Meet Amplitude CDP, the First Insights-Driven Customer Data Platform

Collect and federate high-quality data to drive better outcomes and reduce costs.

Inside Amplitude
May 25, 2022
Image of Pragnya Paramita
Pragnya Paramita
Group Product Marketing Manager, Amplitude
Meet the Amplitude CDP

We know great products are built with great data. Without data you can trust, there are no insights, no personalized experiences, and no data-driven products. Yet we’ve heard from so many of our customers that they’re not happy with the existing customer data platform solutions on the market. We don’t believe our customers should have duplicate costs, overhead, and workflows. Your data shouldn’t become a liability because it’s not proactively planned and managed. Your data should integrate natively with analytics, so product, engineering, and marketing can unite and quickly go from data to actionable insights. That’s why today, we are excited to announce the launch of Amplitude CDP, the first insights-driven customer data platform.

Amplitude’s new CDP is fully integrated with our industry-leading analytics solution, Amplitude Analytics. With Amplitude CDP, your product and marketing teams can proactively improve data quality, analyze and discover new audiences, and sync data across their marketing and data stack. Our goal in launching Amplitude CDP is to help you become more operationally efficient, enable better, faster decision making, and increase your customer engagement. In addition to bringing together CDP and analytics, our free plan will be 10X more generous than leading CDPs on the market.

Stop paying twice the cost for twice the effort

We built Amplitude CDP by observing directly how our customers use Amplitude and what we’ve heard from them.

Let’s start with the data. Amplitude is already one of the top destinations for customers’ CDPs. After all, the primary objective of collecting data is to derive insight. A majority of customers connect their 1st-party customer data by directly using Amplitude SDKs and APIs, and 90% of our customers also use our suite of governance tools to manage their event data and user profiles. And more than 50% of customers have activated the data they have in Amplitude to another tool in their stack.

In conversations with hundreds of customers, we found they don’t want to:

  • Pay for the same data twice: Teams are paying for the event data in both their Analytics solution and their CDP—which is often the exact same data. They want to stop paying the “CDP tax” for collecting data on one platform, and analyzing it on another.
  • Manage multiple data solutions: When you are managing multiple products, it’s painful and time-consuming to manage and capture event data reliably. Engineering teams have to allocate valuable time to maintain event taxonomies in two systems.
  • Collect data without intention: Storing data that isn’t used for analysis or activation adds unnecessary costs and clutter. Since the data collected by CDPs is primarily consumed in downstream systems (like analytics and marketing platforms), it’s difficult to plan and observe what data is actually needed by your teams without a closed feedback loop between these systems.
  • Struggle with visibility: Many teams care about customer data. When we talk to analytics leaders, marketers, product managers, and engineers, their current CDP might help aggregate customer data—but it does not provide an understanding of customer data in a single interface.

In the end, both the quantitative and qualitative evidence rang loud and clear that our customers would value a better way.

Meet Amplitude CDP

With the first insights-driven customer data platform, teams building digital products now have the ability to take their analytics further without having to implement or manage a separate CDP.

Amplitude CDP is built for data teams, product managers, and marketing teams who need to proactively improve data quality, analyze and discover new audiences, and sync data across their marketing and data stack. But CDPs come in many shapes and sizes, so let’s break down Amplitude CDP into three primary components:

  • Connections: Essential to any CDP are the integrations, the SDKs, and an API for developers to track behaviors (i.e. events) and traits about customers as they interact with your applications and digital channels. But connections are a two-way street, offering both the pipelines for data sources to ingest data, and data destinations to sync data across your stack. With Amplitude, customers have 65+ turnkey integrations alongside an expansive set of SDKs and APIs.
  • Governance: We deliver identity resolution that builds and maintains customer profiles so that all behaviors and identifiers are mapped to a unified user ID. Amplitude CDP resolves anonymous and known (i.e. logged in) user profiles automatically and in real-time. What really stands out are the tools for proactively planning and managing data. Embedded tracking plans, collaborative taxonomy validation, observability, data transformations, and a developer toolkit all take governance to the next level.
  • Audience Management: Our audience management capabilities are built for marketers and growth PMs to create customer segments without SQL and sync them to various marketing and advertising platforms to run targeted campaigns. Customers can build dynamic and predictive user segments and automate activation with real-time syncing across the stack.

What makes Amplitude CDP truly unique is its tight integration with Amplitude Analytics. This streamlines the flow from data to insights and allows for powerful audience discovery as teams analyze their customer data with the industry’s #1 product analytics solution.

At its core, Amplitude CDP helps achieve the goals of other customer data platforms—better decisions through improved analytics, increased customer engagement from more targeted experiences, and improved efficiency from centralized data management. We believe it is the most efficient path to actionable insight for many teams building digital products.

A toolkit that proactively improves data quality

Amplitude CDP moves your teams from a reactive approach to data quality to proactive data governance and high trust in your customer data.

With robust governance features built-in, customers can leverage a single taxonomy across CDP and Analytics that include best-in-class data planning, data observability, and developer experience. Additionally, you can transform and enrich events retroactively to reflect changing customer preferences and business needs across internal systems and campaigns.

The end result is high-quality behavioral data ready for trustworthy analysis and targeting.

Amplitude CDP Event Property Group

Unlock the power of audience discovery

Do you always know the exact audience you want to target? Current CDPs assume you do, offering “audience builders” to create cohorts based on all the events and attributes you’ve collected. However, what we’ve found is that analytics helps teams discover the right audiences for campaigns.

