How IU Group Drives Student Engagement with Amplitude

Insights/Actions/Outcome: IU Group faced a common challenge among fast-scaling digital products—fragmented data across tools made it difficult to answer key product questions, including activity, adoption, and retention rates of core features. By improving data governance and event management with Amplitude, IU Group’s product analytics team saw training attendance exceed expectations by 120%, while maintaining monthly and weekly active user rates of 50% and 25% respectively.

IU Group (IUG) is the largest university you’ve probably never heard of. It’s Europe’s largest fully digital university, offering flexible, high-quality education and accessible coursework to more than 150,000 students in 190 countries.

For more than twenty years, our core mission has been guiding students through complex, multi-year degree journeys in over 250 courses. Until recently, however, that path lacked clear visibility into how students engage and progress.

Re-examining lessons from former solutions

I’ve worked in product analytics at HelloFresh, Hotjar, and Flink, tackling everything from integrations and QA, to querying and storytelling. I learned that there’s almost always a need for extra analytics resources, regardless of the operating model. At IU Group, we simply had to start from building strong fundamentals.

Before formalizing our product analytics approach, our data efforts were decentralized, with multiple teams working in parallel but without a unified strategy. This created challenges around data consistency, adoption, and long-term maintainability. Recognizing the growing importance of product insights, I was brought in to help strengthen governance, establish clear ownership, and build confidence in our data. My focus was on streamlining the system, ensuring data quality, and empowering stakeholders to make better use of the tools and information available to them.

We faced challenges with tool misalignment and managing multiple data streams. The team had previously tried to analyze user segments to understand their post-login experience and how students study. It’s a very complex system, and even though we used Google Analytics and had some backend tracking through Kafka, these platforms weren’t powerful enough for the analysis we wanted. Without details on things like user journeys and engagement matrices, all we had was disjointed data that left us unable to answer key product questions.

This lack of detail put analysts in high demand, and there weren’t enough to go around. Instead, we acted as help desk agents, answering ad hoc questions. Amplitude allows for answering most ad hoc questions and relieves analysts from acting as help desk agents—saving several hours for more fun projects.

An A+ partnership for complex analytics

I have a long history with product analytics platforms, and Amplitude Analytics represents what product analytics should be. Even though I was familiar with Twilio Segment and Mixpanel, coming to Amplitude was a big difference and a huge “wow” moment.

Stakeholders and analysts shouldn’t have to search multiple platforms to find an event. Unlike Google Analytics, Amplitude presents a complete picture of event tracking while giving us the ability to a) control what’s visible to users and b) maintain and govern data in one place. The platform handles complex use cases, but it’s intuitive for stakeholders and analysts.

Amplitude also offers numerous third-party integrations. Hightouch is our go-to for marketing and personalization data. BigQuery is where our new data warehouse sits upstream. Seamless integrations enable us to explore raw event data in BigQuery, then feed clean data to Amplitude to create attributes for segmentation via Hightouch.

We leveraged Amplitude across all our digital products, including myCampus Web, our app, Syntea, and the B2C portal, to surface insights we wouldn’t have had before.

Metrics that pass every test

We had three goals from our Amplitude partnership, and we achieved each one:

1. Enabling data-driven decisions. We created an event tracking plan that became a single source of truth. This plan, along with Amplitude's mind-blowing version control features, immediately boosted data quality and trust. We don’t roll out any feature without tracking it in Amplitude, which means everyone can access the information we need to make product-related decisions.
2. Empower teams and analysts. Post-implementation, engineers create their own templates and structure their naming conventions for simplicity and transparency. And instead of analysts working as help desk support staff, they’ve shifted back to their strength: analytics. Now, even a small team can answer more complex questions in three or four clicks and have the capacity to handle more queries.
3. Ensuring reliability and scalability. We wanted to avoid accumulating any tech debt. Adopting Amplitude meant we weren’t adding any maintenance costs and, in fact, would increase data quality over time.

We were pleased by how quickly our team took to Amplitude. Our training attendance beat initial expectations by 120%. These days, IU Group maintains a monthly active user rate (MAU) of 50% and a weekly active user rate of 25%.

Another exciting result comes from cost savings and ROI. Amplitude behaves like an analyst’s right hand, keeping the business lean. After using Amplitude to take a closer look at legacy tools and features, our engineers have sunset unused features, leading to decreased overhead and maintenance costs.

Scaling data confidence

IU Group wants to drive individual progress through our career-oriented degree programs. We’ve done this by improving study progression and reducing churn.

Study progression involves the number of exams a user takes, how fast they complete them, and how well they score. We’ve found that users with strong study progression are less likely to churn, and increasing the frequency of study time directly impacts study progression. We enrich Amplitude with transactional data, use the enrichments as the attributes, and then segment our audience to understand user activity. That’s how Amplitude helps us identify the features that can positively impact user retention and in turn mitigate churn risks.

I have to give kudos to the Amplitude community—it’s one of the most active and supportive spaces I’ve seen. It’s an incredibly engaged group of people who share ideas, ask questions, and help each other grow. That exchange really sped up my learning curve and helped me explore the platform’s capabilities more deeply.

Internally, we’re now expanding Amplitude’s use cases and seeing growing demand across teams to access and explore data themselves. It’s great to see, as it shows how transparency and data-driven decision-making are becoming part of our culture.

The governance and confidence we’ve built with Amplitude will also be fundamental to the success of our new AI products.

We’re shifting from analytics support toward being the engine of data-driven change. The foundation we’ve built with Amplitude enables us to make faster, better decisions that strengthen our mission to make education accessible to everyone.