11 Comments

It would be interesting to see where Google Analytics / Google Tag Manager fit in this space. As a data analyst in the mobile apps/games space I am familiar with product analytics tools and data warehouses as they share a common event-driven architecture.

The problem is that Google Analytics / Google Tag Manager seem weird to me. I really don't understand how their architecture work and it's quite frustrating, as I feel like these are tools with similar purposes, yet they feel so different.

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Historically Google Analytics has been positioned as "for marketers" and better for tracking performance based on source/medium/channel of traffic on a website (vs. individual users on a product). GA4 is a push to be more like the "free google version" of amplitude, mixpanel, etc. Google Tag Manager is the "free google version" of Segment

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Super useful article - Wish I had a guide like this when I was starting out!

One thing I'd note on instrumentation: Timestamps. Make sure that you're getting the right timestamps for your events, accounting for clock skew.

Also, take extra care when building a funnel using a combo of client and server side events. While client side generates events in real time (as the user performs the corresponding actions), server side actions may take longer to complete (esp if they're batched together at one point). This may mess up the order of events in the sequence of steps that is your funnel.

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Great article! There's definetely not enough content around product analytics.

As the founder of a product analytics tool built on top of Segment (https://june.so/) I think it would be relevant to share about our approach to Product analytics.

June allows people to connect their Segment account and automatically generate relevant metrics and reports for Acquisition, Retention, Active usage and Power users

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Very excited to learn about PostHog! Great post

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Awesome article! Thanks once again Justin. Definitely going to check out PostHog 💪🏻

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Pendo!

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This is a great article! How come the article is duplicated halfway through?

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Not sure what you mean? Looks normal on my end

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Hmm weird might be a Substack bug in that case. The article appears twice for me for some reason (but only this article, not your other ones). Screenshot: (it's kind of big) https://r2.phage.directory/product-screenshot.jpg

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very weird

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