PRODUCT ANALYTICS PL AYBOOK

Volume 2

MASTERING
ENGAGEMENT
How to build engaging products that
your customers value
I think of user engagement as the fuel powering
products. The best products take that fuel and propel
the product and with it, the company forward.

SARAH TAVEL – General Partner at Benchmark,

formerly Product Manager of Search & Recommendations at Pinterest
Special Thanks About Amplitude

Special thanks to the team at Optimizely and Braze, as well as our Amplitude is the world's first product intelligence platform that combines
customers Blue Apron and Postmates, for partnering with us to share their customer data and growth best practices to help digital teams scale their
engagement use cases. Also thanks to Nir Eyal for sharing his expertise on business faster.
user engagement and Sarah Tavel for her support.

And finally, thanks to all of the teams who use Amplitude:

you inspire us with your stories and provide invaluable feedback. Read and download Mastering Retention
This book (and Amplitude) wouldn't exist without you! amplitude.com/mastering-engagement

Have a question/comment? Email us

Authors playbook@amplitude.com
Sandhya Hegde
Archana Madhavan Learn more about Amplitude
amplitude.com

Contributors If you share or write about the contents of this book, we just ask that you
Justin Bauer give credit to Amplitude and link back to amplitude.com. Thanks!
Carter Foxgrover
Paul Koullick
Michael Ottavi-Brannon
Tanner McGrath A note on examples:
Nate Franklin Although this playbook draws on real-life examples from companies that
Cara Harshman we work with, we have altered examples to prevent disclosing specific
Austin Hay companies and their real data. We've tried to preserve the lessons and
+ the whole Amplitude team principles behind the examples as much as possible.

Book Design
Meredith Fay
Diana Stoyanova
Jenny Chang
Sabine Althauser © 2019 Amplitude, Inc.
TABLE OF 01 THE THREE GAMES OF ENGAGEMENT 06

CONTENTS 1.1
1.2
Why user engagement matters
Which engagement game are you playing?
07
08
1.3 Defining a north star that drives engagement 09
1.4 Defining customer value exchange for your game 13
1.5 Introducing the engagement loop 17
1.6 Measuring your engagement game 22
1.7 Taking action 31
Worksheet: Your product team’s north star metric 32

02 ACTIVATING NEW USERS 33

2.1 Defining growth in new users 36

2.2 Breaking down new user activation 37
2.3 The ladder of engagement 45
2.4 Measuring new user activation 50
2.5 Taking action 70
Case Study: How Blue Apron uses A/B testing and product 71
analytics to activate more new customers
03 MAKING USERS STICK 74

3.1 The engagement loop revisited 76

3.2 An intro to stickiness 81
3.3 Build triggers into your loop 84
3.4 Setting your stickiness strategy 87
3.5 Measuring stickiness 89
3.6 Taking action 99
Case Study: Postmates uses Amplitude and Braze to 100
build an engagement strategy that gets users to stick

04 SETTING UP YOUR ENGAGEMENT STACK 102

4.1 Why you need an engagement stack 103

4.2 Choosing your stack 104
4.3 Understanding the layers 106
4.4 Spreading adoption 109
4.5 Maintaining the stack 109
4.6 Taking action 110

GLOSSARY 111
CHAPTER 01
THE THREE GAMES OF ENGAGEMENT

Most products disappear into obscurity almost as soon as they're out of the press
spotlight. Research shows that the average app loses almost its entire user base in
just three months(1). Even if the latest media buzz or marketing campaign brings in a
wave of new signups, most products miss the mark on delivering actual value to their
new users—and if those users don’t find meaningful value early on, they’re gone before
you have a chance to show them anything more. That’s why having a strategy for user
engagement is so critical.

[1]
http://andrewchen.co/new-data-shows-why-losing-80-of-your-mobile-users-is-normal-and-that-the-best-apps-do-much-better/

