Amplitude Pathfinder: How Dan Grainger Bet on Amplitude & Won

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.

In 2022, while many large enterprises were doubling down on , Dan Grainger was instigating change. As Haven’s Head of Analytics, he’d earlier assessed Google’s GA4 beta and then made a decision that would reshape how the business thinks about its digital data.

Today, we’re speaking with Dan Grainger, Head of Analytics at Haven, one of the largest providers of UK holidays with 40+ coastal holiday parks, and now, an Amplitude Pathfinder.

What makes Dan a true Amplitude Pathfinder isn’t just his technical expertise—it’s his tireless dedication to making sure that the tooling actually works for his team and the business. Before making any decisions, he surveyed Haven’s entire Google Analytics user base to understand their actual needs and frustrations. Then he partnered with Amplitude to create custom training courses tailored to different business teams rather than relying on generic onboarding.

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

Dan: I’ve been in digital analytics since 2007 or 2008—back when it wasn’t even called digital analytics. It was just someone playing around with web traffic data.

I started in academia as a researcher, but after completing my PhD, I left the field to join Capital One’s graduate scheme. Originally, I was doing credit card valuations modelling—what we’d probably call data science today. And then I fell, for lack of a better phrase, into web analytics through a rotation to the marketing team. They said, “Hey Dan, we’ve got this Visual Sciences tool; can you start doing some analysis on web traffic?”

And I said, “What’s Visual Science? What’s web traffic?” This was long before Adobe acquired Visual Sciences and digital analytics became the big business it is today.

How did you eventually get started with Amplitude?

That came much later. For the first decade of my career, I was very much an Adobe Analytics (Omniture!) guy. From there, I did a few years with companies invested in Google Analytics (GA), and then worked for a small boutique consultancy for a couple of years. Most of our clients wanted better implementations of GA.

I joined Haven in June 2019 as part of a major digital transformation. The business had just hired its first Chief Digital Officer and was starting the journey away from a legacy waterfall approach—web releases every four to six weeks or whatever the cadence was—to modern product and technology practices. At the time, it was a bit like joining a startup in a large business. It’s actually pretty funny—we were literally working in a converted storage room in our office because there was no desk space for our new (and growing) digital team. They removed all the storage cabinets, put a bunch of desks in, and that became the “digital cupboard.” Where we are today, with loads of product managers, engineers, and more, all working fully remote, it’s a far cry from that cupboard.

My role was very open-ended—“Dan, come lead analytics, we need someone to build it out.” We had Google Analytics, but it wasn’t in good shape, there was no proper data layer, and Google Tag Manager was disorganized and not trusted. In general, things had suffered from not having a dedicated owner.

The turning point came when investigating Google’s beta of its “App + Web” properties, which would later become GA4. I assessed this and quickly concluded it wouldn’t be right for Haven. Generally, when Google releases a beta version like that, it’s a reasonable bet they’re planning to sunset the old version.

COVID, of course, got in the way, so in late 2021, I began conversations with Amplitude. I’d previously looked at Amplitude as a possible complement to GA, given its superior capabilities in product and behavioral analytics, but this was now a replacement conversation, not just a complement.

What specifically were you looking for in a new platform? What made you think GA4 wouldn’t work?

The absolute necessity was a platform that was user-friendly for non-specialists—product managers, marketers, engineers, and more. People who aren’t data specialists but need to use analytics daily for improved decision-making. All the other usual factors—cost, effort to implement, technical difficulty—all become secondary. If we can’t confidently put the tool in the hands of non-specialists, what’s the point?

I surveyed our entire GA user base to understand their needs, likes, and frustrations with the tool. What I discovered was that we were in a relatively risk-free position to move to an alternative, as people had already been struggling with Universal Analytics. Furthermore, our digital marketers were creating their audiences in tools other than GA, further reducing risk and complexity for a potential migration.

The main issue was the old Google Analytics’ overly complicated data model. You had user scope, session scope, hit scope, product scope—and yes, all of this stuff still exists, but it was all presented in such a convoluted way that it caused people to make mistakes. For example, the UI could easily let you combine data of different scopes in a chart or table, leading to a bunch of zeroes and an impression that it was wrong or broken.

For non-specialists to understand that model was something of a nightmare. Some people liked the out-of-the-box reports, but as soon as you tried to create something custom, that’s where the struggle began. Amplitude’s interface encouraged you to understand the relationships between data points in the right way.

You mentioned this was during a digital transformation. How did you convince the organization to choose Amplitude over the industry giants?

It was definitely a leap. In the UK, it was very unusual for a large business to choose something other than Google or Adobe; they’d been the dominant players for years.

But I had a few things working in my favor. First, the results from my user survey showed people weren’t satisfied with the existing tool. Second, when we piloted Amplitude, the tool spoke for itself in terms of ease of use. I got so much positive feedback—people saying, “How have we not found this before? It’s so much easier.”

The key was doing proper user research upfront. There’s absolutely no point in looking at any tool if you don’t understand what your user base needs to do with it. I had to answer the fundamental question: What does my business need this tool to do to make people’s days easier?

What project are you most proud of from your time at Haven?

Definitely the migration to Amplitude. It was a really big deal and quite an unknown territory. When we first looked at Amplitude, you could see the direction it was going, but honestly (hands in the air, open honesty), it wasn’t great for marketing at the time. It was phenomenal for product analytics and exceptional for data management and integration capabilities, but marketing was a weak spot. That changed quickly and continues to do so.

