Build charts in Amplitude: Add events

Amplitude builds charts using three modules located along the left side of your chart. Their specific function can change from chart to chart, but they follow some general guidelines.

1. At the top is the Events module. This is where you select the Amplitude events and metrics you want to include in your analysis.
2. In the middle is the Measured As module. The appearance and features of the Measured As module vary widely from chart to chart, so this article focuses on the Events module and the Segment By module instead. To learn about the Measured As module for a specific chart type, refer to the documentation for that chart.
3. At the bottom is the Segment By module, where you define and identify the specific subsets of users you want to learn about.

This article explains how to use the Events module. When you're done, refer to adding user segments to your Amplitude charts.

Events module

Events are the heart of any Amplitude analysis. An event is an action a user takes in your product: pushing a button, completing a level, or making a payment. Aim to track between 15 and 200 events to develop a full understanding of how users engage with your app.

Amplitude can also track inactive events, or actions the end user doesn't take but that still occur within the app or website. One example is a push notification the app sends.

Add events to your analysis

To add an event to an analysis, go to the Events module and click Add Event or Metric. Amplitude opens a list of all available events. You can add up to 10 events to an analysis. Amplitude must instrument an event before it appears in this list.

Amplitude provides five default events:

• Top Global Events: Queries on the top 10 active events by volume with the highest counts, over the selected time period, for all users in your project.
• Top Events for Segment: Queries on the top 10 active events by volume with the highest counts, over the selected time period, for a particular user segment defined in the Segment By module.
• Any Active Event: Queries on any active event over the selected time period. For example, to view your daily active users, select Any Active Event and change the measurement in the Measured As module to Uniques.
• Any Event: Queries on any event over the selected time period. This includes non-active events.
• New User: Queries on new users over the selected time period. For example, to view daily new users, select New User and change the measurement in the Measured As module to Uniques. Amplitude considers a user "new" the moment they send their first event to Amplitude.

When you use [Amplitude] New User in a chart, the chart looks at all events that new users triggered during the interval when they were new. For example, in an Event Segmentation chart, if you compare uniques to event totals, you may see a higher count of events than the number of new users.

Use wildcards to search for events

You can search the search bar for events to add to your chart. If you don't know the exact name or spelling of an event, use a wildcard or combination of wildcards to find what you're looking for. The following wildcards are available in dropdown searches:

• *: Use an asterisk to search for an unknown number of characters. Place it at the start or end of a search term.
• ?: Use a question mark to search for a single alphabetic character. Place it in any position of a search term.
• [ ]: Use brackets to search for the characters within the brackets in any order.

Some example wildcard searches are:

• *save - returns results that end with "save".
• chart* - returns results that start with "chart".
• *chart* - returns results that include "chart" anywhere in the string.
• c???t* - returns results that start with "c", contain any three letters, followed by "t" (strings that start with "chart" or "create").
• dat[ae]* - returns all results that start with "dat" + "e" or "a" (strings that start with "date" or "data").

Add conditions to your events

You can refine your events with the Filter by or Group-by specifications. Both use event properties or user properties to affect your analysis, but they do so in different ways.

The Filter by specification conditions your event on an event property or user property that you select. Amplitude limits the results to those with properties that matched the conditions you specified at the time the event triggered.

For example, to limit the scope of an event to those triggered from an iPhone, use the Filter by specification to tell Amplitude that, for this event, you only want to count those that came from an iPhone.

The properties you have available depend on the nature of your product, and on the specific information you need to understand a particular event. Common event properties among Amplitude customers include cause, description, category, type, duration, level, % completed, count, source, status, from, number, lives, authenticated, error, rank, action, and mode. Common examples of user properties include locale, referral source, plan type, number of photos uploaded, number of units of in-game currency, and current level in a game.

If you have more than one event in your Events module, using the Filter by specification on one event doesn't affect any of the others. Add conditions to each event individually.

The Group-by specification also uses these properties. Instead of limiting your results to those that match your conditions, Group-by breaks out your results based on the property you selected. For example, if you tell Amplitude to group by country, the chart shows results for each individual country (or, more technically, for each instrumented value of that property for which any results exist).

Note the following:

• You can group each event by a maximum of five properties, and the graph displays the top 12 property value counts by default.
• Amplitude records event and user properties at the time an event triggers. This can lead to situations where the returned value for the property is no longer the current value.

Next step: Add user segments

Now that you understand how the Event module works in Amplitude, refer to adding user segments to your charts.