Amplitude vs Google Analytics 4

What the numbers say

Both columns are counted in events, and the word carries a different job on each side. In a Google property an event is what the tag sends about a visit to a page, with enhanced measurement adding scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, file downloads and form interactions once it is switched on. In Amplitude an event is a step in a person’s use of a product, captured by the browser SDK or sent by your code; Identify and Group Identify calls stay outside the monthly count, and history imported from another tool lands inside it, in the month it arrives.

That difference explains most of the rows that do not match. Google publishes its own guides for shop platforms and site builders; Amplitude documents a single script, an npm package, a tag manager template and a WordPress plugin, and leaves the builders unlisted. Sharing runs the other way: Amplitude sends dashboards on a schedule by email or to Slack channels and publishes charts and dashboards through public links or embed codes, while the Google property offers neither.

The storage row is the one place where the choice belongs to the customer. Amplitude runs an EU data storage region that an organization picks at signup, after which the browser SDK has to send with its server zone set to EU. Google collects data from EU, Swiss and UK devices through servers in those regions and drops those IP addresses before logging, but no setting picks where the processed data sits. Retention follows the plan on one side and the property on the other: a year of data on Amplitude’s free plan and two years on Plus, against 2 or 14 months of event-level data in a standard Google property, a setting that reaches explorations and funnel reports and leaves standard reports alone.

Who picks which

Google Analytics 4 answers questions about a site and the money spent bringing people to it. The links do the work: Google Ads, Search Console for organic queries and landing pages, BigQuery for raw events. Setup is a property, a data stream and a tag, and WordPress has Google’s own Site Kit plugin.

Amplitude answers questions about what identified people do after they arrive. Browser SDK 2 begins capturing page views, sessions, form starts and submissions, file downloads and campaign attribution as soon as it initializes; element clicks and frustration clicks wait for a setting. Its marketing analytics section reports traffic by channel and campaign and page engagement with bounce, entry and exit rates, and the EU region is offered on every plan. There is no self-hosted edition, which the open source and self-hosted list puts in context, and identity sits in cookies by default, next to the setting that turns browser storage off.

Questions and answers

Can I keep my Google Analytics history in Amplitude?

Yes, through BigQuery rather than the reporting interface. You link the property to BigQuery, create a storage bucket and a service account, then add Google Analytics 4 as a source in Amplitude. Daily export tables arrive with a 72-hour delay and streaming tables with 24 hours, and a backlog is worked through ten tables a day.

Can I run both at the same time?

Yes, and Amplitude documents a route for it. Its Google Analytics event forwarder is a plugin for the browser SDK: placed before the Google tag, it listens for the events sent to the Google property and sends a matching event to Amplitude, so one instrumentation fills both dashboards during an overlap period.

Which of them reports organic search queries?

Only the Google property, through the Search Console link, which adds a report of organic queries and one of landing pages. Amplitude reports acquisition from the campaign parameters and the referrer its SDK captures, so the channel is there and the search term is not.