Mastering Engagement — 6
 Topics covered in this chapter: The retention lifecycle framework
TERMS TO KNOW After a new user is onboarded (or a churned user
1.1 - Why user engagement matters is resurrected), that user must engage with the
Retention is a measure of how many 1.2 - Which engagement game are you playing? product through a number of value-adding inter-
users return to your product over time 1.3 - Defining a north star that drives actions before being activated into a regular cur-
after some initial event (usually first engagement rent user. A current user who then becomes more
use). 1.4 - Defining customer value exchange for and more engaged with different dimensions of
your game your product can then become a power user.
Engagement is a measure of how much 1.5 - Introducing the engagement loop
or how often users interact with your 1.6 - Measuring your engagement game Engagement matters because, ultimately, it
product. 1.7 - Taking action drives revenue. If you consistently deliver value
to your users and help them discover that value,
Onboarding is a series of steps within they’ll stay engaged with the product, keep com-
your product designed to show new ing back, and keep wanting to invest their time
users how they can use the product to 1.1 I Why user engagement matters and money into your product.
obtain value.
In the Product Analytics Playbook Volume I, we
Activation is a point or phase at the introduced the Retention Lifecycle Framework—a
end of Onboarding during which a framework for analyzing retention depending on
new user obtains enough value from whether a user of your product is new, current, Power
the product such that they become a or resurrected. User engagement is what directs users

current active user of the product. the flow of users between each of these buckets.

Current
users

n rea
atio ct
iva
tiv t
ac ion

acquisition
New Resurrected

churn
users users

ch n
u rn ur
ch
z
Z ion
ct
rre
The retention lifecycle framework es
u
Dormant r
users

7 — Three Games of Engagement

1.2 | Which engagement game At product-led companies, the product team
are you playing? isn't simply a cost center of the business whose PRO TIP
success is measured by the number of things
Based on our research of products at over 12,000 shipped(2). By solving customer pain and building At Amplitude, we have now run
companies and 5 trillion user actions, we have things that deliver value, product teams have workshops with dozens of large digital
learned that all digital products play one of three a very real impact on the business—that's why businesses to help them refine their
possible games of user engagement. They’re building a great product should be treated like a product strategy.
either playing to win attention, transaction, or game of chess.
productivity: When we share the Three Games of
Just as chess grand masters have to analyze the Engagement framework with product
1. The Attention Game: Products playing this board to map out their strategy, (sometimes up managers and executives, their
game are trying to maximize the amount to eight moves in advance!), so must product first reaction is to say that all three
of time users spend in-product. Industries managers proactively analyze the set up of their engagement games are important to
that typically play this game today are media, customer engagement game. them. While this is true, making a clear
gaming and any company displaying adver- choice about which game matters most
tisements to you. Once you know your game, with the right tactics is what strategy is all about. Strategy
2. The Transaction Game: Products playing in place, PMs can get users to their aha moment is what you say no to. Product teams
this game help customers make purchase faster, start them on their journey up the engage- need to make a clear choice about
decisions with confidence. Companies you ment ladder, and set them up in successful whether they are playing the attention,
will often find playing this game are e-com- engagement loops—but more on this in Chapter transaction, or productivity game so
merce platforms. 2 and 3. they can focus on winning it.
3. The Productivity Game: Products playing
this game create an easy and reliable way to The first order of business is to ask yourself which
complete an existing task or workflow for engagement game you are playing and then
the user. This game is predominant in busi- define the right metrics of success for your game.
ness-to-business software.

Attention Game Transaction Game Productivity Game

[2]
https://amplitude.com/blog/2017/10/04/thrive-product-led-era

Mastering Engagement — 8
 TERMS TO KNOW 1.3 | Defining a north star that
PRO TIP
drives engagement
A north star metric defines the
relationship between the customer A north star metric is the key measure of success Beware of vanity metrics, especially for
problems the product team is trying for the product team in a company. It defines the your north star. “Daily Active Users” or
to solve and the revenue the business relationship between the customer problems “Registered Users” are not good core
aims to generate by doing so. that the product team is trying to solve and the KPIs because they say nothing about
revenue that the business aims to generate by what engages your customers. When
A KPI, also known as a Key Performance doing so. teams fail to connect engaged customer
Indicator, is a measurable value that value directly to their north star metric,
demonstrates how well an organization The product north star serves three critical pur- they risk leading their business down the
is achieving its current objective. poses in any company: wrong path.

An OKR, also known as Objectives 1. It gives your organization clarity and align-
and Key Results, is a framework for ment on what the product team is optimiz-
defining and tracking company, team, ing for and what can be traded off. completes a transaction, you win. But let’s say
or personal objectives. 2. It communicates the product organization’s you and your team don’t clearly define the game
impact and progress to the rest of the you’re playing. Instead of shipping features that
A leading indicator is a value or company, resulting in more support and get customers to make purchases, you end up
measurement that can be used to acceleration of strategic product initiatives. shipping features that increase the time custom-
indicate future business outcomes. 3. Most importantly, it holds product teams ers spend browsing for goods. This might not
Good north star metrics are leading accountable to an outcome. do your business much good. In fact, it might do
indicators of success. On the other harm if you inadvertently decrease the number of
hand, metrics like ARPU and monthly Purpose #3 is where aligning your north star purchases being completed.
revenue are lagging indicators. metric with your engagement game becomes
crucial. If you measure product success on a Knowing which engagement game you’re playing
north star that doesn’t represent customers is the first step towards defining a north star
using your product in a way that they get value, metric and set of KPIs that focuses your team’s
you risk optimizing for the wrong metric and efforts on shipping features that create value for
ultimately the wrong outcome. customers, and ultimately helps you win.

