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It’s an interesting argument, but in my view, one that sailed 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics, which fairly drastically ch

It’s an interesting argument, but in my view, one that sailed 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics, which fairly drastically changed our data views given as it was so heavily geared to revenue generating click businesses (as opposed to B2B SaaS). At that point we instituted a big program to move to Amplitude (which we’ve been fairly happy with, but probably won’t be perfect until we get our own data overlays through eventually getting a data lake etc etc) - now the move BACK to GA … II would never touch GA again or consider it for a new project

lmkg 5y ago
> 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics No, this is the same migration. This is my point: you weren't actually forced to migrate until now. The migration has been optional up until this announcement, and many people haven't. What your team did 2-3 years ago, the majority of organizations have been putting off. But now they can't anymore.
- robbiep 5y ago
  Wow, is that right. We had some weird little projects that were web based that we didn't do anything with that we could still view through analytics.google but I felt that the mobile stuff was GOOOONE unless we did something. So they've basically said 'GA is closing unless you want to pay 120k/pa so move to firebase - GA is now Firebase Analytics' to now 'Firebase Analytics is Google Analytics again, but that thing we said you had to do you now have to definitively do?' ?
  - sanitycheck 5y ago
    100% - I jumped right on it when they said that, did a few hours of hurried research, then discovered that it wasn't actually possible to use Firebase for what we use GA for. Figured we just had to wait until they hit feature parity so I've been checking the status of things a few times a year ever since. ...and there's been very little movement. We can still create "universal analytics" properties, we still can't do the same stuff in Firebase, and the GA4 "Measurement Protocol" is still in beta. I think our eventual move is going to be to a non-Google product.
    - robbiep 5y ago
      You’re right, there was so much feature asymmetry we couldn’t justify sticking around - we would have lost any valuable insights into user behaviour. Firebase analytics just seemed like a ‘made for ads and influencers’ analytics tool. What a monumental cockup by the team that decided that it was important to lose that pool of users. Because of that shift we actively avoided making any choices re any of the other Google cloud or firebase tools. There’s heaps of good ones around now - our shift to amplitude was a good one but I know there are a lot of other really simple and free ones about too
  - lmkg 5y ago
    It sounds like you were working on app tracking rather than web tracking, so your timeline makes more sense. The various GA SDKs for different platforms stopped working a few years ago, forcing a move to firebase-which-is-now-GA. On the website side of things, which is GA's core user-base, Universal Analytics has remained supported up til this announcement.
    - robbiep 5y ago
      That does zap my story into a framework that makes sense
- fasicle 5y ago
  Yep, I've been on the same Google Analytics for the past ~6 years. It's still working and I haven't ever migrated / updated it.
sskates 5y ago
Glad to hear you’ve been happy with Amplitude. We’ve been doing a lot RE helping customers federate data to data lakes/warehouses. If I can ask- what data lake you using and what data from Amplitude are you looking to get into it? (Raw dump of analytics data or something else?)
- robbiep 5y ago
  Hi, Thanks for your interest, you've got a great product there and it's been really cool seeing it evolve. We're actually not currently using a data lake. We were initially on the startup plan which was fantastic (the ability to do templated reports etc is a big one for us) but currently we couldn't justify the cost of a full subscription at that point (and now we are just making do until we can complete our next round at which point we will re-look at the whole situation) We love that you have an API and used fivetran to ETL to (for want of something cheap + low BI tool costs) BigQuery where we were hoping to be able to attach Data Studio to it to achieve our objectives. This may not have been the right approach. We couldn't spare anyone from our dev team to take the time to work out the transforms/queries required to make it useful in Data Studio so we spent some time contracting the work out, but that fell over because they were on lend from a mate's startup and I think just never moved out of the blocks. Also maybe we were using the incorrect tools. Essentially we were looking to get a fair proportion of our data out, in order to create data views for our clients on their usage (... platform in bio, but hospital analytics stuff - no patient info, all operational efficiency). This was fulfilled really nicely by Templates but in the reports we now generate (... a bit laborious but using a offshore contractor who takes all the pain out of it) we are also able to put benchmarking averages against their peer hospitals etc in which wasn't something it was immediately obvious we could achieve with Templates. Ultimately we want those individual dashboards available for the Hospitals to view, as well as be able to return things like views per period for their content on our dashboard, which we know we can also achieve through the API

lmkg 5y ago

> 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics No, this is the same migration. This is my point: you weren't actually forced to migrate until now. The migration has been optional up until this announcement, and many people haven't. What your team did 2-3 years ago, the majority of organizations have been putting off. But now they can't anymore.

