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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

Stupid question: Can't you do all of this in Google Analytics? What are the advantages of Posthog/Mixpanel/Amplitude/Heap over GA?

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Not a stupid question. These products tend to offer a lot more functionality and flexibility in terms of how you consume your data. Different analysis possibilities, fancy ML models, custom dashboards, etc.

Also more control over how the data is ingested (sampling or not, etc.)

These products feel more suited to teams building rich apps/webapps where as GA seems to have its roots in sites that are more "content-based" (news sites, etc.).

And for many, not sending the data to Google is an advantage in and of itself.

I'll also add that product analytics software is built more towards measuring depth of engagement: How many times has this user returned to our site? What is the average LTV of this cohort? What is cohort X's n-day retention compared to cohort Y? What features have correlation to those differences? Did this experiment lead to improvements in retention - 30 days later?

Google isn't built to go that deep. Sure you can see that 3% of users have used feature X, but you can't really effectively dig in and see how upstream or downstream actions and events influence each other. Sure you can create some custom segments on a sessions/user level - but that quickly turns complex and unwieldy if you have several segments, cohorts and funnels. Also there are a lot of charts that are just plain better in product analytics tools. Retention charts, funnels and path diagrams are obvious examples.

At my previous employer we were using GA and it's very flexible. We were able to track all DOM interactions by just configuring the included js. Although, querying that later with tools engineers can use and build is a whole different story.

There's two issues with GA. First the functionality is somewhat bare bones. It does a really good job out of the box, but it's pretty hard to use beyond that. Take the funnel feature. You need to define your funnels ahead of time before you can start analyzing them. Compare this to any of the other product analytics tool where as long as you were collecting the events up front, you can compute any funnel you want.

Second, once you cross the free tier, you will have to pay at least $150k/year. The free tier is 10 million hits per month[0], which is high enough that most businesses never hit it. Other analytics tools often come in at a better price point at that kind of scale.

[0] https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/terms/u...

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