Optimize your Amplitude workflow to improve user engagement

To gain the most value from Amplitude, follow this workflow. Amplitude's most successful customers use this sequence of steps to lay the groundwork for the most important metrics, and to show how specific charts connect to each other.

Step 1: Identify your product's critical event

A critical event is an action users take in your product that aligns closely with your core value proposition. You probably already know what your critical event is: the action you want to drive your users toward.


Type of Product	Critical Event
Self-guided meditation	Completing a meditation session
Find and book nearby fitness classes	Booking a class
Multiplayer mobile game	Playing a game
Buy and sell used things near you	Completing a purchase
On-demand grocery delivery	Completing a delivery
Share songs on various social media platforms	Sharing a song

Use these questions to help identify your product's critical event:

Does your product have different offerings? If so, what are they, and what are your success metrics for each?
Does your product have distinct groups of users? If so, how do they differ in the way they use your product, and what value does each group get?
What's the one action that you want a user to do every time they open your product?
What metrics do you care about as a company? What are you trying to drive up, and which user actions connect to that metric?

Step 2: Determine your product's usage interval

Just as important as defining your critical event is determining how often people take that action. The product usage interval is the frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, and so on) with which you expect people to use your product.

Some products are built for daily use, such as social networking, media, casual gaming, or productivity apps. Others, such as on-demand, e-commerce, and expense reporting apps, see much less frequent use.

You can't calculate user retention without first understanding your product's usage interval and critical event.

Step 3: Create retention graphs to understand your user retention rates

If you're having trouble retaining users, it may signal a problem with the product, or with the experience of using it. But if you can't track retention, you may never identify the issue.

Amplitude's Retention Analysis chart helps you drive product adoption by showing how often users return to your product after taking a specific action. Use it to discover the events that keep users coming back, as well as the ones that drive them away.

Step 4: Plot a user Lifecycle graph

After you identify your product's critical event, find out how your user base interacts with that event over time. A Lifecycle analysis breaks out your active users into three subgroups (new, current, and resurrected, which were formerly inactive) for a more granular view of user behavior.

The goal is to use this information to grow your current and resurrected user counts, either by keeping users engaged or by giving them a reason to become active again. Pay attention to your dormant users: if this category starts growing, you may have an engagement problem.

Step 5: Map your user personas

Knowing who is using your product is just as important as knowing what they're doing with it.

Amplitude's Personas chart groups your users into clusters based on the similarities of their event behavior: users who behave the same way end up in the same cluster. The Personas chart can surface similarities between user cohorts you may not have thought to look for, and it can guide you through creating a comprehensive set of user personas for your product.

Step 6: Compare engagement across personas with the Engagement Matrix

Amplitude's Engagement Matrix chart breaks out the top and bottom events for engagement into a four-quadrant matrix view. You can spot which features to refactor or deprecate, and which ones offer the potential for extending engagement into other areas of your product. This view helps you understand the high-level pattern of feature engagement in your product, by both breadth and frequency.

Ongoing work: Create cohorts, compare, A/B test, improve

Beyond this workflow, use Amplitude to explore your product and user data further. Create cohorts in various charts and compare how different groups of users engage with your product. Are they taking different flows in their user journeys? Do experiments show they convert more quickly with one variant?

Drill down into the differences and develop hypotheses on what product changes can encourage all users to become power users. Test these hypotheses through A/B testing.

Use your wins to make meaningful product changes, and repeat as needed.

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