Snowplow Outperforms GA4 in GigaOm Comparative Evaluation
In the rapidly evolving world of e-commerce, web analytics plays a critical role in shaping business strategies and understanding customer behavior. As consumers' daily lives are increasingly driven by digital platforms, digital analytics plays a vital role in shaping business strategies and understanding customer behavior.
In August 2023, the technology-focused analyst firm GigaOm published a report titled Digital Analytics and Measurement Tools Evaluation, which provides an in-depth comparative evaluation of Snowplow and Google Analytics 4 (‘GA4’) based on parameters such as ease of use (usability), performance, data scanned, and total cost of ownership (‘TCO’).
The results were clear: ‘Snowplow significantly outperformed GA4’.
Snowplow stood out in four key areas:
Speed: Snowplow performed 6.9 times faster than GA4;
Quality: Snowplow queries scan over 99% less data than GA4 queries;
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Snowplow was 800 times less expensive than GA4 over a three year period;
Ease of use: Snowplow queries were 42% less complex and allowed for more user-friendly queries.
Access the full report here.
Background
Analytics tools can provide a competitive advantage for organizations, especially in today’s data-driven world. In particular, access to reliable, timely, and granular digital analytics is essential for all consumer brands to truly understand their customer journeys and enable use cases such as onsite in- session personalization. Although Google Analytics (“GA”) has historically been the first) choice for analytics users, organizations are now choosing whether to adapt, continue or migrate from GA4 to another solution when looking for better, faster and more cost-effective solutions.
GigaOm’s product evaluation comes into play as it recognises Snowplow’s solution as a key replacement tool for GA4.
To provide a fair analysis for its comparative field test, GigaOm limited its analysis to retail organizations, specifically e-commerce companies that use a cloud data warehouse. The analyst firm compared running different analyses that an online retailer would perform using data from Google Analytics data versus Snowplow data.
Result
The study concluded that Snowplow is significantly more user-friendly, performs better, and is more cost-effective than GA4. Snowplow is able to support organizations of all sizes manage and optimize their data. The test conducted by GigaOm also showed that Snowplow offers significant benefits thanks to its e-commerce accelerator and dbt models.
These elements create BI and AI-ready first-party behavioral data, accelerate time to first insights for marketers, and minimize costly development cycles for data teams.
Access your copy
To read the full analysis of the findings, methodology, graphs and detailed results of the GigaOm study, access the full report here.
Author’s note: In parallel with this field test taking place, Snowplow recently announced Snowplow Digital Analytics, Powered by Snowflake. The application provides a modular, turnkey architecture of pre-built, Snowflake-native analytics components that make it even easier for companies to create meaningful analytics and optimize their products. Snowplow Digital Analytics provides out-of-the-box visualizations without compliance issues, limited customer views and lack of data ownership.