The Guide to Data Accessibility

Access to data is critical for the success of your business. Easily accessible data enables you to move quickly, focus on the product, and build a data-informed culture where data leads to better decisions and action.

Build a data-informed culture

74% of businesses say they want to be data-driven, but only 29% say they are good at connecting analytics to action. If you can’t quickly and easily get actionable insights from your data, unite your company around that insight, and make product or business decisions from it — then you aren’t data-driven.

These are the hallmarks of a truly data-informed company:

• Everyone is aligned around a single core metric
• Everyone can access the data they need
• Everyone can get insights from their data

Although picking one core metric might sound counterintuitive — why pick only one? — it helps unite your entire company toward a common goal and helps you to define your user experience. This core metric, often called a "north star metric" measures the value that you provide to your users.

To align around a core metric, everyone at the company needs accessible data so that they can constantly measure how their individual KPIs are tracking towards the business goal. At Square, a high-growth company with over 2000 employees, establishing a central source of truth for their data was critical for uniting disparate teams and departments.

Rather than having data siloed to an analytics or data team, which would slow down product iteration cycles, Square selected Amplitude as their central source for exploring and developing insights from user behavior data. Over 100 Square employees use Amplitude every month to understand user behavior and track core performance metrics.

By having self-service data access for multiple departments, including marketing, growth, customer support, and analytics, Square has created a data-informed culture and can now make better decisions, faster.

Read the case study from Square

To be truly insights-driven and make the best decisions possible, everyone at your company should be able to improve the business using data — and we mean everyone. From someone who has never looked at analytics before, to the most seasoned data analyst, Amplitude empowers your company with simple-to-understand, yet powerful access to your user data.

• Intuitive, easy-to-use analytics — Enable every employee to explore data and discover insights
• Faster time to insight — So you can iterate, improve, and move faster than the competition
• Focus on the core business — Instead of building and maintaining costly infrastructure
• Save data scientists’ time — With a fully managed pipeline and data warehousing

Give everyone at your company access the metrics that matter most for doing their job well

For product and marketing teams

Drill down with funnels, retention, and advanced behavioral analytics

For managers and executives

Keep track of high-level metrics with custom drag-and-drop dashboards

For data scientists and analysts

SQL raw data access via Amazon Redshift and fully managed data pipeline

For customer support and engineering

Real-time user activity streams for debugging and answering tickets

Empower business end-users with intuitive, easy-to-use analytics

To move quickly, you want every employee to be able to dig into the data and find their own answers. If every question needs to go through a data analyst, the whole product iteration and improvement cycle slows down.

With Amplitude, anyone on your team, even a complete analytics newbie, can start slicing and dicing the data however they want and getting answers, fast.

Drill down with just a few clicks

Anytime you have a question about your users, you should be able to answer it yourself, right away. Easily group by user properties like Country or Device to segment your users and see how different factors affect conversion rates and churn. Any product manager or marketer can quickly pinpoint funnel drop-off points and uncover retention drivers and detractors with a few clicks.

Monitor, share, & collaborate

Data is meant for collaborative decision-making — with the right insights, your team can come to a shared conclusion and agree on the best path forward. Our Slack integration, email reports, alerts, and custom drag-and-drop dashboards make it easy for managers and executives to keep a constant pulse on the health of the product and core KPIs.

In addition, shareable links allow you to share live data with anyone inside or outside the company, so you can show reports to investors or advisors without an Amplitude accounts.

Perform advanced behavioral analysis without writing SQL

In the past, any question more complicated than a simple conversion funnel or retention query required a costly and time-consuming query by a data scientist. Other analytics tools only give you a surface-level view of your user metrics, but Amplitude’s behavioral analytics features make it possible for anyone who knows how to use a mouse to understand complex user behavior.

What paths do users take through the app? Who are the users who drop out of the checkout funnel, and what are they doing instead? What are the behaviors that predict new user retention? Amplitude allows you to answer questions like this in minutes, rather than days.

Read more about understanding user behavior

Move faster than your competition with shorter time to insight

Faster time to insight enables you to move quicker, pivot faster, and experiment with more precision. It’s critical to enable everyone in your company to have insights at their fingertips that will enable them to make well-informed decisions, quickly.

Intuitive, easy-to-use analytics drastically reduce your time to insight. If you have both the ability to access the data you need, as well as manipulate, visualize, and interpret it without needing to know a programming language, you can cut down days, even weeks, from your time to insight.

With real-time analytics that provides insights without having to write SQL, you enable your entire organization to make decisions quickly and iterate at a faster pace than your competitors.

When Life360 was looking for an analytics solution, their main priority was decentralizing data so that everyone could access it. As Trenton Huey, Head of Analytics, put it, "The number one thing was letting everybody have data insights, without having to write SQL or code. Basically, I didn’t want to be the only person able to deep dive into our user behavior!"

Trenton knew their previous workflow of channeling all data through one analytics person could not scale — at the time he was working with 6 product managers. He had to manually create reports and anticipate questions that people might ask. Their infrastructure also had slow data latency; the team would have a question, but need to wait 2 days for the data to flow into their system.

With Amplitude, the entire company now has near-instant access to their user data. Questions take minutes to answers, not days.

Read the case study from Life360

You have incredibly smart data scientists who want to roll up their sleeves and find game-changing insights, but often these valuable hires spend their time doing data ‘janitor work’ and running endless queries requested by other teams. Amplitude saves your data scientists’ time and allows them to do the work they really want to do by:

• Reducing the backlog of query requests from other teams, who can now answer the majority of their questions themselves
• Eliminating the need for data cleanup, pipeline, and infrastructure maintenance by providing a fully managed data pipeline and warehouse

Data pipeline

There are a million things that can go wrong with your mobile and web data — duplicate events, scrambled user IDs, faulty timestamps… the list goes on. Stop spending time worrying about data cleanup — Amplitude makes sure your data is accurate before sending it to your dashboards and Redshift cluster.

Direct SQL access via Amazon Redshift

SQL is often the language of choice for analysts. By providing direct SQL access to your user event data, data scientists can get straight to the data analysis without wasting time on cleanup and ETL.

Access to raw data gives you the flexibility to answer any question about user behavior. Plus, you can integrate with visualization tools like Looker or Tableau to create custom reports.

Dedicated Redshift cluster with dynamic schemas optimized for query speed

You need your queries to be as fast as possible. We provide you with your own Redshift cluster, so that performance is never hindered by someone else’s query. Customized dynamic schemas adjust to your data’s structure on the fly, so that your queries are as fast as possible.

ETL to your own Redshift cluster

Already have your own Redshift cluster that you’d like to send event data to? Maybe you want to join your user data with other data sources, like CRM or transactional data. Amplitude can pipe all of your event data to your own Redshift cluster, allowing you to easily join different types of data for analysis.

Focus on the core business instead of building and maintaining costly infrastructure

Having self-service data means that your engineering and product teams can focus on building the product (which is, after all, why your business exists), not analytics infrastructure.

"We went with Amplitude because we didn’t want to spend any more resources and time on building internal infrastructure. We are not an analytics company."
Trenton Huey, Head of Analytics, Life360

It’s easy and relatively cheap to dump your data in Hadoop or Redshift, and many companies think that building an in-house solution will be better than going with a third-party. Unfortunately, companies often underestimate the time and resources required to build an in-house analytics system that everyone, company-wide, can use to derive insights. You need good visualization, exploration, and dashboarding solutions — and then you need to constantly maintain the entire system.

All of this adds up to valuable engineering resources siphoned away from product and dedicated to reinventing the wheel.