How Amplitude Won Me Over

You may know me now as an Amplitude enthusiast, but that wasn't always the case. When I first started using it years ago, I struggled navigating another “black box” tool and transforming its data. Once I revisited the tool with a fresh set of web events, and Amplitude released some significant product improvements, it quickly became one of my favorite data tools.

What is Amplitude

Amplitude is a data platform that helps companies see and engage with customers on their websites. By instrumenting web events that are collected as a customer engages with the store or service, the platform provides the structure you need to learn about your customers and engage with them at the right time. 

3 New Amplitude Features that improved my experience:   

Observability

Amplitude now provides a “User Look-up” view, which is a live stream of events coming into the platform, and a bonus (!) Chrome plug-in that displays live events as you move around your site. With these views, I can easily move around our internal test site and validate which actions trigger a web event. Even better, the Chrome plug-in lets me see the events without even moving off the screen I’m on.  

Data Governance 

When the new Amplitude Data tab feature rolled out, I immediately turned on the option to block all new events. It provides a dictionary of all your web events and controls to hide or block events, and helped me enforce a new event review process across the company. I also quickly cleared out over 500 events that were no longer used. This tool continues to help me untangle and label our web event information, which makes it easier for our end users to find and leverage insights from Amplitude. 

Syncing

Amplitude’s new ability to easily sync customer lists to marketing tools like Hubspot or Braze significantly increased the actionability of our data. Now, you can action data by selecting cohorts of customers that you want to send custom messages or offers too. For example, if you need to send an email of users who viewed your products but didn’t check out, you can easily do that with a click of a button.

I’ve been exploring the Recommendations and Predictions features, which I just got access to as well, so stay tuned for my thoughts there.

Are you an Amplitude user — new or long-time? Tell me more about your experience, and learnings, below.