robbiep 5y ago
Wow, is that right. We had some weird little projects that were web based that we didn't do anything with that we could still view through analytics.google but I felt that the mobile stuff was GOOOONE unless we did something. So they've basically said 'GA is closing unless you want to pay 120k/pa so move to firebase - GA is now Firebase Analytics' to now 'Firebase Analytics is Google Analytics again, but that thing we said you had to do you now have to definitively do?' ?
- sanitycheck 5y ago
  100% - I jumped right on it when they said that, did a few hours of hurried research, then discovered that it wasn't actually possible to use Firebase for what we use GA for. Figured we just had to wait until they hit feature parity so I've been checking the status of things a few times a year ever since. ...and there's been very little movement. We can still create "universal analytics" properties, we still can't do the same stuff in Firebase, and the GA4 "Measurement Protocol" is still in beta. I think our eventual move is going to be to a non-Google product.
  - robbiep 5y ago
    You’re right, there was so much feature asymmetry we couldn’t justify sticking around - we would have lost any valuable insights into user behaviour. Firebase analytics just seemed like a ‘made for ads and influencers’ analytics tool. What a monumental cockup by the team that decided that it was important to lose that pool of users. Because of that shift we actively avoided making any choices re any of the other Google cloud or firebase tools. There’s heaps of good ones around now - our shift to amplitude was a good one but I know there are a lot of other really simple and free ones about too
- lmkg 5y ago
  It sounds like you were working on app tracking rather than web tracking, so your timeline makes more sense. The various GA SDKs for different platforms stopped working a few years ago, forcing a move to firebase-which-is-now-GA. On the website side of things, which is GA's core user-base, Universal Analytics has remained supported up til this announcement.
  - robbiep 5y ago
    That does zap my story into a framework that makes sense
fasicle 5y ago
Yep, I've been on the same Google Analytics for the past ~6 years. It's still working and I haven't ever migrated / updated it.

sskates 5y ago

Glad to hear you’ve been happy with Amplitude. We’ve been doing a lot RE helping customers federate data to data lakes/warehouses. If I can ask- what data lake you using and what data from Amplitude are you looking to get into it? (Raw dump of analytics data or something else?)

robbiep 5y ago
Hi, Thanks for your interest, you've got a great product there and it's been really cool seeing it evolve. We're actually not currently using a data lake. We were initially on the startup plan which was fantastic (the ability to do templated reports etc is a big one for us) but currently we couldn't justify the cost of a full subscription at that point (and now we are just making do until we can complete our next round at which point we will re-look at the whole situation) We love that you have an API and used fivetran to ETL to (for want of something cheap + low BI tool costs) BigQuery where we were hoping to be able to attach Data Studio to it to achieve our objectives. This may not have been the right approach. We couldn't spare anyone from our dev team to take the time to work out the transforms/queries required to make it useful in Data Studio so we spent some time contracting the work out, but that fell over because they were on lend from a mate's startup and I think just never moved out of the blocks. Also maybe we were using the incorrect tools. Essentially we were looking to get a fair proportion of our data out, in order to create data views for our clients on their usage (... platform in bio, but hospital analytics stuff - no patient info, all operational efficiency). This was fulfilled really nicely by Templates but in the reports we now generate (... a bit laborious but using a offshore contractor who takes all the pain out of it) we are also able to put benchmarking averages against their peer hospitals etc in which wasn't something it was immediately obvious we could achieve with Templates. Ultimately we want those individual dashboards available for the Hospitals to view, as well as be able to return things like views per period for their content on our dashboard, which we know we can also achieve through the API