What is Amplitude?
Amplitude is a product analytics platform that helps you build better products by tracking and understanding user behavior.
Use Amplitude to track user data and gain insights into user engagement, retention, and revenue. Amplitude keeps your data trustworthy and secure, so you have access to accurate and reliable information. Amplitude's analytics tools help answer questions about what happened, why it happened, and which actions to take next. With Amplitude, you can share your work across teams to support collaboration and drive growth.
Availability by Pricing Plan
Not all Amplitude products are available for every plan. Your experience with Amplitude may vary from the documentation depending on the plan you're using. For details on which functionality is available to each plan, go to the Pricing page.
Key concepts
Amplitude is an event-based analytics tool. It tracks user behaviors based on in-product interactions and analyzes user behavior in real time. Event-based analytics is the method of tracking and analyzing interactions between users and your product, also known as events. Before you get started with Amplitude, understand some key concepts.
| Name | Description | A music player app example |
|---|---|---|
| Events | An event is an action a user has taken | A user presses the "Play Song" button |
| Event Properties | Event properties are details about an event. | The genre of the music |
| Users | A user is the specific individual that interacts with your product | A user uses the app to play music |
| User Properties | User properties are details about a user | Whether a user is on a paid or free plan |
| Sessions | A session is the period of time a user has your app | A user uses the app to play music |
If you aren't interested in the details of these concepts, you can stop reading now.
Events
Events are actions that users take in your product, such as clicking a button, making a purchase, or creating an account. You define the events you want to track in Amplitude and the data you want to capture for each event. For example, you can send a "Play Song" event every time a user presses the Play button in a music player application.
To learn more about how to decide which events to track, refer to Select events to track.
Event properties
Event properties are details about events. For example, when someone presses the "Play Song" event in a music player application, event properties can track the genre. Any detail related to the event can be an event property.
Users
A user is the specific individual who completed an interaction with your product. Amplitude analyses depend on accurately tracking unique users. This is often trickier than it sounds, because your users can log in and out at will, browse anonymously, or use multiple devices.
To learn more, refer to Identify your users and How Amplitude tracks unique users by using a combination of device IDs, user IDs, and Amplitude IDs.
User properties
User properties are details about users. For example, use them to track whether a user is on a paid or free plan in a music player application.
Sessions
A session is the duration a user has your app in the foreground or has your website open. Sessions are useful for understanding the frequency and duration of your users' engagement with your product. Amplitude assigns a session ID to each session, and all events within the same session share the same session ID. To send data, Amplitude SDKs automatically generate and manage session IDs. However, you have to manage session IDs yourself when using HTTP APIs.
To learn more, refer to How Amplitude tracks sessions.
If you're new to Amplitude, complete this course to get started and learn more helpful definitions.
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