Release notes: Q2 2021

At the beginning of April, we had just come off of some exciting announcements – Harvard Business Review found product analytics to be the number one measurement of digital success, G2 reviewers rated Amplitude the #1 customer product analytics platform, and Amplitude introduced the Digital Optimization System with the launch of Amplitude Recommend. Q2 was an equally exciting quarter for us – we launched Amplitude Experiment, shipped 34 improvements across our existing products, and acquired Iteratively. We have our customers to thank – they help us deeply understand the challenges facing digital teams, so we can iterate, and build the right solutions to solve them. Here are the biggest product launches, innovations, and integrations from Q2 2021.

Introducing Amplitude Experiment

Amplitude Experiment is the first experimentation and feature management solution powered by analytics and customer behavior. Experiment provides an end-to-end workflow, from hypothesis to analysis, that empowers organizations to scale experimentation across teams and make bigger bets that drive growth.

When it comes to experimentation in your digital product, nothing is more important than the process. A well-designed process ensures that you have the highest chance for success—a result with clear next steps—so that you don’t waste precious resources or steer your team down the wrong path.

In Experiment, we define that process as Design, Rollout, and Learn. Through those key phases, we compiled every step—from hypothesis development to targeting to measurement—into a single page. Not only is it easier to manage your experiments, it helps you ship better tests because you start and end with your customer data. Check out the demo video below, read the full launch story, or sign up for a demo here.

New in Product Analytics

Surface Insights for any Teammate with Chart Takeaways and Dashboard Metrics

Not everyone is going to fully understand your event taxonomy, or know the best way to build charts, but everyone should be in touch with the insights creators find in Amplitude. Our latest Analytics bets help non-creators actively consume content in Amplitude, and reduce complexity in the core experience.

Charts in Amplitude aren’t always intuitive – to understand rates of change or improvements over baseline often requires mental math, a ruler, or a calculator. Chart Takeaways offer summary statistics beside funnel and event segmentation charts, to make it easier to comprehend the meaning and implications of the data.

In addition, you can now view metrics for charts with multiple series on dashboards, and toggle which series to visualize. We’ve also added descriptive labels along with matching series colors to make it easier to understand the metrics you’re viewing. This is available for event segmentation, sessions and revenue charts on saved dashboards, and can be set up by clicking the options icon on a chart saved to a dashboard, and clicking “Show Metrics.”

Chart takeaways and dashboard series metrics are available to all customers.

New in Collaboration

Expand the Reach of Insights with Embedded Amplitude

With the launch of the digital optimization system came Executive Reporting – a powerful set of upgrades to our Dashboards to help leaders monitor digital business performance. Since then, we’ve broadened the reach of dashboards and charts in Amplitude with innovations like Embedded Amplitude. This allows you to generate and create code embeds out of Charts, Notebooks, Dashboards, and Cohorts. This displays Amplitude to unauthenticated users like public links, but instead will be directly attached to HTML pages. Of course, these embedded links can be managed and deactivated by an admin user at any time.

User management API

The new User Management API provides a programmatic solution to user provisioning and group management through a public API, rather than manually. This enables administrators to quickly and easily manage their organizations at scale, and integrate the provisioning process with other tools, including Identity Providers.

The User Management API follows the SCIM 2.0 Standard, allowing for the creation, retrieval, update, and deletion calls for users (including pending users) and permission groups. It is built on universal standard SCIM 2.0, so this can be used with virtually any provider. Additionally, we worked with Okta to create a provisioning application inside their catalog of integrations. This allows administrators to create, manage, and de-provision Amplitude membership within an organization almost entirely within Okta.

The User Management API is available to customers on the Enterprise plan.

New in Data Governance

Define, Track, and Verify Data Quality with Iteratively

Data management is the foundation of the Digital Optimization System. Behind any insight, recommendation, or experiment sits a data layer to integrate data sources, resolve identities, and proactively manage the data our customers bring into Amplitude. To bolster Govern, our existing data management offering, Amplitude acquired Iteratively, an innovative leader in data planning and instrumentation.

Iteratively eliminates human error when implementing analytics tracking, which in turn accelerates the path to high-quality data for any organization. Their self-service application replaces manual, ad hoc processes with an easy-to-use product for data, product, and growth teams to define, track, and verify data before it is delivered to systems like Amplitude. For developers, it makes instrumenting product analytics dramatically easier and makes QA and maintaining quality simple. Check out the demo video below to see how it works, sign up here, or reach out to your customer success manager to learn more.

Iteratively is now available to all new and existing Amplitude customers.

Monitor Data Health and Fix Issues Faster with Proactive Governance

Govern is Amplitude’s central hub to plan events, filter out sensitive data, and fix mistakes when they inevitably happen. Last quarter, we redesigned the Govern experience with several enhancements to surface data issues proactively. For instance, Shortcuts display your org’s count of unexpected errors, uncategorized events, and missing descriptions. We also enhanced transformations with Derived Properties, a tool to create new events and user properties on the fly, and expanded data controls with Drop Filters, which allow you to drop specific event data from your charts at query time. Read the full Proactive Governance Blog Post here, for a deeper dive into these bets and more.

Govern is available to customers on the Enterprise plan, or Growth plan who purchased the Govern add-on.

New in Data Connections

Collect Data from New Sources, Operationalize it in New Destinations

Amplitude’s Sources and Destinations panel provides a centralized, code free way to import and export data to our integrated partners. It allows you to quickly connect Amplitude’s native SDKs and APIs to import your data, and export events, cohorts, recommendations, and experiments to the rest of your stack. Last quarter, we introduced a Java backend server-side SDK for Amplitude clients. Instrument events in microservices apps or other Java servers, like inside a website built with Spring Boot.

We expanded the reach of Destinations with two new self-service export offerings: Snowflake and Google Cloud Storage. This is included in all paid Amplitude plans and is supported in all regions. Through this self-service UI, you can forward Amplitude events and merged user IDs to your warehouse solution for further analysis, while maintaining ownership and privacy of your data warehouse, all without support from Amplitude engineering.

Finally, behavioral cohorts can now be synced to Hubspot, to better target your marketing efforts.

The Java SDK is currently in Beta, available to all customers. Behavioral Cohorts, Hubpsot syncing, Snowflake and Google Cloud Storage Export are available to all paying customers.

To stay up to date on Amplitude releases as they are shipped, visit Product Updates in the Amplitude Community.