Snowplow vs. Google Analytics
Find out why thousands of data-first organizations use Snowplow to deliver sophisticated data applications using behavioral data created for purpose.
Trusted by the world’s leading data-led organizations
What’s the difference
between Snowplow and
Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a great tool for companies starting their data journey and understanding top-level performance metrics across your site.
But for data teams with ambitions to build scalable and sophisticated data applications they need to go beyond the Google Analytics UI and export data to their warehouse or lake to build applications such as churn prediction, recommendation engines in real-time, or custom attribution modeling.
Snowplow differs from Google Analytics by allowing you to create granular, rich behavioral data bespoke for the data application you want to build in your own cloud. Snowplow delivers incrementally modeled BI and AI-ready in real-time to your warehouse or lake to integrate with tools across the Modern Data Stack from visualization tools to reverse ETL’s to help build sophisticated data applications as opposed to standardized reporting.
Deliver BI-ready data in real-time to your warehouse or lake
When exporting data from Google Analytics to BigQuery, teams spend more time preparing the data than discovering insights. Avoid nested table structures, SaaS logic, and stateful joins, and save your lines of SQL for unlocking insight using Snowplow’s BI-ready data from your warehouse or lake.
Snowplow delivers granular, rich behavioral data to your data warehouse or lake in real-time.
Data is incrementally modeled through our customizable web and mobile DBT models, giving you data ready to use in a BI tool of your choice.
Snowplow combines behavioral data with in-stream transactional and demographic enrichments, removing the need for maintaining joins in the warehouse.
Take complete control of your data
Recently, both the Austrian and French Data Protection Authorities (DSB and CNIL) deemed that Google Analytics does not comply with GDPR. Regardless of where you operate, you can take control of data with private deployment in your own cloud.
Snowplow is deployed privately in your cloud, giving you complete ownership over your data and choice of storage location.
Your data, which is delivered directly to your warehouse or lake, is covered by our SLA guarantees.
Our suite of out-of-the-box privacy controls, including PII pseudonymization, record a basis for capture with each event, giving you complete control over your customer’s right to privacy while still understanding their behavior.
Gain a complete picture of your customers
With the growing impact of third-party solutions like Google Analytics due to browser cookie changes such as ITP/ETP, user tracking can be restricted to as little as 24 hours. This limited view of customer behavior can significantly affect business decision-making.
With Snowplow, you can define your own custom events and entity schemas, and capture an unlimited number of properties with every event.
With Snowplow’s first-party tracking and out-the-box identity resolution and configurable IDs you can track all users for more than two years for analytics and attribution.
For over a decade, Snowplow has helped craft and optimize analytics strategies using behavioral data. You are supported from initial set-up with our dedicated Solutions Architects to ongoing optimization with our customer success specialists.
