Why Creatify switched from Google Analytics to PostHog
Mar 19, 2024
Creatify is a powerful AI video editor that simplifies the process of quickly creating short video ads for any platform. Its capability to rapidly generate marketing videos lets users test strategies and adopt the data-driven approach that Creatify champions.
“We officially launched Creatify in early 2024 but we’d been in development mode for a while before that,” said founding CTO Xin Zhou, who met his Creatify co-founders while working at Meta. “We used that time to build the product and test ideas. PostHog was key to that — we’d been using it for about three months before we even launched.”
Before switching to PostHog, Creatify had tried using other platforms, such as Google Analytics and Amplitude. They found the tools unsuitable for their needs.
“We started asking other founders what they recommended and they all said PostHog is better,” said Xin. “We tried it and found it pretty simple to set up. Then we found out that PostHog also supports A/B testing. And feature flags. And web analytics.”
Using PostHog for web analytics
When the PostHog web analytics beta launched in November 2023, Creatify was among the first organizations to opt-in and start testing it out. As confidence grew, they migrated away from Google Analytics entirely.
“Monitoring our web analytics is definitely much easier with PostHog,” said Xin. “I'm not an expert on Google Analytics and it can take me a long time to figure some things out with it. PostHog is very intuitive, though. I can just immediately find the data I need, whereas in GA4 I don’t even know where to start.”
“I don't think I could ever go back to GA4 now that we've adopted PostHog. Web analytics gives us all the metrics we really care about. It is so much easier to use than GA4.”
The team watched with anticipation over the following months as the beta grew and new features released, often sharing feedback to ensure the dashboard included the metrics they cared about most. When this wasn’t possible they simply created their own product analytics dashboards to break down the data in new ways.
“I don’t think I could ever go back to GA4 now that we’ve adopted PostHog,” said Xin. “Web analytics gives us all the metrics we really care about, and we’ve set up dashboards for breaking down specific segments when we need to. It’s great that we have all the metrics we care about so readily available.”
The advantages of an all-in-one data stack
“We use basically every feature in PostHog, including surveys and A/B testing,” said Xin. “Previously I worked at Meta and Airbnb, where we ran a lot of A/B experiments and would be very data-led. At Creatify, these tests are still very important to us.”
As an AI startup, Creatify faces unique challenges in terms of the data the team needs to monitor. There are some metrics, such as latency and model performance, which Xin wasn’t able to monitor with Google Analytics or Amplitude — but which PostHog is starting to support.
Even without these AI-specific tools, the ability to combine A/B testing, surveys, product and web analytics, and feature flags into a single platform has been transformative for Xin’s team.
“We’ve deployed PostHog both within our product and our marketing site,” said Xin. “We can run tests on our site, deploy flags within our product, and gather feedback with surveys and track it all in PostHog.”
“Basically, PostHog has everything we need. We love it for that.”