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by aacook
3970 days ago
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What questions are you trying to answer about your web-app? While I think reports like individual user streams are neat, I find they're not very good at diagnosing a product and driving growth. One of the best charts for doing that is a simple cohort analysis / retention chart. If you've been storing historical data about your users in your database or in a log file, one thing you could try is importing historical data into Amplitude and then looking at your retention chart. I just finished doing this for a friend in Mixpanel earlier today. Here's the result:
http://aacook.co/retention.png This chart only uses two user events (Sign Up and some usage event you define) but tells you so much. Week/week acquisition (number of new users signing up) is in the first column, new user activation in the 2nd column (number of new sign ups who reached a moment of value) and a basic form of retention (number of users coming back at week N). In my friend's startup, they're doing a great job with new user acquisition but they have a clear onboarding/activation problem. Less than half of new sign ups reach the authentic usage state. In the following week, another 50% of those users drop off. |
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I was only referencing the fact that the individual user data appeared to be correct in one view, even though the session length distribution chart was way-off. Had it been off for all users, it would be a big problem, but only affects the first session (See my edit above).
I agree cohort analysis is useful, but not particularly difficult to capture and chart on the server side for web apps, or mobile apps with a server back-end. For SPAs or hybrid or mobile apps you need a facility to capture client side events, which is where something like Amplitude really adds value.
It's one less thing to build or run, but if it's hamstrung by limited reporting, free isn't really free - you have to pay to unlock the value of that event stream.