How Amplitude’s Transformative Tech Makes It Easy for Companies to Drive Success

In today’s increasingly digitized world, engagement is critical to accelerating and sustaining growth. So when NBCUniversal wanted access to more sophisticated analytics in order to increase retention and viewership, it turned to Amplitude (AMPL), a product analytics company offering the industry’s first Digital Optimization System. With Amplitude’s expertise, NBCUniversal found that video previews were tied directly to increased engagement. Now, it has grown its conversion rate by 36%. Similarly, Peloton found that virtual high-fives and callouts from instructors brought users closer to their fitness goals while using Amplitude. In response, it made its products even more social. Today, Ford is leveraging Amplitude to enhance brand loyalty through its mobile app.

As the top-ranked product analytics solution by G2 users, a verified peer-to-peer software review site that helps businesses find the top products, Amplitude is on a mission to make analytics easy to understand with effective tools to help companies drive success on their digital platforms.

Before creating Amplitude, co-founders Spenser Skates, Curtis Liu and Jeffrey Wang saw product analytics as one of the last untapped software-as-a-service (SaaS) markets, and with the ever-increasing creation and use of digital products, they saw a need for software that could help companies with their digital initiatives.

They transformed the product analytics industry with the Amplitude Behavioral Graph, a solution to the age-old problem of scaling product data. Unlike CRM data or marketing data, product data requires a special infrastructure due to the thousands of data points produced by increasingly complex digital products and nonlinear user journeys.

In an interview, Skates expanded on these two main problems.

“The average product has thousands of different things you can do in it. Just keeping track of them as a data team is difficult. [...] How people use products... it's not a linear journey where you just go from A to B. You're going to go from A to B to A to C, D to F to something [else]. Each user takes a totally different path, like how you use the Peloton treadmill is different from how I use it and different from their millions of other users,” said Skates.

Skates, Liu and Wang set out to solve this problem through the Behavioral Graph, a comprehensive, interactive and user-friendly way to aggregate and analyze data from millions of these different user journeys.

Amplitude’s Digital Optimization System has an eye toward the future, with a user-friendly design that doesn’t require a lot of technical expertise. “There are lots of customers who will have thousands of people using Amplitude every month because we're so accessible. Whereas before, [if] you look at a lot of data tools out there, they're only usable by the data science team or by someone in engineering,” said Skates.

As Amplitude advanced its analytics software, management decided it was time to go public with Nasdaq. Skates, Liu and Wang opted for an increasingly popular route to access the public markets. The co-founders wanted to offer Amplitude stock to the investors who believed in it the most, at a price determined by the open market. In September 2021, they went public through a direct listing.

Since listing on Nasdaq, Amplitude has shown outstanding growth, reporting over $100 million in revenue this year and a slew of success stories with clients, including Twitter, Instacart, Spirit Airlines, Walmart, Under Armour and more.

This past year, the company released two new products:

• Amplitude Recommend: Combining analytics with automated machine learning, Amplitude Recommend offers strategies based on usage, a personalized user experience based on previous behavior at every touchpoint possible, all without requiring extra technical resources.
• Amplitude Experimentation: Amplitude Experimentation embeds analytics into A/B testing and rollout to show different users different versions of the product and present which version performs better. The feature helps teams learn faster on what works and what doesn’t for specific users.

These two products, combined with Amplitude Analytics, make a Digital Optimization System that is innovating what analytics software does for customers.

“[This system is] really exciting, because you go from, ‘Hey, we're just reporting out’ to, ‘Hey, we're driving success in your product,’” said Skates.

Recently, Amplitude has taken its data and aggregated it in its first-ever Amplitude Labs Product Report. With over 1,400 customers covering 6,000+ products, the company has unparalleled insights into what drives digital growth. It found that the use of digital products has grown 54% since January 2020. While most of that growth was driven by the pandemic, the company expects digital adoption to continue growing across industries. The report offers advice on the next digital trends and strategies for companies looking to revamp their digital strategy.

As companies continue to grow their digital platforms, Amplitude continues to innovate.

“We're going to be launching one to two new products a year from here on out and be very aggressive about that because it's not just analytics, it's not just experimentation and recommendations. We're looking at things in the data ingestion and cleansing space. We're looking at more sophisticated machine learning models. So, there are a whole bunch more networks that we will be excited to get out there in the years to come,” Skates said.