Comparing Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and Piwik Pro by Emotional State During Usage
Let’s talk about Feelings
Who came up with the nonsense that we should decide based on data, not emotions?! Not me! I am fully emotional in all my decisions, and the same holds true for this tool comparison: The only criterion is my emotional state while using GA4, Adobe Analytics, and Piwik Pro — three solutions that couldn’t be more distinct when it comes to feelings…
Tool comparisons are a controversial sport. In most cases, the victor is the one that is favored by the comparing party (especially when you task an agency or me with the comparison). Furthermore, there are few out there who know more than one solution really well. So when they rant off about tool X and you happen to know tool X well, you wonder why that shallow dude can even think he is qualified to talk about tool X... 😆
Fear not, dear readers, for I shall not subject you to any of that! Instead, here comes an unadulterated and entirely subjective tool comparison: A reflection of my emotional state when using Google Analytics 4, Adobe Analytics, and Piwik Pro — the three Analytics solutions I have worked with the most in the last year.
So let’s screw the data for once and talk about feelings, oh-oh-oh feelings:
Welcome to the “Axis of Emotion”!
As a fan of George W. Bush, you have heard of the “Axis of Evil”, and you know I am part of it! But did you know that there is also the Axis of Emotion? I didn’t either. It shows a character’s emotional state (y-axis) on a timeline (x-axis). While the emotions in the original range from “happy” on the top and “unhappy” on the bottom, my Axis of Emotion ranges from “excited” to “annoyed”. It shows a typical day of work in these tools.
Google Analytics 4: Sleeping Pill
Soon, the first Google Analytics property I ever set up will stop receiving data. When I created it in May 2007, it opened a new world for me. And I haven’t escaped from that world of Web Analytics since. While it is clear that GA3 has had its days, it will be sad to see it go. Especially since its successor Google Analytics 4 felt like a letdown from the start — from my first look at it in 2019 when it was still “Web + App Properties” to the more recent experiences with clients giving up on it.
Some less zealous clients stay, even some of the more zealous ones. I still can’t cultivate much love for it. Simo Ahava’s recent, desperate plea to Google Analytics 4 summarized everything that is wrong with this tool so well:
Google Analytics 4 has bugs, cardinality issues, thresholding problems, confusing delineation between client-side and vendor-side processing, a clumsy BigQuery export schema, misleading and gullible advocates, an opaque approach to privacy, and a huge identity problem. — Simo Ahava
While Simo thinks this is fixable, I have emotionally surrendered with GA4. I can’t even get annoyed anymore by all the auto-migration nonsense, the obtrusive countdowns and endless e-mails urging you to migrate properties that have long been migrated (makes me wonder: what if Google had put these migration marketing efforts into the actual tool…). When I see weird data or UI glitches, I just think: “Well, that’s probably just another one of those. Let’s see if we can google ourselves to the workaround for it.”
When I run into the 273th Looker Studio “API Quota Limit Exceeded” error, I just smile. GA4’s zeal to give technically unskilled marketers a way to circumvent tech teams by sliding in breaking (!) changes to tracking and privacy settings through the backdoor no longer fills me with tears. When I miss proper session handling, I eat some chocolate, and gone is the subtle numbness inside. So GA4, in terms of emotions, has simply become boring and uninspiring.
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While Google did improve the solution within the last year, and you can actually get the basics done now (with some workarounds), nothing excites me when I use it. The coolest thing about GA4 was Simo’s and Johan van de Werken’s BigQuery course at Team Simmer, but that was not due to the oft-mentioned, supposedly “superior data model” (with non-unique Event timestamps, inconsistent naming of even the standard events and other signs of superiority 😆), but because I finally got my 19-year old SQL updated to modern times.
Google Analytics 4 will live on, there are just too many people earning good money with it, including myself. And all criticism aside, GA4 is not that terrible. Especially in the free market, it is still a usable product. It is just no fun.
Adobe Analytics: Rollercoaster
Oh boy. Adobe Analytics… While Google Analytics 4 has become the equivalent of a sleeping pill for me, Adobe Analytics is the ultimate trigger for all kinds of extreme emotional states, good and bad.
Getting past the login requires patience, but once I’m inside of Analysis Workspace, it’s like stepping into an ad-hoc analysis paradise. I can put together a swift, concise and deep ad-hoc analysis with a few intuitive drag-and-drop power moves. The way in which it assists my analytical thought process still elicits “wow” moments of pure joy years after.
In other tools I either need many, many steps to do many things I can do with a couple of clicks in AA. Think about reproducing a simple thing like a segment-based Calculated Metric in GA or Piwik Pro, or stacking segments (I would have to create an additional segment for each combination I ever want to stack). Or I cannot do it at all in their interfaces and have to work with the raw data, throwing hours of SQL complexity into it that no untechnical user will be willing nor able to untangle. The customizability and scalability of Adobe Analytics (with some exceptions for which I built the Component Manager) are worthy of the word “enterprise”.
