Learning Amplitude

A walk-through an analytics software

I finally delved into the world of Cohort Based Courses, aka CBCs, in November 2021. The course was named Product Analytics 101, organized by The Product Folks. As a part of the sessions, there was a hands-on workshop on Amplitude, a software to study user behavior on a website. This article is a walk-through of everything that the demo covered.

The background and the dataset

Amplitunes is a music streaming app like Spotify. The software Amplitude tracks the user as they surf the website of Amplitunes. This tracking process is based on events. When you visit a website, the tracker marks it as “Session Started”. It follows you through the pages that you visit and the actions that you perform. These actions are called user events. In this case, they may be of the form “Played a song”, “Searched for a song”, etc. based on what the product is about. The accumulated data of multiple users are then studied to understand the user behavior and factors that drive decisions.

The aim of the demo is to understand how to get more users to purchase a song or video on the website.

Funnel Analysis

A funnel is a series of steps a user takes as part of the experience of using your product.

The job at hand is to identify what path a user may take on the website of Amplitunes. A probable user path that leads to purchase can be the following:

Start Session → Search Song or Video → Play Song or Video → Add Content to Cart → Purchase Song or Video

And this is what the funnel chart for the given path looks like.

• A considerable ~83% of the users search for a song or video after visiting the website.
• Almost all of them play the song or video.
• A very significant drop of ~45% is observed in the next step. Half of the users who play a song or video do not add it to their carts, and thereby it can be assumed that they do not make a purchase. This needs to be studied in detail to understand what factors may be putting the users off.
• A favorable observation follows. 97% of the users who add a song or video to the cart purchase it.

So, if the number of people adding songs to their cart can be improved, it can the expected that the number of purchases will increase.

Conversion Drivers

Let us now study the factors that may be influencing the users who play a song or video, leading them to not add the content to the cart. Amplitude offers a functionality called conversion drivers to do just that.

The function gives a list of events that may be performed between the two steps in question (Play Song or Video → Add Content to Cart) and whether it leads to a purchase, in terms of the correlation. In the image attached above, you can observe that the correlation score of the event “Download Song or Video” is 0.97. It simply means that after playing a song, users often tend to download it before adding it to their carts. And this action also often leads to a purchase, aka conversion.

There is not a lot of background information available about the product Amplitunes. What’s the process for a purchase? Can a user download a song and listen to it without having to buy it? Is the Download functionality limited to a few days? In the lack of this information, it can be assumed that Amplitunes allows the users to download a song or video for a set duration before they need to purchase it. This assumption fits in well with our observation. A user may choose to download a song and decide whether they like it, and then purchase the song if they do.

It is also observed that the events “View Ad” and “Skip Ad” have a negative correlation score. Users are not converted, i.e., they do not purchase the song or video if they encounter an ad. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Ads are a big put-off, and the company may make more conversions if they choose to remove ads from their product.

Exploring geographies

Everything that we have covered so far is based on the existing product. It talks about the current functionalities available and how they can be improved to increase the number of users making a purchase. Another popular way of expanding the product market is to enter new countries or geographies. Let us see if we can figure out any market that may not be utilized to its fullest potential by Amplitunes. For this purpose, consider that the domestic market of Amplitunes is the United States of America and it wants to expand in the Asian countries of Singapore and Japan.

Everything that we have covered so far is based on the existing product. It talks about the current functionalities available and how they can be improved to increase the number of users making a purchase. Another popular way of expanding the product market is to enter new countries or geographies. Let us see if we can figure out any market that may not be utilized to its fullest potential by Amplitunes. For this purpose, consider that the domestic market of Amplitunes is the United States of America and it wants to expand in the Asian countries of Singapore and Japan.

Wrapping it up

This is a very basic and surface-level introduction to the software Amplitude and the potential of Product Analytics. A detailed analysis would require a lot more background information and time, which is out of scope for the current use case. But I do hope it gave you an idea of how user behavior can help uncover business problems and solutions.