Imagine this scenario: You’re building a funnel chart to see the conversion across steps in your new user onboarding or purchase flow. You find a significant-sized group of users who dropped off after they’ve already created an account but failed to activate it. Now you have a great opportunity to message that cohort with a targeted message about the value of taking the next step. That’s audience discovery leveraging an insights-driven CDP.

Amplitude Funnel Analysis plus microscope

Reduce cost and redundancies

Who doesn’t want to save time and money? We often found teams paying for a CDP to collect data, and send it to Amplitude and a few other marketing destinations. The reality is these teams are paying to host the same data twice. We see a real opportunity to help teams control and consolidate costs by paying one time to collect AND analyze event data.

For teams that use Amplitude CDP alongside Amplitude Analytics, they will be leveraging a single, unified taxonomy for their event data rather than maintaining one in each system. This not only reduces engineering overhead but also improves data hygiene.

And all those rich customer profiles are not locked in Amplitude. You can export them to your data warehouses using out-of-the-box connectors.

Amplitude Unified Customer Profiles

Federate and sync data in real-time

Adding to our growing list of data connections, we are excited to announce six new event-streaming destinations—AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis Firehose, Branch, Intercom, Iterable, and Google Pub/Sub. These event-streaming data connections send data from Amplitude to your martech and data service platforms to power real-time, targeted digital experiences and enrich your centralized data platforms.

We’ve also added the ability to sync cohorts in real-time to any data destination in our integration catalog. Imagine a customer receiving a push notification or ad shortly after viewing a product or abandoning their shopping cart, or a message reminding a user to finish that “Get Started” flow they abandoned. Real-time sync enables these use cases, delivering impactful experiences to end-users at the right moment.

Get started with Amplitude CDP—for free

Amplitude CDP will have the most robust free plan available on the market. For customers that are streaming fewer than 10 million events per month to destinations, Amplitude CDP will be free of charge. That’s 10 times the volume you get from leading CDPs in the market—all for no cost.

Amplitude CDP Free Plan Offering

It’s time to re-imagine how you build your digital products with trusted data, powerful insights, and targeted activations with Amplitude CDP. Every Amplitude customer can start benefiting today (and many already have) from many of these capabilities, like enhanced ingestion, data planning, and a world-class developer experience.

The full CDP solution is in early access today with select customers. We’ll be opening it up to more customers throughout the summer starting with North America.

Ready to learn more? Request a demo to learn how to join the early access program and join us on June 15 for a webinar featuring Amplitude CDP customer, AllTrails.

Thank you to the team

Building products that solve customer pains is a hard problem to solve and it’s an incredible team that comes together to take on this big challenge. Thank you to a very passionate and collaborative team for bringing the vision of an insight-driven CDP to life.

Engineering, Design, & Product: Cathy Nam, Jeff Judkins, Weichen Wang, AJ Horst, Bingbing Huang, Eric Tu, Kartheek Ganesh, Lee Henderson, Leo Zhang, Nhat Ho, Pavan kumar Patibandla, John Tran, Raymond Chen, Sina Jamshidi, Taylor Evanko, Tom Zhang, Zequn Fu, Yuchen He, Gabor Torok, Leo Li, Robyn Nason, Ryan Adams, Sumit Singh, Dustin Pearce, Mohamed Moustafa, Andrew Kramarev, Bohan Li, Daniel Chen, Hao Liu, Alyssa Yu, Joseph Reeve, Justin Fiedler, Kevin Pagtakhan, Ondrej Hrebicek, Qingzhuo Zhen, Ryan Busk, Shrey Valia, Theo Chao, Dean Shi, Igor Luchenov, Rahul Muthyam, Zahra Traboulsi, Eric Pollmann, Jackson Huang, Minh To, Moose Paksoy, Courtney George, Vignesh Ramesh, Chethana Kandula, Matt Kabus, Shannon McCready, Kristine Ng, Anna Zeman, Eric Tu, Patrick Thompson, Asavari Tayal, Hiral Shah, Christopher Selden, David Nelson, Shintaro Matsui, Carolyn Feibleman, Alan Okada, Brandon Khoo, Shreyas, Yerin Cha

Go-to-market Partners: Nate Franklin, John Hurley, Rachel Torres, Tiffany Parcasio, Chelsie Cauthon, Mari Anderson, Jake McKibben, Darah Easton, Grace Lynch, Alex Qian-Wang, Archana Madhavan, Casey Smith, Yelena Levina, Donna McDonald, Haley Cen, Jennifer Rudin, Justin Friedberg, Maria Newman, Meghan Noel, Rob Bow, Tyler Segalla, Jeremie Gluckman, Jenna Elliott, Dan Stephen, Renee Barnes, Eddie Gaona, Spencer Fleury, Gretchen Monahan, Rachel Herrera, Sam Wettling, Kim Hohenstein, Lisa Hopkins

G&A: Andrew D’Agostino, Heather Dunn Navarro, Todd Gascon, Rebecca Ballew, Foster Geng, Charles Yang

About the Author
Image of Pragnya Paramita
Pragnya Paramita
Group Product Marketing Manager, Amplitude
Pragnya is a Group Product Marketing Manager at Amplitude. Here she leads the go-to-market efforts for data management products. A graduate of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, she is passionate about working at the intersection of business and technology and when time allows, cooking up a storm with cuisines from all over the world.