GA4 is replacing universal analytics in July 2023 and there are a few limitations of GA4 that are concerning for webmasters. Here in this article, we will discuss Mixpanel, a third-party tool that can be the best alternative to GA4 and help webmasters analyze and measure data efficiently.
In this data-driven market, you need a tool to help you analyze websites (data) eaquicklynd effectively. The most popular tool of all is Google Analytics.
But, nowadays, there is a conflict between Google Analytics (GA4) a,nd Mixpanel as Google Analytics updates to4. Therefore, businesses and website owners are looking for alternatives like Mixpanel.
Want to know why?
In this article, you’ve got to understand which tool can be the best tool for your website analytics. But let’s first understand the importance of analyzing website data.
Why is it Essential to Analyze Website Data?
Running or optimizing your website without analyzing it is like shooting arrows in the dark. Website analytics is as important as setting up a website for your business. You need to know several things, like traffic, audience behavior, engagement, demographics, etc., before setting a goal for your website. Therefore, you need analytics for your website.
User Insight: You need to know your audience and their behavior on your website. It helps you create content so your audience can understand and find the information they want.
Analytics helps you find and use demographics like their interests, gender, location, and interest topics to create content around them and make your website user-friendly.
Discover what works best for you: the analytics tool tells you which content is performing well, how many visitors you have, your bounce rate, audience retention time, and so on. You can optimize your content, CTA, and tags based on that. Furthermore, you can create content on the topic that your audience likes.
It helps you build SEO strategies. A lot of organic traffic is what you need to grow your website. SEO is the most important part of your content strategy. With the help of analytics SEO tools, you can thoroughly understand how customers arrive at your pages. Examining your most converting pages and making them even more optimized is one technique to enhance SEO.
Data segmentation and visualization made easy: As mentioned in the preceding pointers, analytics simplified data segmentation and visualization with a few clicks, giving you all the information on your screen.
What is Google Analytics (GA4)?
Google Analytics is the most liked website analytics tool which organizes and segments website data. It has been running since 2005, and because it is a free tool, most businesses use it for website analytics.
However, Google recently updated Google Analytics into GA4, which has brought many changes that are not business-friendly, which is why businesses are looking for other options.
Now, let’s check what is different in GA4.
To begin with, GA4 will be the sole Google Analytics means; universal analytics will be phased out by July 2023. Furthermore, GA4 seems more technical, which means you need a proper technical team to understand the data analytics in GA4.
As opposed to Universal Analytics, GA4 only allows you to filter out internal traffic, not create a custom view.
Limitations of GA4
You cannot export data from universal analytics to GA4: When universal analytics stops working in July 2023, you will need to set up GA4 concurrently with Universal Analytics so that you can access GA4 after universal analytics stops working.
Limitations on Data Collection: GA4 has a limit of 25 custom parameters for each custom event. Although it appears like a lot, it might not be sufficient for larger websites. By upgrading to Google Analytics 360, additional limits are available, but the price is high.
Inadequate Data Anonymization: With data anonymization, you can get the most basic metrics about visitors (visits, clicks, and page views) but not personally identifying information (PII) like geolocation, tracking ID assignments, or other cookie-based information.
It decreased your capacity for remarketing, recognizing recurring guests, and using sophisticated conversion attribution.
No native optimization features for conversion: Users of Google Analytics need to use third-party solutions to obtain more in-depth information, such as how visitors interact with your website or call-to-action.
Invalid Annotations: When you need to give other team members additional context, annotations are helpful. For instance, draw attention to unusual traffic spikes or a marketing funnel gap. Although it was present in Universal Analytics, this feature is no longer present in Google Analytics 4.
No real-time metrics: Google Analytics typically processes data with a 24-48 hour lag. Data refreshes are only performed once daily for accounts with more than 200,000 daily sessions.
As a result, you won’t see the most recent data on key indicators. It might be frustrating during one-day promotional ads when real-time information can make all the difference!
Mixpanel is the best alternative to GA4 to overcome Google Analytics 4 shortcomings. Let’s understand Mixpanel.
What is Mixpanel?
Mixpanel is a web and mobile analytics tool that helps you collect, store, and analyze user-generated data to habetter understandow people behave on your site or in your app.
You can consider this tool if you are looking for a Google Analytics alternative.
You will have to add a line of code from Mixpanel to your website. Each event you want to track has a unique code. After adding the code, you can use Mixpanel’s dashboard to set up funnels to track interaction metrics on your website.
Mixpanel Highlights
Mixpanel provides top-notch features and integrations that make it the best website and app analytics tool. We have listed some of them below.
- You can compare time period insight, which gives you an understanding of how trends are changing over time.
- A personalized dashboard is another Mixpanel highlight; you can customize your dashboard as per your need and requirement.
- It organizes complex data in a simple format. Mixpanel provides display names, event category tags, and definitions which makes it easier to understand by anyone.
- It allows you to calculate metrics in just a few clicks. You will find some formulas in Insights that make it easier for you to calculate the KPIs and produce detailed reports.
- Mixpanel funnel makes it easier and faster to fetch user journeys, no matter how long and short the user’s journey. On Top of that, features like flow charts, the capacity to add an endless number of steps, filter by group, and exclude data make Mixpanel a powerful analytics tool.
- Mixpanel does a good job when it comes to finding diversions. Mixpanel automatically identifies any significant user segments accountable for the shift; you may spend less time determining the source of each diversion.
- Global filters in Dashboards let you fetch data as per your preference; for example, it can be last month’s data or new users’ data.
Benefits of Mixpanel
The key benefits of Mixpanel are its accurate and consistent customer behavior analytics for web and mobile applications.
