Udemy sheds light on learners’ needs, boosting subscriptions by 40%

Insight/Action/Outcome: The product team at Udemy—a leading online skills marketplace and learning platform —wanted to attract, excite, and retain online learners. By shedding light on user behavior with Amplitude Analytics, Udemy gained clear direction on changes they could make. Personalizing the browsing experience created a massive 40% boost in individual subscriptions and a 4% increase in ARR (annual recurring revenue) for Udemy Business.

Education—how do we turn this everyday word into an exciting learning journey at our education platform Udemy? By understanding what our customers really need and want—that’s what we’re trying to achieve with data.

Udemy’s goal is to provide flexible and effective courses that develop skill sets for both individuals and entire companies. Not only do we offer more than 220,000 courses, we pride ourselves on our constant improvements. Our Udemy Business subscription model aims to inspire companies to upskill their employees by giving them access to a curated collection of 27,000+ top-rated courses. Ultimately, we want to help them achieve critical business outcomes and stay competitive by training with our engaging, on-demand courses.

Before I joined Udemy as Principal Product Manager, I had been using Amplitude’s solutions since 2015. Now, I use them so much that I think I’m in the top 1% of Amplitude users at Udemy! It’s become a huge driver in understanding what our learners are looking for and how we can serve them better. In doing so, we hope to increase the number of subscriptions and grow our customer base.

Answering the “What” and “How”

As a product manager, I ask two questions: “What are our learners looking for?” and “How do we help them find it?”

For answers, we need insights into what leads users to find, purchase, and start a course. That knowledge guides the product design and engineering teams in building the right products and solutions, and how we present the courses online. And since we rely on teamwork, one of my other main goals was to establish a culture of using Amplitude Analytics in our team. Thanks to supportive people like Aracely Payan from Amplitude, my team became Amplitude-savvy in no time.

Amplitude Analytics is so intuitive and time-saving—previously we would have to write queries manually and needed additional expertise to understand which tables we were looking at. Then we’d have to validate the queries, which would sometimes result in errors or information we weren’t looking for. With Analytics, however, we get clear results in real-time, and they’re all visualized clearly within the dashboard. It’s also easy to switch between different views. For example, going from an overall view to drilling down into individual experiments, like how courses are performing for new users as opposed to returning users, whether in the US or in another country. The analytics process would have usually taken me hours previously. Now, I can perform it in about 10 minutes or so—it’s way faster.

With the insights we now have access to, our product managers can determine what kind of funnels or segmentations to build. These are useful during the product planning phases to ensure we’re actually solving problems our users have in the best way possible.

An aha moment that led to 40% more subscribers

How would you go from “I want to learn” to “I’m learning”? What’s the key turning point? This user behavior pattern was what we wanted to discover with the Journeys feature in Analytics.

First, we needed to understand what pages customers were landing on when they first arrived on the website, and what next steps they took. This is actually something I couldn’t get with individual queries, but could with Analytics—and super fast, too! I can now map the user journey and see what common steps lead people to either find what they’re looking for and stay, or what problems lead them to leave.

On Udemy, learners can either purchase individual courses or get unlimited access to a curated collection of 12,000+ top-rated courses through a subscription. Our biggest aha moment with Analytics was when we discovered that learners who were interested in several skills were 3x more likely to get a subscription than those who only sought one or two skills. Based on these insights, we decided to show learners the best option for them—a recommended single course for new learners interested in one skill, and a subscription for more ambitious learners.

The results were dramatic! Within the experiment population, we saw a 40% increase in new subscribers, who were learning much more and spending longer periods of time consuming that knowledge. Everyone was astounded by the results because it’s not common to see such a significant improvement in subscriptions. It showed us the power of data and how crucial it is to personalize the user experience. For me, this is one of the largest growth initiatives I’ve brought to Udemy.

More clarity, more subscribers, 4% more annual revenue

Besides individual subscribers, we also wanted to more effectively attract companies to sign up for Udemy Business—a subscription plan for companies that allows their employees to access 26k+ top-rated courses. For this, we asked the question: “How do organizations find Udemy Business?” and “What leads them to sign up?”

We used segmentation and funnel analyses with Analytics to figure this out, and the results were surprising. It turns out that about 50% of the organizations that signed up actually discovered Udemy Business from the “logged out” homepage—and even more surprising, these visitors never actually had an account before and, therefore, might not have been familiar with Udemy at all. In addition, we found that organizations that had previously browsed both technical and professional courses were much more likely to sign up.

So we decided to redesign our “logged out” homepage and put our best content front and center—showcasing a range of technical- and leadership-related courses, plus those involving trending skills like working with generative artificial intelligence. We also highlighted hands-on learning courses and placed links to customer stories. The results? We were able to increase our experiment population's annual recurring revenue for Udemy Business by 4% because people saw and got what they were looking for.

Strong foundation for a bright future

Analytics has become so integral to our daily lives that we are always using it to discover more user insights and build the right products that meet both our customers’ and our business's needs. I love how fast it enables me to slice and dice data and share it with the organization and how it’s given us the confidence to make the right decisions.

I can definitely see myself using Analytics moving forward because it’s given me the ability to truly understand what Udemy learners need and has empowered us to become a more dynamic, impactful platform.