The Personas chart: Find your product's user personas
Amplitude's Personas chart groups your users into clusters based on similarities in their event behavior. Amplitude places users who behave the same way into the same cluster. It's similar to a behavioral cohort, except no explicit, pre-specified rule defines a cluster.
The Personas chart rewards experimentation. Use it to do exploratory data mining analyses of how your user base navigates your product. It surfaces similarities between user cohorts you might not have thought to look for. It also guides you through creating a comprehensive set of user personas for your product, which you can use to drive engagement and retention.
Before you begin
Events don't appear in Amplitude charts until instrumentation is complete, so finish that first. Read the article on building charts in Amplitude.
Personas differs from other Amplitude charts
If you're already familiar with Amplitude, the first thing to notice about the Personas chart is that it doesn't work like other Amplitude charts. There's no Event Module and no Segmentation Module. There's also no Measured As Module, because the Personas chart doesn't rely on metrics the way other Amplitude charts do.
Instead, there's the Cluster Generation Module, the Cluster Count Module, and the Target Cohort Module.
Refer to the FAQ article on how Amplitude calculates clusters.
Set up a Personas chart
To build a Personas chart, follow these steps.
In the Cluster Generation Module, choose the user cohort to analyze. Amplitude populates this dropdown list with the user cohorts you've already created. If you haven't created any user cohorts yet, you can only choose Active Users or New Users.
When analyzing new users, Amplitude only considers events triggered during their first day as a new user.
To limit your analysis to a segment of this cohort, filter users based on user properties. Click + where, choose the property to use as a filter, and specify the property value you're interested in.
To narrow the focus further to users who already performed certain actions, click + perform, then choose the event you're interested in.
In the Cluster Count Module, choose the number of clusters from the ...into a total of dropdown.
Each analysis is different, and there's no one-size-fits-all answer for how many clusters to select. With too few clusters, the differences between them might not generate meaningful insights. With too many, Amplitude might create invalid or spurious clusters because it can't find that many distinct user personas. Try different cluster counts until you get a result that seems useful.
In the Target Cohort Module, choose your target cohort from the dropdown. 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
The definitions of these cohorts depend on whether you're looking at new users or active users (including cohorts you created yourself). New users fall into these cohorts if they were new during the time frame of your analysis and triggered an active event in the listed week (or month) after they were new.
Active users fall into these cohorts if they triggered an active event during the time frame of the analysis, and then another one in the specified week (or month) following that initial event.
Use the date picker to specify the timezone and set the timeframe for your analysis. Your analysis can span a maximum of 30 days.
Read on to learn how to interpret your Personas chart.
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