Amplitude have announced $30 million of Series C funding, and I wanted to look at what they are doing well, in an increasingly competitive market.
Hopefully if you’re reading this you’ve already heard of Amplitude. For those of you that haven’t, it is a relatively new mobile and web analytics tool.
On first hearing about Amplitude I was very intrigued. I was desperate to find out what they were doing so differently to their well established rivals, that made them think they could compete. What could they possibly have that the others don’t? In hindsight, the same question could have been asked of other tech companies like Airbnb and Slack (holiday lettings and instant chat? Yeah, because thats never been done before!).
At a time when ‘growth’ is the buzz word of the tech start up scene, Amplitude have cleverly positioned their solution as a growth tool and moved away from simply being a marketing /reporting tool, which is where many of their competitors come from.
With regards to the use of analytics, companies tend to fall into one of two buckets:
Vanity Analytics
- Reporting vanity metrics (sessions, page views, avg. time on site) back to the business, with minimal actionable insights and superficially measuring growth
- Creating loads of dashboards that no one looks at
Growth Analytics
- Proactively analysing and identifying problems and opportunities
- Understanding user behaviour — how do users fall in love with the app/site, and what keeps them coming back again and again?
I’ve seen vanity analytics alot and its a difficult trend to break. What do you do when you have an exec asking you “how many page views has page x had?”.
There is no doubt that vanity analytics is a cultural issue for alot of organisations, but it does feel like many analytics tools on the market haven’t helped this mindset. Perhaps it’s due to legacy features that has left some vendors behind, or maybe it’s the analytics vendors actually giving their customers what they want. Either way, Amplitude have taken the decision to do things differently.
Amplitude is a reporting tool secondary to being a product insights tool. It gives product teams easy access to insightful, actionable data, without the need to run any complex sql queries. The straight forward event tracking gives lots of flexibility for manipulating the data, with plenty of helpful out of the box charts. The most impressive feature is a predictive tool called ‘Compass’, which analyses behaviours that are closely correlated with retention.
Amplitude are in the privileged position of having been able to build their product from scratch and make it relevant for the twenty-tens, without any noisy legacy features. For example a lot of their competitors have been around for a comparatively long time, and they were designed for web. Along came mobile and they adapted their tech for native apps, with what appears to be little innovation — with the same tracking methods and reports as web.
Amplitude is a mobile first tool by focusing on helping to answer the increasingly difficult question of ‘how the hell do I retain my native app users?’.
It is clear that Amplitude have created a product that it’s customers have been (knowingly or unknowingly) crying out for (helped by the story behind the birth of the company), and they have reached this point in their journey by listening intently to their users. They have literally put into practice the culture they are trying to promote to their prospects and existing customers, of making smarter data led product development decisions.
Amplitude certainly know their industry and audience. This is also demonstrated by their content marketing — it is some of the best content I’ve seen. As an example, one of my early reads of their blog was Behavioral Cohorts: find your most engaged users. It’s heavily focused on the capabilities of their product, but it did the job of getting me thinking about the holes in our existing tool.
I also encourage you to read their Product Analytics Playbook. This is a masterclass in content marketing. It’s not just hot air, it gives a framework for developing a retention strategy with data. It demonstrates how in-tune they are with their market.
A little while ago I met their Co-founder and CEO, Spencer Skates. In the meeting he presented some key elements from the playbook and demonstrated how his team is applying them to their own retention strategy. I enjoyed Spencer’s transparency, and appreciated his understanding of what companies like mine are looking for.
Amplitude is an extremely exciting company. Of course the product is not perfect, but their appetite for customer feedback, and pace of development can only benefit their product iteration, and in-turn their customers. I personally want a partner that lets us lead them, and not the other way round. My hope is that as they grow in size, and eventually move away from ‘start-up’ status, they can maintain their way of working.
If you are looking to choose a new web analytics tool, and Amplitude are on your hit list, please feel free to contact me for some impartial feedback.
(My company has migrated to Amplitude. Amplitude have had no involvement in the writing of this post).
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Growth Lead at Dailymotion, Richard has a passion for improving user experience and ROI through data and experimentation.
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