Amplitude Digital Analytics Platform

A specific example of how I used Amplitude in my HCT project involved using Amplitude exports to derive behavioral features like session frequencies and feature adoption, which boosted customer retention predictions. I used Amplitude to extract user engagement data and enrich predictive analytics with behavioral insights.

Besides data extraction and behavioral analytics, my other use case is enabling product and customer analytics. I generated clickstream, CRMs, and transactional data sets into Amplitude to measure user journeys, funnel drop-offs, and retention trends, along with marketing attributes.

My company provided me with access to Amplitude through their purchase.

The cohorting feature specifically helps in my day-to-day work by allowing me to understand where the drop-off points are. Funnel analysis shows me what the customer journey is and what the retention rate looks like. When my task was to create a unified event analytics pipeline, I used Amplitude for real customer behavior insights, which made it easier for me to grasp the basic idea about the customers and the data. The dashboard shows real-time funnel and retention curves and marketing insights such as MTA, which improves campaign targeting and raises personalization accuracy.

Amplitude has positively impacted my organization by providing better behavior level analytics individually, which other BI tools cannot do natively. It has helped the product teams or my team to make faster decisions without relying on engineering for every question.

Since I can see everything in Amplitude dashboards, it helped the product teams to make quicker decisions to understand the drop-off points. For example, if someone added something to the cart and did not purchase it, I can understand the retention of that customer and that product, making it much easier to make decisions without relying on other engineering teams for data and approvals. For ad-hoc analysis, it is much better.

I give it a nine because it is close to a perfect ten for me, but it is only useful in one layer of the project, not the other, which the tool is supposed to do. In general, it is very impactful in my project.

I really appreciate using Amplitude; it is a nice addition to my projects, and it helps me make faster decisions. I give this product a rating of nine out of ten.

A specific example of a dashboard we built with Amplitude is a click-level report that I created recently when I was with TurboTax. We made it to study the clicks on every page. Essentially, what we visualized was a Sankey chart of how people are moving through pages. Since we changed the entire product stack, it was important for us to verify where the drop-offs were. Eventually, we moved the idea of a Sankey chart to a drop-off chart where we studied the bounce rate for each page, and we had a bar graph showing the number of people on one page and throughout their journey, where people dropped off. That drop-off report was a big project, and I think that helped the team recognize what the bottlenecks were and what the problem areas were in the product.

The reaction from our team and stakeholders to the findings from the drop-off report was that it had already been discussed with the major stakeholder product managers, so it was a requirement we mutually discussed and came to. Since Amplitude has incredibly easy functionality for accessing the past year of data, it became a tool that even the PMs could play around with, allowing us to leave them to self-serve. That acted as a big positive for us in the analytics team because the more our stakeholders use self-serve reports, the less work it is on our shoulders. That was especially great from the PMs because we could reconcile our Amplitude data with other data sources, such as the Databricks  data lake, in a short span of time. Changes were made right from UX level changes on the pages to broader decisions on whether we need to clamp down on the entire tax filing experience.

What stands out about Amplitude's data visualization compared to other tools I have used is the easy integration with clickstream data. It was seamless for that data to be loaded into Amplitude, with a good volume that easily loads onto Amplitude without having to create intermediate tables, which was the case with Tableau. Everything on top of that is easy usage and functionality because we used to do it on Chrome without needing a desktop server to create data visualizations. This entire package is really robust.

Collaboration was a significant part. What improves collaboration is the self-serve functionality, which was a big deal for PMs to have access to just that data and also the base layer of how that data is structured, which connects to clicks that every report refers to. Business stakeholders can pull different cuts and slices without relying on analytics, which is usually quite loaded with tasks. That was the best thing, as collaboration allowed business stakeholders to attempt to go through the reports and create their own reports, which was beneficial.

I notice faster decision-making for sure, as business stakeholders could themselves get their own reports.

Amplitude's security and access controls are completely in-house, and organization-wide accesses were provided right when we onboarded onto our analytics roles, so that was never a problem. Access controls were also straightforward, and we did not have any issues there.

Managing data privacy and compliance requirements with Amplitude was easy. As far as I remember, the challenges with data privacy and compliance requirements did not raise any issues flagged at any point by the data engineers or the Amplitude admin. We could seamlessly use the data from an analyst perspective.

We did not use the mobile app, so I cannot comment more about it.

I would describe Amplitude's reporting and analytics capabilities compared to other tools I have used as really good. I would say it is on par or just shy of Tableau, which, for me, is the best tool in the market, so it is right up there.

I went through the training resources and documentation when I joined in 2019, and as far as I remember, they were useful. The training may have included videos or articles, but I do not fully recall. The prompts on the website and the nudges were really helpful.

My advice for others looking into using Amplitude is that if it is clickstream data, Amplitude is likely the best option. Having accessible data which can be easily customized and manipulated by even business stakeholders with less technical knowledge is one of the best things. I rate Amplitude an eight because the changes I mentioned, including longer data retention, easier integration with AWS  data sources, and a better focus on error logs, would make it a ten for me.