The migration itself was rather demanding. We accomplished everything in-house, with much of the work done by me and one team member. However, it was extremely successful and went down well; we haven’t looked back since.

I talk to a million users, and I feel like there are a couple of things you do particularly well, because it doesn’t always go this smoothly…

Oh, 100%. I’ve done a number of similar migrations in the past and learned that while, yes, you want to understand the tool, the functionality, pricing, SLOs, the legals, etc., etc., if you don’t actually understand what your user base intends to do with the tool, little else really matters.

So I always go back to those first principles.

What advice would you give someone just getting started with Amplitude?

It depends on your role.

If you’re not a data specialist—a PM, engineer, or designer, etc—I’d start by diving into the core charts that matter most for your business. In our case, that’s Funnels, Segmentation, Data Tables, and User Journeys—those four modules get hammered compared to anything else in Amplitude. For us, it’s about understanding flows and improving the experience of people in getting from A to B—whether that’s purchasing something or a customer self-serving in their account. And, of course, understanding and improving the performance of marketing channels and campaigns.

If you’re a specialist, definitely throw yourself into —the data management section. That’s your playground where you ingest your events and properties, then configure and govern them. If you can understand that foundation, everything else becomes much easier because it all flows from there.

Any advice for people struggling with the transition from session-level to event-level thinking?

This often comes down to how well Amplitude has been set up. If your setup is solid and designed with your end users in mind, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

Marketing teams should already be familiar enough with their websites and apps to understand . They’re not just driving traffic to a homepage—they want quality traffic that flows through the site and converts to a particular action. Whether that’s a holiday booking for us or selling jeans for a clothing retailer.

One more thing for specialists: overindex on the time to get your right. Really, properly think it through. You’re better off spending more time getting it right from the start than you are cleaning it up later.

How do you get non-technical people to care about using data in their work?

When we first started, I worked directly with the Amplitude team to create a couple of courses.

I didn’t want a one-size-fits-all course. I wanted it more targeted, based on the people who were being onboarded at the time. So, we split it into the two core parts of our business at that time: sales, which focused on things like selling holidays or generating leads to sell caravans; and the other part—which was growing at the time and is now really big—experience. That’s very much the “I’m going on my holiday” side—booking activities, swimming, restaurant reservations, mobile food ordering, and more.

The underlying data set was all in the same place, within a single Amplitude project, so it was seamlessly connected. And the basics were the same—here’s Amplitude, here’s how eventing works, how to use the various modules, etc—but when we went into the interfaces, we would use the different pockets of data relevant to those worlds and focus on some real use questions and examples. That really helped, using our actual data and questions, rather than, for example, a dummy retail website with random data that doesn’t mean anything to our team. That’s the special sauce where we make it true and actually say, “This is your data. This is how it’s been crafted for you. This will make your day better.”

So, if you have a new joiner, do they go through a self-serve learning program that you’ve already built out? Or is there like a sync?

We have recordings of the sessions I just mentioned, which we encourage new joiners to watch in their own time, and we also recommend the self-serve courses in . Following the initial onboarding, we host monthly drop-in clinics, where individuals can join to advance their skills

What’s one feature in Amplitude you can’t live without?

Amplitude Data—the governance module. That was one of the key things that pushed the sale over the line for us. At the time we were evaluating, no other tool came close to Amplitude's features, and they’ve improved further since.

That data governance module is worth its weight in gold. It’s like having security staff at your front door, checking if events are expected, in the correct format, with intended property values, etc. Plus, it has monitoring features that alert you if something unexpected comes through.

The metadata capabilities are also worth their weight in gold. You can add descriptions and images to events and properties, so people don’t need to ask, “What does this mean?” It’s so useful and helped so much when we did the migration.

If you could build any feature for Amplitude, what would it be? And why does this feature matter for you?

Without hesitation, improvements to user admin and access management. Amplitude is clearly a fit for Enterprise scale now, so user management should reflect it. We understand which elements of Amplitude are relevant to the various job roles within our business, so we should be able to control access to these accordingly, rather than everything being available to everyone (which, of course, has its risks!). I happen to know this is on the way, looking forward to it landing!

Who do you draw inspiration from in the analytics space?

I’ve been a professional since 2007, so with almost two decades in this field, most of my inspiration has come from social events, conferences, networking, meeting people, and—outside of face-to-face interactions—reading blogs and posts. I can’t tell you how many blogs and posts I’ve read, particularly in the early days when I was an Omniture/Adobe guy and was the king of that. He literally wrote the book on Adobe Analytics and inspired so many people with his vast knowledge. Then, in the tracking/tag management world, was always a go-to for inspiration.

These are individuals who’ve established themselves as the definitive experts in their respective niches, sharing knowledge that helps others grow. But honestly, you also draw inspiration from the people around you within your own company. I’ve been at Haven for over six years now—longer than anywhere else in my career. I wouldn’t stay somewhere this long if the people around me weren’t inspiring enough to make me want to keep growing here. A company is nothing without the right people.

I love the high bar nature of the people you’re mentioning…I worry about that with AI, will we lose depth?

To be honest, I don’t really use AI for anything other than speeding up tasks (yet!). Regarding content, I’m more concerned that it will become too similar than that it will lack depth. When it comes to content, I’m old-fashioned—people win.