How Under Armour Uses Data Insights to Drive Innovation

After acquiring popular apps like MapMyRun and MyFitnessPal in 2015, Under Armour Connected Fitness became the leading digital fitness company, with a digital product suite designed for the everyday athlete.

Eager to see how these new mobile offerings were helping users meet their fitness goals, Under Armour turned to Amplitude’s self service product intelligence platform. The results: lifts in retention, boosts to the bottom line and refocused priorities.

Before implementing Amplitude, Under Armour relied on its team of product analysts to build their own SQL queries in third party business intelligence platforms. The process was time-consuming and often required multiple iterations.

With Amplitude’s Product Intelligence platform, suddenly Under Armour had “analysis at our fingertips,” Carpenter said. “We were able to validate our assumptions and we could easily access the data to make quick analysis and react to the results.”

Stuart Kim-Brown, director of Product Analytics, agreed, observing that Amplitude’s easy to use interface, and out of the box product and growth analyses “empowered our product managers to be self-sufficient, to get at the answers they needed without having to wait for help from my team.”

In turn, Kim-Brown said, his team was freed to focus on more sophisticated models.

Greater access to data insights has made it easier and faster for Under Armour to experiment with new features and products. Leveraging Amplitude’s Segmentation, Funnels, and AB Test View they cut the experiment time from three months to one.

Hoping to further its goal of making athletes better, Under Armour decided to test out a big product bet designed to inspire its MapMyRun users to log more runs each week: Form Coaching Tips. A connected software product, Form Coaching Tips takes aim at poor form, which can cause injury and pain, keeping runners off the road. Using Amplitude’s Cohort, Segmentation, and Retention analyses, Under Armour saw the feature was a success, boosting day seven retention by 30%.

“This was something that really lifted retention for us and that equates to dollars for us because the more users we have using our app, the more money we’re making,” Carpenter said.

Building on the success of its Form Coaching Tips, which runners use post-workout, Under Armour decided to test a feature that would help users perfect their form before they lace up. The KPI: how much time users spent on the app with the addition of the new Target Zone Calculator, which estimates the best cadence or stride length zone for a user’s desired pace. Using Amplitude’s Funnels, they saw a gain of 10 seconds.

Amplitude has also helped Under Armour focus on its priorities by revealing important insights into its users. Using Amplitude’s Segmentation chart, Under Armour discovered that its race training plans had low user-engagement. Operating on the theory that the plans weren’t clicking with most of its users, Under Armour redesigned the plans to address a greater variety of goals, whether it was learning running basics or improving cardiovascular health. With Amplitude Cohorts, Under Armour saw a big payback: a 3x increase in its MVP (paying) users who leverage the plans and an increase in their free users tapping on the plan.