Release Notes: August 2017

Happy August! In this product update, you will find information on:

• New Features
  • Autocomplete in Custom Formulas
  • Property Count, Trendlines, and Other New Functions!
  • Walkthroughs
  • Official Dashboards
• Feature Improvements
  • Behavioral Cohorts: Descriptions
  • Lifecycle: Dormant Users
• Resources
  • New Webinar Series: Instrumentation Trainings
  • Product Analytics Playbook: Mastering Retention
• SDK Updates

Amplitude Product Training Webinar Series

Join one of our interactive webinars! Register here for New User Trainings, chart-specific Deep Dives, and Instrumentation Trainings.

1) New Features

Autocomplete in Custom Formulas

Our Custom Formulas feature in the Event Segmentation chart is a powerful feature that allows you to write formulas to calculate specific analyses and metrics. We received feedback that while this feature was extremely useful, it was difficult to remember which functions were available and the syntax required to use them. As a result, we’ve implemented autocomplete! As you type, the formulas text box will provide suggestions and clarify what parameters are needed for each function. Hint: Press ctrl+space to display all available functions!

Property Count, Trendline, and Other New Functions!

Along with autocomplete, our Product Development team has shipped 12 new functions that you can leverage in formulas. As a reminder, you can plot multiple custom formulas on the same chart by separating out the formulas with a semicolon (;). To read more about Custom Formulas, see our documentation here. Below are examples of how you can leverage the new formulas. If you group event A, ‘Play Song or Video’ by the property ‘Content_ID’, then the formula PROPCOUNT(A) will return the number of unique ‘Content_ID’ values in the given time interval. Let’s say that you want to find the 90th percentile event frequency for your critical event across all users in order to identify your power users. For example, if ‘Play Song or Video’ is your critical event, then FREQPERCENTILE(A, 0.90) will show you the 90th percentile event frequency. Here, A denotes the ‘Play Song or Video’ event. Below, we can see that on {insert date}, 90% of users triggered ‘Play Song or Video’ {insert number} or fewer times. This means that users who trigger ‘Play Song or Video’ more than {insert number} times on a given day are your power users. You can also plot a trendline on top of other metrics in an Event Segmentation chart in order to compare data points. This is calculated with ordinary least-squares linear regression. For example, the formula TRENDLINE(UNIQUES(A)); UNIQUES(A) where event A is ‘[Amplitude] Any Active Event’ would plot the trendline of your active users on top of your active user count.

Walkthroughs

You can now go through in-product walkthroughs that will take you on a step-by-step tutorial of Amplitude’s Event Segmentation and Funnel Analysis charts. To access the walkthrough, click the “TOUR” icon in the top right-hand corner of those charts. This will bring up a module from which you can select the specific walkthrough that you are interested in. Each walkthrough will help you build a chart from scratch!

Official Dashboards

Admins and managers now have the ability to mark dashboards as “Official” via the Settings page. We highly recommend marking your “source of truth” dashboards to be “Official” for other users in your company to easily follow. “Official” dashboards will show up automatically at the top of each user’s pinned dashboards sidebar.

2) Feature Improvements

Behavioral Cohorts: Descriptions

(Enterprise Only) You can now add a description to your Behavioral Cohorts to help describe the cohorts you create. This will enable you to have more context surrounding your cohorts besides the definition and the title. To add a description to your cohort, click on the title of your cohort to bring up the description text box.

Lifecycle: Dormant Users

(Enterprise Only) We’ve made a change in our platform so that the Lifecycle chart labels users who have not returned to your product but have been active in the previous time period as dormant and not churned. The way Lifecycle metrics are calculated has not changed and this update is purely in nomenclature.

3) Resources

New Webinar Series: Instrumentation Training

We’re proud to introduce a new webinar series that focuses on instrumentation of Amplitude! This training is meant for developers and product managers who will be responsible for instrumenting Amplitude. We will go over the following topics to prevent common instrumentation errors:

1. Methods of Sending Data
2. Amplitude Schema (Event Types & Properties)
3. User Identification
4. Session Tracking
5. Additional Best Practices
   Register for a webinar today!

Product Analytics Playbook: Mastering Retention

In February, we released the Product Analytics Playbook, Volume 1: Mastering Retention. This first volume provides a thorough 155-page guide on how to use data to make better product decisions and improve user retention. You can currently [download the full volume online](https://www.amplitude.com/mastering-retention.

4) SDK Updates

Please find below updates we’ve made to our Android SDK. We highly recommend that you always update to the latest version of our SDKs.

Amplitude-Android v2.14.1

• Since v2.14.0
  • Switch to an internal implementation of isEmptyString instead of Android TextUtils.

5) Questions?

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out to contact@amplitude.com. You can find previous release notes here.