You’ll have a clear understanding of how users interact with your website and product, as well as comprehensive knowledge of the state of each account.
#1. Easy to Use Interface
If we can’t extract useful information from the data, then the data is useless. Extracting useful information from the data is a result of good data representation.
The Mixpanel platform has an easy-to-use interface that enables you to dig in deeper and discover users’ responses on your website or app. It gives a better understanding of how users interact with your app and provides recommendations for improving your product.
Good suggestions will lead you to develop a good product, and a good product will lead to more conversions which will help your business grow!
#2. Funnel reporting
When users interact with your mobile app, the Funnel report shows where they dropped out of a planned conversion path or abandoned a marketing campaign.
The Funnel report can also be used to compare how various segment actions differ. You may learn where users are being turned away from your app, what path they typically take, and when they leave by gaining visibility into their decisions at each stage.
For two reasons, Mixpanel’s funnel analysis is effective:
- Much more detail is included.
- It is simpler to set up.
Even if your funnel hasn’t been implemented, you can still see user interaction from the previous 90 days in Mixpanel.
#3. Specific Data Collection
Systematic data gathering enables you to acquire firsthand knowledge and unique insights into your study challenge, whether conducting research for business, governmental, or academic purposes.
There are countless possibilities available with the data that the tool delivers. The platform can compile billions of insights and events that users can use to improve their products in response to the actions of their customers.
#4. Simple Analytics
Analytics can play a key role in decision-making for your business. Accessing data and converting it into useful information is a process that can differentiate a successful organization.
To make data analytics accessible to you, Mixpanel presents them in a thorough yet simple way. You can easily measure action with the information presented to you, whether it is through an iOS, Android, or web-based app.
#5. Targeted Data Collection
Mixpanel is more robust than other analytics service platforms. The tool’s data delivery gives an infinite number of options. The platform can gather billions of insights and events that you, as a user, can utilize to improve their goods in response to client behavior.
Mixpanels vs. GA4
| Features | Mixpanel | Google Analytics (GA4) |
| User interface | This program offers genuine data enrichment. The data model makes it possible to link recent business data with historical events. | The User Interface of GA4 is slightly complicated for beginners and SMBs. |
| Real-time analysis | Real-time analysis with 99% of the data accessible in a matter of seconds | There is no real-time metric in GA4 |
| Funnel visualization | Mixpanel’s funnels track user journeys most easily. These could be the path user follows the web pages they visit, or any other pertinent information. | While funnel visualization is a feature of Google Analytics, it cannot provide you with the level of information you need to make data-driven decisions. |
| Conservation of Data | Mixpanel provides access to previous data going back a maximum of five years in terms of data storage and retrieval. Furthermore, you can import previous user data to replace the expired data. | GA4 has a 14-month historical data retention period. However, because it does not support historical data import, GA4’s access to the storage, retrieval, and analysis of prior user activities is highly constrained. |
| Data Accuracy | Mixpanel analyses all user’s data, as sample data can be error-prone. | On the basis of sampled data, GA4 provides tailored reports. |
Pricing Structure
Pricing of Google Analytics
Google Analytics is fantastic because it is free! Additionally, there are no pricey add-ons or integrations.
Google Analytics 360 is its advanced version and includes all of the fundamentals. If you work with a lot of data, the enterprise edition has many more features, requests, integrations, and capabilities. However, most businesses will discover that Google Analytics’ basic version satisfies their needs.
Pricing of Mixpanel
Both programs are free. The first 1,000 monitored users on the MixPanel “Starter” plan are free per month. There are also features like cohorts and analytics flows. With a data history of up to 90 days, you can add an unlimited number of team members.
The MixPanel “Growth” option starts at $25 a month. It includes a year’s worth of data and up to 25,000 monitored users per month. Additionally, the MixPanel “Enterprise” plan is charged separately for each customer and comes with group/B2B analytics, single sign-on, and configurable data history (based on how far back you need to go).
Alternatives of Mixpanel
Though Mixpanel is a great alternative to GA4, you can compare Mixpanel with a few more website analytics tools and choose the best one for your website (and apps).
Usefathom
Usefathom is a privacy-first website analytics tool that gives you a clear picture of users, no matter if they use ad-blockers. On top of that, they provide full data security.
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It is an affordable website and app analytics tool and lets you create Websites, personal domains, and email reports. You can manage your blog, weekend project, and company website from the same account.
Matomo
It is an open-source web analytics tool that supports 50 different languages. Matomo focuses highly on data ownership, privacy protection, and zero data sampling.
It offers both cloud and on-premise hosting alternatives. On-Premise is the free, open-source, and self-hosted PHP/MySQL software you can install on your server, giving you the most flexibility while the cloud eliminates the burden of installation.
With a full suite of features, including heatmaps, session recordings, objectives, form analytics, visitor profiles, e-commerce, and funnels, this premium web analytics and conversion optimization tool provides you with the most conclusive information.
Cloudflare
It is a cloud-based web performance analytics tool. The platform, created for enterprises of all kinds, offers solutions for websites, small to medium e-commerce firms, and companies needing enterprise-grade security and network performance.
Additionally, it provides various free tools and apps that you can add directly to your website without uploading or manually pasting files or scripts. Furthermore, Cloudflare provides everything you need in a website analytics tool.
Conclusion
Mixpanel vs. Google Analytics is a common debate among developers. There are many elements to consider when scanning for a tool to help you track your analytics, but the most important are the features and the price.
If you’re on a budget, Mixpanel is a clear choice. Even if you’re not on a budget, Mixpanel is still a good choice because of its ability to store more data than Google Analytics. It’s important to note that Mixpanel is a tool for marketers and product managers, not developers.
You may also explore some best tools for live website traffic tracking.
