User tracking and analytics are essential for successful marketing. While the first tool coming to mind is Google Analytics, which is great, however, it is very limited for large organizations. Google Analytics 360 removes limitations of standard GA but comes at a high expense and still might not meet all the expectations of a company with a sophisticated data analytics team.
One of the tools that we find very helpful for profound data teams is Snowplow. In certain cases, it has substantial advantages over GA 360. Below we will talk about them.

Data ownership

With Snowplow, you own the data, it is stored in your AWS infrastructure. Google runs on its own infrastructure with data being delivered to BigQuery; this means, you can only have access to raw data (BigQuery), while subscribed to GA 360.

Data accessibility

In Google Analytics, you access the data processed through BigQuery: the data view determines what’s in the data set. This approach is top-down.
In Snowplow, you determine what data to use or not and set up the process which determines what’s in the data set. This approach is bottom-up. You get access to truly raw clickstream data.

Defining your own events and entities

When tracking different types of events from different platforms, it’s important to put them in schemas, because they all have a different structure.
Google Analytics offers a fixed schema and any company, no matter from which industry it is, will have to use the same table with the same columns. Some flexibility is possible, Google allows tracking of 200 custom dimension and 200 custom metrics, however, each value needs to be connected to these variables in the code, otherwise the data won’t be collected.
With Snowplow, users are free to define their unique event types, fields for these events, and entities tracked across these events. This means you can capture the data layer fully and then decide what to include in modelling and what to not.

Attribution modelling

Google Analytics has its own predefined way of assigning traffic to direct, organic, or referral sources. In Snowplow you can create your custom attribution model to fit your specific needs.

Real-time data tracking

Snowplow supports almost real-time data streaming. Users can set up the frequency of the pipeline execution, from a few hours to real-time. In GA 360, clickstream data is refreshed every 4 hours.

Data enrichment

Besides tracking events on your own platforms, Snowplow allows you to enrich your data with data from external sources, such as weather, currency conversion, event fingerprint, and other APIs.
GA 360 doesn’t have an enrichment processing engine.

Monitoring of bad rows and data reprocessing

During the data processing, Snowplow filters the data that doesn’t fit the schema and places it into Bad Rows repository. If you then determine that these records are good data, Snowplow allows re-processing of these Bad Rows. Such filtering might happen because of an error at the implementation phase. Improper implementation of GA would mean loss of data until the issues are fixed; reprocessing is not supported.

Integrations

Out-of-the-box, Google offers integrations with its own services: Google AdWords, Google AdSense, Google DoubleClick, Google Search Console, Google DataStudio.
While it is possible to integrate Snowplow with those services as well, it is not as simple to set up.
Yet, Snowplow provides integrations with many other services which Google misses: Adjust, Angut, CallRail, Clearbit, Mailchimp, Mandrill, Optimizely, OpenWeatherMap, PagerDuty, Pingdom, SendGrid, Urban Airship, Open Exchange Rates.

Cost

Another significant advantage of Snowplow is its cost. The product itself is open-source and free. What you have to pay for is a space on a public cloud where you plan the deployment. This would amount to $40 – $200 per month.
Google Analytics 360 license, on the other hand, starts at $150.000 per year.

Technical involvement

This aspect, in some cases, gives Google a significant advantage. The solution offers a full suit: solid tracking, data presentation interface, and great scalability with Google infrastructure. This means minimum technical involvement is required from users.
Snowplow provides the code to capture and enrich data, but you have to set it up by yourself. You’ll have to prepare the infrastructure to store the data, create the process for data enrichment, host tracking codes. The platform gives full clarity and possibilities for tweaking; however, you need to have professionals able to do that.

Summary

Both GA 360 and Snowplow give certain advantages, depending on your needs and team expertise.
Most of the benefits of Snowplow come up to the fact that you have full control of the data and can get it in the rawest form. Plus, there is no license fee.
Google Analytics requires minimum technical involvement and is compatible with other Google services out-of-the-box. However, even in this case, you’ll have to make sure that the implementation is done properly, otherwise, there is no guarantee for the quality of the collected data.

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If you plan to implement user behavior analytics in your eCommerce business, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation. ISDK has a solid experience of setting up various analytical platforms, including Snowplow (see our latest case).