplitude is a powerful cross-platform analytics tool with extensive integrations, it comes with a complex initial setup process. This means it might not be the right tool for users without technical expertise.
- Userpilot and Google Analytics 4 are two viable alternatives to Amplitude. Each offers distinct advantages in user behavior tracking and ease of implementation.
- To find out more about Userpilot event tracking capabilities, including its new autocapture feature, book a demo!
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What is Amplitude analytics used for?
Amplitude is a powerful analytics platform. Catering to businesses of all sizes, it enables teams to track user interactions with the brand at different stages of the customer journey.
For example, you can use it to analyze the performance of your marketing campaigns, how users navigate your e-commerce carts, or in-app user behavior.
Its key features include:
- Event tracking.
- Customer segmentation.
- Industry-standard reports, including funnels, retention, and user journeys (paths).
- Conversion driver analysis.
- Root cause analysis.
- Session replays.
- Predictive analytics and anomaly detection.
- Feature flags for controlled rollouts and experimentation.
- Customer data integration from unlimited sources.
What does Amplitude track?
All Amplitude analytics are based on event tracking – that’s all user actions within the product and interactions with your ads.
You can also use Amplitude to track page views. This enables you to track user conversion paths on your website, for example, in the e-commerce context.
In addition to basic events, the platform allows you to track custom events. These are events made up of two events connected by an OR clause. For example, “start a flow or start a project.”
How does event tracking work in Amplitude?
Here’s an overview of how event tracking works in Amplitude.
Define key events to monitor
Before you start tracking any events, create a tracking plan.
In the plan, specify:
- Events you want to track, for example, ‘create account’.
- Event properties, for example, ‘UserID’ or ‘DateAccountCreated’.
- Reasons for tracking the events.
- User properties, for instance, ‘FirstName’.
- Company properties.
- Data source.
Having such a plan in place ensures your data tracking is consistent. It also helps new team members understand what your data processes are and makes it easier to scrutinize and review them.
Gather customer data for tracking events
Amplitude allows you to collect customer data in three ways.
One is Amplitude’s SDKs.
These are tools that allow developers to integrate Amplitude analytics quickly. Once installed, they send event data from the app or website to the platform where you can analyze them.
Amplitude provides SDKs for JS, Android, iOS, React Native, Python, and Typescript.
Amplitude’s Autocapture uses SDKs to automatically collect data about basic user interactions with your website and mobile apps.
If you want to track events unique to your application, Amplitude offers precision tracking. That’s when you manually define the events to track and their properties.
In addition, Amplitude allows you to import customer data from 3rd-party tools, like Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, Adobe Analytics, or Hotjar. These require no coding and work out of the box.
Analyze event data to extract actionable insights
Once you get the data flowing in, you can start analyzing it for actionable insights.
For example, you can:
- Track key product metrics over time to identify trends and patterns.
- Measure the impact of product changes on customer engagement via retention analysis.
- Track conversions at different stages of the customer journey with funnels.
- Study user interactions on a specific page/screen via paths or session recordings.
- Attribute conversions to specific events.
How much does Amplitude tracking cost?
Amplitude offers four pricing plans:
- Starter – free
- Plus – from $49 per month
- Growth – custom pricing
- Enterprise – custom pricing
The Plus plan offers you access to the most basic analytics features.
For root cause or cart analysis, you need either Growth or Enterprise plans. I’ve seen reports that their prices start from $995 and $2,000 a month, respectively, but you need to contact their team for accurate figures.
Pros and cons of leveraging Amplitude for event tracking
Now that you’ve got an idea of how Amplitude tracking works, let’s look at its strengths and limitations.
Pros of using Amplitude
Not going to hide it: Amplitude is a powerful tool. You wouldn’t expect anything else from one of the most popular analytics platforms out there.
Its key strengths include:
- Cross-platform analytics allow users to track events across mobile and web apps and web pages.
- 100+ 3rd-party integrations and customer data integration capabilities.
- Once set up, Amplitude is user-friendly and intuitive to use.
Cons of using Amplitude
Amplitude’s powerful capabilities can also be its main drawback in certain circumstances.
For example, Amplitude users mention that the product’s customization options make it difficult to set up when you’re only starting to use the tool and don’t know what it’s capable of.
Other downsides include:
- No front-end event tracking means non-technical users have to rely on engineers to set them up.
- The autocapture feature tracks only basic events.
- The custom events can only consist of two events.
- Some users find creating workflows cumbersome.
Alternatives to Amplitude tracking for monitoring user behavior
Considering how complex it can be to set up and customize event tracking in Amplitude, you’re probably wondering if there are easier analytics tools around.
There are!
Let’s look at 2 of them, Userpilot and Google Analytics 4.
Userpilot: recommended for monitoring in-app user engagement
Userpilot is a product growth platform with potent analytics features.
These include autocapture, so you don’t have to tag any events manually. Userpilot tracks all user actions for you for a complete picture of user in-app behavior.
You can visualize the event data in various reports, including Trends, Funnels, Paths, Retention, and Heatmaps. Session recordings are coming to Userpilot this year.
As Userpilot supports custom analytics dashboards, you can view all the relevant event data and reports in one place without switching between screens or tools back and forth.
The best part? The analytics are just a part of the package.
There’s also feedback functionality, so you can supplement quantitative insights with qualitative data, and engagement features, which enable you to act on the insights.
For example, you can support users proactively by triggering in-app messages contextually to help them navigate through tasks when they experience friction.
Google Analytics 4: recommended for tracking website event properties
Google Analytics doesn’t require introductions. Marketers all over the world use it to analyze the performance of their websites and marketing campaigns.
Apart from automatically captured events, you can track custom events (add up to 25 properties for each) as well as enhanced measurement events, like scrolls, outbound clicks, or file downloads.
Just like Amplitude, it allows you to track events across customer journeys, but tracking is much easier to set up with Google Tag Manager.
And it’s free to use unless you need complex analytics, like attribution analysis, which is available through Google Analytics 360. This will set you back by $50K+/year – not such a bargain anymore.
Conclusion
Amplitude is a powerful analytics tool that enables you to track user interactions with your brand across multiple touchpoints in the custom lifecycle.
However, this comes at a cost: the product is fairly complex to implement and non-technical users will struggle to set up event tagging without developer help.
Userpilot is a more intuitive solution than Amplitude because event tracking requires no coding. If you’d like to explore its capabilities, book a demo!
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