The Amplitude website is one of our primary acquisition channels. It’s where potential customers learn about Amplitude and, ideally, decide to try out our product.
We understand that our site converts visitors into customers when it helps people and provides them with value. But what is valuable to our audience changes over time. That means we need to constantly adapt.
Luckily, we have access to the best data analytics platform in the industry: our own. We use Amplitude to understand what our website visitors are looking for and identify improvements we can make.
In this post, I share three changes we made to our site based on learnings we pulled from the Amplitude platform.
Key takeaways
- The Amplitude platform helps the Amplitude Growth team learn how visitors use the website so we can refine the site to align with visitor interests and needs.
- Amplitude charts enable us to identify points of friction that prevent customers from getting to the next step in a funnel.
- Insights from Amplitude led us to:
- Revamp our global navigation menu to improve the user experience.
- Better understand our international visitors and adjust our global strategy.
- Discover unnecessary parts of our sign-up flow that were hurting conversion.
Reducing friction points
One of the primary ways we use Amplitude is to identify friction points. Within Amplitude’s funnel analysis chart, you can mark a step in your funnel as optional. From there, you can compare conversion rates between two versions of the funnel to see if someone is more likely to convert when they do or don’t do a specific action.
For example, we introduced a video into our signup flow. I hypothesized that the video would distract people and prevent them from making it to the next step. We decided to test the hypothesis and marked viewing the video as optional in our funnel analysis. In the end, we confirmed that people who engaged with the video were less likely to make it to the next step and chose to remove it from the flow.
Analytics helps you close the gap between how you expect customers to interact with your website and how they actually behave.
I often hear people in the company talking about our site, and it’s clear they’re picturing someone poring over the site, exploring five, six, or more pages. In reality, people spend an average of three minutes on the site, and they visit fewer than three pages. That insight completely changed the way we think about our site. Instead of working on ways to convert visitors on their fifth page, we’re focusing on increasing the number of visitors that reach a second and third page.
Redesigning global navigation
We used Amplitude to analyze which elements people clicked most in our navigation bar. Then, we updated our navigation and footer so our site visitors could get the information they needed in as few clicks as possible.
By building funnel and event segmentation analyses in Amplitude, I found that there were a lot of links in the navigation that nobody was using. But other links people often clicked on were buried in the navigation menu. Our users had to put in a lot of work to get to where they wanted to go.
I used Amplitude Notebooks to communicate these findings to others in the organization. Notebooks are a storytelling format for sharing analyses in Amplitude. You can communicate insights with the right level of context by embedding charts and highlighting key takeaways.
After getting team buy-in about the need for a change, we redesigned the global navigation to make the links and elements people engaged with most more prominent. We removed the parts of the navigation that were not bringing users value. As a result, we’ve seen a lift in pages per session overall, showing that users are getting to the pages they want and engaging more deeply.
Improving the website experience for international visitors
When we used event segmentation and funnel analysis to dig into our website traffic, we realized that our international subdomains weren’t serving our international audience.
Initially, we had been maintaining separate subdomains for different countries. However, the subdomains didn’t get much traffic. It was clear that the international visitors preferred the main US-focused site, Amplitude.com. In fact, the majority of the traffic on our main site comes from outside the US.
We also discovered that international visitors were more inclined to engage and convert on the US site than on the subdomains. We used this data to support deprecating the subdomains while we put together a dedicated international strategy to better serve our global audience.
Partnering with product to improve sign-up flow
Our original sign-up flow included some fields asking customers for additional details, such as their company’s location. Customers could technically pass to the next step without filling them in, but these sections weren’t marked as optional. Through analysis in Amplitude, we learned that customers who took the time to fill in these extra details were less likely to get to the next step of sign-up than those who didn’t.
To increase the number of people who complete sign-up, we’re partnering with the product team to completely redesign the flow. Right now, we’re testing the impact of removing the extra fields and looking at other changes we can make to streamline the flow.
Analyze and improve your website experience with Amplitude
To conduct similar analyses on your site and improve your website experience as we did at Amplitude, try these different charts:
- Event segmentation: Measure top events users perform and how often events are triggered—plus by how many and which types of users.
- Funnel analysis: Understand conversion through a set of steps.
- Journeys: Dig into the different paths users take through your site and learn why they convert.
Get started with a free Amplitude account to access these charts and hit the ground running with a data-backed website strategy.
