Table of Contents
01.How to track user activity on your website or app with Amplitude
02.Measure and improve user engagement

User behavior analytics helps you:

  • Leverage user insights to improve your product and meet business goals: increase engagement, prevent churn, and drive revenue
  • Understand not just what your users are doing, but why they’re doing it
  • Answer complex behavioral questions with just a few clicks — no SQL required

What is behavioral analytics, and why do you need it?

Behavioral analytics is a type of analytics that provides information about how users behave inside mobile applications or websites. It goes beyond basic metrics like daily active users or pageviews, revealing how engagement with different features can lead to retention, conversion, and revenue.

A deep understanding of user behavior is necessary to move all of your core metrics, whether it’s retention, lifetime value, conversion rate, or revenue. Other analytics platforms only give you surface-level metrics: they show you what is happening in your product, but they can’t tell you why.

You need to understand why your users do what they do, so that you can improve your product to meet your business goals.

Amplitude has made it possible for anyone to answer complex behavioral questions with just a few clicks. These questions would previously have required data scientists, custom queries, and hours to days to answer, but now are accessible to anyone who can use a mouse.

How to track user activity on your website or app with Amplitude

The most accurate web and mobile user behavior analysis

Today, users access your product in different ways: they may visit your website first and later download your mobile app, or they might explore products on your mobile website and then make a purchase on their desktop computer a few days later. They also use your app on different devices, from their smartphone, to tablet, to laptop.

Behavioral analytics software that allows you to track user activity across platforms and devices is critical for an accurate view of your user behavior.

“Amplitude has made us smarter about understanding our users.”
- Trenton Huey, Head of Analytics, Life360

You don’t want to double-count a user who uses you on both their iPhone and their iPad, and you want to be able to tie together actions that users have taken across their devices or platforms. Other user analytics platforms fall short in identifying unique users, but Amplitude gives you the most accurate picture possible.

Amplitude provides event-based analytics that measure the actions users take within your product. An event is any distinct action a user can perform (like sending a message or purchasing an item), or any activity associated with a user (for example, receiving a push notification).

We make user tracking easy — you can use our iOS, Android, or Javascript SDKs, or send server-side events via our API.

Anything you can think to track, you can send to Amplitude. Our data model is user-centric, so all events are tied to a user and you can see an individual’s entire activity history.

Measure and improve user engagement

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. You need to know whether your last feature launch was successful, or whether your latest marketing campaign is paying off.

“We use Amplitude to track top line metrics, but the real power of it is going deep.”
- Alex Tew, CEO, Calm

Amplitude makes it dead simple to measure engagement: how many people are using your new feature? Easily drill down with event segmentation, formulas, and behavioral cohorts. See how often users interact with your product each week or month. With Amplitude’s user behavior tracking, you can even visualize all of the paths users take as they navigate through your app or website.

Learn how user behaviors correlate with your KPIs

Your job is to meet your business goals and KPIs — and Amplitude is here to help you do that. To improve your Day 30 retention or increase in-app purchases, behavioral analytics can help you discover the drivers of those key metrics.

Amplitude Compass finds the behaviors that are most predictive of retention for new users. By surfacing these actions, Compass shows you what features you should focus on and what to nudge new users toward.

Behavioral cohorting allows you to define custom user cohorts based on actions or properties so that you can understand which behaviors impact your core metrics. You can also track your AB tests in Amplitude to measure how experiments impact downstream conversion and retention.