Amplitude Review: How to Build Customer-First Products

Management at Babble faced a challenge. The company’s small analytics group couldn’t handle the workload of ad-hoc requests it received from content teams.

That’s when the company turned to Amplitude in hopes of getting more meaningful insights to take its successful language-learning program to the next level.

“We needed our teams to be able to answer their own questions, without a lot of technical knowledge,” said Data Insight Analyst Jakob Willisch. “A lot of our important stakeholders are language experts and content creators, and we can’t expect them to also have SQL skills.”

But Babble also focused on building data literacy among its team members. To that end, the company began coaching teams on how to make data-driven decisions. That program included:

• Mandatory attendance at an Amplitude workshop
• Weekly meetings where data analysts could answer questions about Amplitude
• A Slack channel where people could ask questions

That’s how it started. But how’s it going?

I’ll let Willisch answer that question: “Without Amplitude, the Product Performance team wouldn’t be able to do what it’s doing. Amplitude is a crucial tool for the teams that are building and structuring our curriculum to be able to continually put out better content much more quickly.”

And that’s what Amplitude can do for your brand as well.

Understand Your Users

In this Amplitude review, I’ll cover how the tool helps you understand the people who use your products.

That’s important because then you can create new products that will likely resonate with your target market.

Amplitude software helps you build customer-first products by giving you in-depth insights into behavior data.

And it’s not just helpful for your product teams. It can benefit your engineering and marketing teams as well.

Additionally, the tool shows you where customers convert as well as where they drop out of the sales cycle. Use that info to optimize your marketing strategy to get maximum results.

Amplitude also helps you track key performance indicators (KPIs) based on metrics specific to your business. In other words, the tool doesn’t take a “one size fits all” approach to analytics and reporting.

Even better, Amplitude enables you to create data-driven personas.

If you’re not familiar with personas, they’re fictitious representations of people in your target market. They’re usually identified by characteristics such as demographics and interests.

Once you’ve identified several personas interested in your brand, you can fine-tune your outreach efforts with messaging that’s likely to resonate.

Amplitude also offers something called “behavioral cohorting.” It’s a feature that groups users defined by their actions over a specific time period.

You can target your marketing efforts to those specific groups with ad copy that’s likely to transform them into customers.

And here’s a fun feature I’m happy to share in this Amplitude review: the tool also spots data anomalies and brings them to your attention.

Hey, bugs happen. And when something goes wrong, you want to know about it.

But with other tools, you might not uncover those bugs. That’s why Amplitude’s data-monitoring feature is so valuable. It saves you the time you’d have to invest in running quality checks on your insights.

Amplitude also enables you to know who uses what and how often those folks use it. You can monitor product interaction by new, current, resurrected, or dormant users.

And best of all, the tool won’t only show you what’s happening, but it will explain why it’s happening. Use that info to double-down on successful strategies and eliminate failing ones.

“Amplitude allows us to move faster, experiment quicker, and understand our users better to take more immediate action to improve our customer experience,” says Josh Snow, Vice President of Product at NBCUniversal.

Improve Product Experience

In this part of the Amplitude review, I’ll explain how the tool improves the product experience.

According to the company website: “With product intelligence, your teams will improve product experiences faster, measure impact, and visualize end-to-end user journeys.”

First, the Amplitude software helps you build products faster. That’s because the tool handles all the number-crunching and analytics behind the scenes for you so your teams won’t get bogged down with data science.

Next, Amplitude measures impact. It gives you immediate insight into how new product releases and marketing campaigns impact user experience.

Also, the tool helps you make smarter decisions. You can create a hypothesis and test it based on real-time customer data.

Amplitude also shows you the “before and after.” You can see how first-time engagement with a single feature impacts customer behavior.

And, of course, the tool lets you do split-testing. That will give you the opportunity to put a hypothesis on trial and make the decision that works best for your target audience.

Amplitude also shares trend highlights. Use that info to identify whether a change is meaningful, seasonal, or just a bump on the road.

“Amplitude enables us to come up with business cases quickly in order to change things or add new features,” says Natalie Efstathiou of MindBody. “Our redesigns increased conversion by 25%.”

Identify Lifetime Value

In this part of the Amplitude review, I’ll go over how the product helps you build long-term customer loyalty.

For starters, Amplitude enables you to optimize conversions. Use the tool to increase onboarding, free trials, and purchases.

It also gives you insights into growth. According to the company website, Amplitude will “identify actions, features, and products that correlate with higher retention and repeat purchases.”

And you can use the tool to personalize experiences. That’s because Amplitude crunches first-party behavior data to fuel targeted, ROI-boosting campaigns.

Further, Amplitude shows you conversion drivers. Grab that data to identify behaviors that lead to purchases. Then, optimize your sales funnels accordingly.

Perhaps even better: the tool will show you the behaviors that lead to drop-offs. Then you can identify the issues that prevent your company from reaching its potential.

Amplitude also shows you retention info. That data explains why customers hang around and identifies behaviors that lead to customer loyalty.

And by the way: you get those insights right out of the box. No need to do any fancy configuring.

The tool will even show you how to turn new customers into brand evangelists. Why not take advantage of that feature and let other people do your marketing for you?

Finally, Amplitude will highlight behaviors that lead to repeat purchases. It’s the kind of info that can help you literally double your revenue.

Pricing

In this part of the Amplitude review, I’ll go over its pricing structure.

Here’s good news: you can get started with Amplitude for free. You’ll gain access to core analytics, custom dashboards, unlimited data retention, APIs, and custom datasets without spending one nickel.

However, if you want access to behavioral and predictive reports, monitoring, automation, advanced data governance, and a few other goodies, you’ll need to fork over some cash.

How much? Well, that depends on your needs. But the website is mum on the pricing.

That means it’s going to cost a lot of money.

So do yourself a favor: get started with the free product and when your business becomes more successful, look at one of the fee-for-service options.

Wrapping It Up

There it is. My review of Amplitude.

If you’re in need of data-driven product development, there’s little doubt that it’s one of the best tools on the market. You should at least take a look at the free option.

Then, if you’re convinced that the insights you get from Amplitude will generate a positive return, go ahead and spring for it.