The Compass chart: discover your users' 'a-ha' moments

A key step in driving growth is discovering your users' "a-ha" moments. An "a-ha" moment happens when a new user makes the decision, consciously or unconsciously, to become an active user of your product.

The most famous example comes from Facebook. Facebook discovered that users who added at least seven friends in the first ten days almost always stuck around. Users who didn't almost always churned. This insight helped Facebook drive retention by encouraging the right user behavior: adding friends.

The Compass chart helps you achieve the same outcome. A Compass analysis scans your user data and identifies these behaviors, giving you the insights you need to improve your product and drive sustainable growth.

Before you begin

Events don't appear in any Amplitude charts until instrumentation is complete, so finish that work first. Refer to the article on building charts in Amplitude.

Set up a Compass chart

The Compass chart works differently than most other Amplitude charts. There's no Event module, no Segmentation module, and no Measured As module.

When you first open a Compass chart, you see a heat map view that shows the likelihood of retaining new users into their second week, based on the events they trigger and when they trigger them. In this example, users who start a session on their first day are less likely to retain. This happens because all new users start a session on their first day. They have to start a session to become a new user, and since they haven't yet had a chance to interact with your product beyond that, the event isn't especially predictive.

If those users also search for a song or video on that first day, they're much more likely to retain into the second week. The correlation rates between triggering those events on day 1 and sticking around for another week are 0.40 for starting a session and 0.72 for searching for a song. Refer to the article on interpreting your Compass chart for more on correlation.

To build a Compass chart, follow these steps:

1. In the left-side module, select the user cohort you're interested in from the For users in the following cohort dropdown. This is your base cohort. Amplitude populates this list with the cohorts you've already created. If this is your first cohort, you can only select New Users.

2. From the ... how does performing dropdown, select an event you'd like to know more about.

3. To add properties to your event, click + where, select the property name, and specify the property value you want. You can add multiple properties to your event.

4. Next, take one of the following steps:

   • Set the range of first use. Tell Amplitude that the new user must have triggered your event within a set number of days after first using your product. The default is seven days.
   • Tell Amplitude you want to group your results by a particular property by clicking + group by. Amplitude generates a report explaining how different values of that property affect the correlation between your base cohort and your target cohort.

5. From the ...predict they will be in the following cohort dropdown, select the target cohort you want. Amplitude draws from the list of cohorts you've already created. You can also select from a handful of pre-set, out-of-the-box cohorts:

   • [Amplitude] 2nd Week Retention.
   • [Amplitude] 3rd Week Retention.
   • [Amplitude] 4th Week Retention.
   • [Amplitude] 2nd Month Retention.

   These cohorts include users who were new during the timeframe of your analysis and who fired an active event in the week (or month) listed after they were new.

6. Set the date range of your analysis with the date picker.

Make this time range long enough to generate a good sample size, and far enough in the past to ensure that all users in your sample have had an opportunity to retain. For example, if you're looking at '[Amplitude] 2nd Week Retention' as your target cohort, make sure the new users in your base cohort have been new for longer than two weeks.

Add your Compass report to a dashboard

To add your Compass report to a dashboard, follow these steps:

1. If you haven't done so already, save your chart by clicking Save.
2. Click + Add to. From the dropdown, select the dashboard you want to add the report to, or select Create a new dashboard.

After you create a Compass chart, find out what it all means. Refer to the Help Center article on interpreting your Compass chart.