But as mentioned, Adobe is also a recurring cause for extreme emotional states at the other end. The main reason: Bugs! There are just too many of them lately, especially when new features are released.
I have learned not to make the mistake again to roll out or praise new features at clients before thoroughly testing them myself first (and then usually waiting for a few months until Adobe fixes the bugs). It can be so embarrassing to praise e.g. the new Company Folders and then to paddle back the next day due to countless complaints. But the biggest emotional strains are caused by the features which you cannot not use, because you are force-“upgraded” to them. The toughest example this year have been Classification Sets, a feature that cost me a quarter of my nerves and many support tickets. Adobe does react to input and eventually fixes things, but the way there can be rocky.
Speaking about support tickets… While the support quality has really gotten much better lately (I am serious!), adding insult to injury of the bugs is the Customer Support Portal, which simply does not deserve being part of a software called “Experience Cloud”. Or maybe it does, because the experience is indeed cloudy. While Adobe improved some things since a round of protest in Measure Slack last year, it is still not an experience that feels like “we want to make it easy for clients to tell us what’s wrong”. I waste time uploading screenshots as individual files, which means I cannot show them within the text where they should be. I thus need to write even more to explain which screenshot refers to what part of the text etc. This then leads to having to upload text as attachment because messages longer than 5000 characters are not allowed. Formatting (bold/italic/code formatting or at least monospace fonts)? Who needs formatting? Etc...
While Google has just as many bugs (and PiwikPro is just not complex enough to possibly be that buggy), the Adobe bugs somehow feel way more painful to me. Maybe I have an Adobe bias and thus suffer more when they screw up. Maybe it is also because with Google, I am just lost. Nobody will listen to me (or anybody else) if I want to tell Google that a certain bug is a true nuisance. So I have resigned and thus don’t suffer anymore. As mentioned, Adobe — and that’s a good thing — listens to clients. Sometimes at least. You actually have the feeling that you can influence certain things and decisions. That keeps me more involved emotionally.
Piwik Pro: The Less Ambitious, but Well-Tempered Clavier
Piwik Pro is more and more establishing itself as a professional, semi-advanced option in the Analytics tool landscape (see also my review of a GA client who switched to Piwik Pro). Functionally, it is nowhere near Adobe Analytics, but it does almost everything that GA3 did, and faster. So it is like Bach’s well-tempered Clavier — a lot of timeless pieces whose beauty lies in their simplicity, but it’s not an oratory or symphony.
Emotionally, Piwik Pro feels like a mix of Google and Adobe. While I never come close to analytical orgasms in Piwik Pro, there are plenty of decently good moments with it. There are also some negative ones, but I rarely if ever get livid like with Adobe or give up emotionally like with GA4.
While I am delighted by the speed at which Piwik Pro delivers unsampled reports, that state persists during the many occasions where I am positively surprised that it solidly does what I expect it to do. I can e.g. use Hit-based segments or create as many goal or calculated metrics as I please, and the report filters and drilldowns survive even more complex scenarios. When I realize that this is as far as I can go with the Piwik Pro interface for a certain endeavor, I don’t sob, I just accept it because I don’t expect it to be on that level — yet. The funny English where I can “create an explorer” causes no more than fine wrinkles. When an eight-column Custom Report is too wide even for a wide screen because the columns don’t wrap long text pieces if they don’t have spaces or dashes, and the left-right scrollbar is all the way at the bottom, I sigh, but then export the report to Google Sheets and keep working. When Piwik logs me out after 20 minutes of inaction, I just roll my eyes and say “come on!” and log in again (and I can, most of the time, keep working where I left off).
While there occasionally are moments where Piwik Pro does not behave as I would expect, these are usually not fundamental issues. I am talking about things like Piwik’s Russian roulette with their Regular Expressions, which are interpreted in a certain way in some fields, and in another way in others (and you don’t know how until you try). Or that you cannot change the scope of a Custom Dimension once you have created it (see the review of Custom Dimensions in Piwik Pro with Timo Dechau). Or that the Page Title is only available for Pageview Events, but not for Custom Events. Or that segments have certain unexpected limits. But none of that gets my blood rushing.
All in all, Piwik Pro keeps me in that well-tempered state, like 20 C° of room temperature, so it may just be the right tool for ageing, less ambitious folks like me. I see myself in a wheelchair already, ranting about the state of the world, with my nephews telling me to “calm down, grumpy uncle, go play with some Piwik Pro reports!”
That’s it. You just finished reading the first ever Analytics tool comparison based on feelings. Can you relate? What kind of emotions do you go through when using these tools? Let the world know in the comments! Thank you!
