Amplitude Pathfinder: Ani Lopez’s Blueprint for Clean Data and Scalable Analytics

Amplitude Pathfinders are the quiet catalysts behind real change in Amplitude’s Cohort community. They are the analysts, marketers, founders, product managers, and devs whose often invisible work reminds us: data alone doesn’t move mountains. People do.

Ani Lopez brings a wealth of experience to the Amplitude community. Currently the Senior Measurement Strategy & Analytics Engineer at Unity, his 20-year career has spanned companies like VMware Cloud, Google Cloud, Electronic Arts, Decathlon, Expedia, and ASICS.

But what truly sets Ani apart isn’t just his resume—it’s his rare combination of steadfast devotion to data governance coupled with the guiding principle of putting strategy, not technicalities, first.

Or as Ani puts it, “solving problems and getting things done.”

Beth: Tell me about your data story and how you got started in analytics.

Ani: I started coding websites 27 years ago. The internet was just getting started in Spain, and I taught myself how to code—HTML and a little bit of JavaScript. There were no tools, so I did it all in Notepad.

Then I started coding websites and mobile apps until I transitioned more to the marketing side—mainly international enterprise search engine optimization. That’s when I totally stumbled upon the real value of data. With data, I could evaluate my marketing efforts and present those findings to clients objectively, help them understand the return on their investment, and discuss strategies backed by evidence.

For a while, I was doing both—search optimization and other marketing disciplines alongside analytics—but eventually, especially after moving to Canada and joining VKI Studios (which later became Cardinal Path and then Merkle), I moved away from the marketing side to work on data collection, implementation, privacy, data visualization, reporting, analysis, and business conversations with stakeholders.

Back then, there weren’t university programs or many online courses for analytics, so everything I learned was hands-on—working on real projects, being creative, and learning as much as possible from the community, books, and blogs.

When did you start using Amplitude specifically?

When I started at Unity four years ago, it was a Google Analytics shop. Their tool for analytics—Google Analytics Universal—was about to be sunset, and I decided that instead of going with inertia and using Google’s next iteration, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), I had the obligation as a professional to see what was in the market.

So I started to evaluate all the tools and ended up with Amplitude as the clear favorite. It was the right tool for what we needed. From there, I worked day in, day out with Amplitude.

What is one Amplitude feature that you couldn't live without and how do you use it?

Working in data collection and governance, the ability to define a schema—a very detailed schema—before you start gathering data is so essential to my work. The schema defines what’s allowed to be collected, so if an event is sent and there’s a property that doesn’t match the schema, it will be rejected. That ensures we’re always collecting clean data.

I also love the integrations with other tools that let us import and export data. For example, we use BigQuery quite a lot. So being able to export from there frequently into Amplitude keeps our data fresh so we can mix and match it with all the other sources we have in house.

If you could build any feature for Amplitude, what would it be and why?

I’d want even more governance tools—more visibility and control on a project-by-project basis. When you’re a small company, the tools are great. But when you’re an enterprise business operating across countries and cultures like Unity, I wish I had more tools to help me keep an eye on things.

For example, we have a limited number of events by organization in our contract, but I can’t limit events per project. That makes it hard to know if somebody’s going off the rails in terms of consumption or doing something incorrectly.

Also, having easy access to information about, say, who created a project and who is doing what for that project—that would be huge. Especially because Unity is always changing, people move teams often—we’d save a lot of time if we had clear visibility into who set each project, when they did so, and who is in charge of the project now. Otherwise, we end up spending a lot of time manually tracking people down to make sure we’re governing properly.

What is a recent challenge that kept you up at night and how did you approach solving it?

Creating a unified, standard way to track website activity when we’ve got data coming in from websites with different front-end and back-end technologies and different e-commerce platforms.

Since websites load differently based on network speed and location, having a solid approach to collect events in the right sequence was a big challenge. The solution came through a lot of trial and error and tinkering. That’s what I enjoy—getting my hands dirty, checking documentation. I’m old school and like to learn by getting in there and trying things, breaking things, figuring it out as I go.

In this case, I ended up using the best of both GTM and the feature set from Amplitude’s SDK to ensure events fire in the correct sequence when a page loads. Specifically: the SDK loads first, then the identify event for marketing processes, followed by the identify event for user properties, and finally the page view event and subsequent user-triggered events like clicks or form submissions.

This order is crucial—otherwise data becomes incomplete and inconsistent.

We also need to respect privacy by layering in consent mechanisms like cookie banners and getting consent before collecting data. Many companies don’t do this right, unfortunately, but I work closely with our legal department to ensure compliance.

Tell me about a project that you’re especially proud of and what made it meaningful to you.

The migration from Google’s Universal Analytics to Amplitude. It was just me and one other person. It was a big change, going from old school analytics, where it was not so event-based, to purely event-based Amplitude. We were learning a ton on the fly while making sure to keep the lights on and not lose any data in the migration.

Pulling that off in Unity’s complex environment as a small team, that was challenging.

I’m proud of what we did. We made the transition and kept most of the team happy (you can never keep everyone happy in a huge transition like this).

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

I’m really inspired by people who just won’t cut corners, no matter what. My dad was like that—I know it sounds cliche, but he really was. He never risked the quality of what he did to make a few extra bucks. He could rest easy because he knew he did a good job, an ethical job. And he owned his mistakes.

I saw the same qualities during a recent visit to the Zinacantan Mezcal production headquarters in Mexico when I met their owner and maestra mezcalera, Fabiola Torres Monfil. Watching her work, I was so inspired—she’s brave, humble, and a perfectionist who never cuts corners. You could tell that revenue was not the most important thing. It was doing things right, protecting the cultural heritage and sustainability of the land, and taking care of the people who make a living working there. Knowing there are people like that inspires me to do the same with my work.

If you could give one piece of advice to someone just starting with Amplitude, what would it be?

Understand how your data is collected and, based on that understanding, create a taxonomy of events and user properties that is going to be as sustainable as possible. Some people think they can skip this step or have someone else do it for them—not true. Those people usually realize that once they try analyzing the data and everything gets really difficult.

Once you’ve got a trustworthy source of consistent and proper data, you can confidently jump into the analysis and the representation of that data. My tip for that, and I recommend this internally and externally for people, is to go through the Amplitude’s badges and Amplitude Academy courses.

I went through them all myself recently and really think they’re fantastic. They don’t do the whole, “Here you have 30 different types of charts that you can create and how to use them” thing. They’re super practical—they teach you how to apply proper analysis techniques for retention, acquisition, monetization, and use the right chart or visualization technique in Amplitude to achieve that proper analysis. Plus, they’re fun!