Instrumentation pre-work

Your Amplitude experience depends on the decisions you make during instrumentation. To lay the foundation for a successful instrumentation, complete the following steps first.

Define your business goals

Defining your business goals is critical to getting the most out of Amplitude. The more you know about your business goals, and the better you can articulate them, the more Amplitude can help you achieve them.

Start by identifying your business goals as specifically as possible. Which aspects of your product do you want to better understand or improve? For example, your goals for this quarter might include improving user acquisition, user retention, and paying user conversion. After you identify your goals, think about the data or events you need to reach them.

Understand how Amplitude identifies and tracks users

If you don't track your users correctly, you can't get what you need from Amplitude. Read and understand the article on how Amplitude identifies and tracks unique users before you start instrumentation.

Organize events and related properties

Consider making a spreadsheet that lists each event and its associated properties. It might look something like this:

Make event names clear and intuitive. If your organization doesn't have a standard naming scheme, consider naming your events using the following syntax:

verb + noun (clicked signup) or noun + verb (signup clicked).

Go to the Data Taxonomy Playbook for best practices around your event taxonomy. Download the template above as an Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet.

Resist the urge to track everything immediately

New Amplitude users often assume that tracking as much data as possible generates more insights more quickly. The opposite is often true: too much data can obscure the answers you're looking for just as easily as too little data.

Instead, track only the events that answer the business goals you defined in the previous section. Your team has an easier time understanding and using the data Amplitude sends. Customers often mention that the most difficult thing to teach new hires isn't the Amplitude platform itself, but what the event data means and how to generate it.

Each event you track should have no more than 20 properties. This limit also applies to user properties. If you find it necessary later, you can always add more events and properties.

Consider instrumenting a cross-platform project

If your product is similar across all platforms and the taxonomy is consistent, combine web and mobile data into the same project. Combining data lets you analyze how users move between different platforms. Instrument products with distinct taxonomies in separate projects. Refer to the pros and cons of combining Android and iOS data or multiple apps in the same Amplitude project.

Next steps

If you still have questions, read the article on instrumentation FAQs and get data into Amplitude.