For instance, suppose you’re on the product team

at an e-commerce company and you should be
playing the transaction game—when a customer

09 — Three Games of Engagement

 EXAMPLE

When LinkedIn Endorsement’s

past north star metric drove the
wrong engagement game

In 2012, LinkedIn introduced their ‘Endorsements’

feature. Endorsements allowed LinkedIn users to
vouch for the expertise of other users. It served as
validation of a user’s skills and expertise as well as
a way for recruiters to find candidates with specific
skills.

Initially, the north star metric for Endorsements was

total endorsements given. In order to increase this
metric, LinkedIn suggested endorsements for users
to give their connections.

What the team discovered, however, was that

although the suggestions did prompt more users
to endorse their connections (and thus boosted LinkedIn’s old Endorsements feature(4)

their north star), this didn’t actually result in

increased product value. In fact, because endorsing
in bulk became so easy, the meaning of a LinkedIn
Endorsement became devalued. Users expressed
not trusting Endorsements—the complete
opposite of what LinkedIn had intended with the
feature (3).

[3]
http://papers.www2017.com.au.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/companion/p617.pdf
[4]
https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/linkedin-endorsements/

Mastering Engagement — 10
 Here are some hypothetical north stars from mind: companies playing the same game can
companies playing each of the three engage- have radically different north stars because it
ment games. One important thing to keep in reflects their unique product strategy.

Companies Hypothetical North Stars

Attention !" #
• Time spent actively engaging with feed

• Number of subscribers watching > X hrs

of content per month

Transaction
• Purchases per prime subscriber
$
• Purchases per customer visit/session

Productivity
• Avg records created per account

• Number of engaged cloud subscribers

Potential examples of north star metrics for each type game

11 — Three Games of Engagement

Players of the attention game: Players of the productivity game:
Facebook vs. Netflix Salesforce vs. Adobe

While Facebook and Netflix both play the atten- Salesforce aims to be the central source of truth
tion game, their business models are radically for customer records at B2B companies. Their
different. Facebook’s revenue is proportional to latest strategy revolves around AI for decision
the amount of feed engagement and hence ad making in sales. This means that their north
revenue generated. Netflix, on the other hand, star would be less about user adoption and
follows a subscription model with a fixed (but more about the amount of customer data they
growing) amount of content. Let’s say Netflix store for their accounts. On the other hand,
read our Mastering Retention playbook and Adobe Creative Cloud likely focuses on individual
found out that subscribers watching greater subscribers and driving enough engagement to
than X hours of content per month were more ensure continued subscription.
likely to be retained the next month. Instead of
focusing on total time spent watching content, Product teams need to start their strategic plan-
Netflix’s north star should be about getting more ning by defining the engagement game they are
subscribers to watch that amount of content. playing. This, along with their business strategy,
informs their product north star metric. Getting
Players of the transaction game: your engagement game and north star metric
Amazon vs. Walmart right is the core of product strategy and organi-
zation. At the end of this chapter you will find a
Similarly, Amazon Retail and Walmart might have helpful template that will allow you to have this
very different north stars despite being players discussion in your own organization.
in the same transaction game. Amazon is likely
optimizing for the number of Amazon Prime The engagement game defines much more than
subscribers and the value that it generates for the core KPIs a product should track. The specific
them, especially since the Prime subscription game you’re playing also dictates fundamental
gives Amazon visibility into customer loyalty and concepts around the product-customer value
lifetime value. Walmart, on the other hand, is a exchange that you should be designing into your
cost leader—a company that has competitive application workflows.
advantage by having the lowest cost of produc-
tion in the industry—and is probably focusing on
increasing the percentage of their customers'
spend over time.

Mastering Engagement — 12
01 Three Games of Engagement

1.4 | Defining customer value Attention Transaction Productivity

exchange for your game
$
Modern management theory defines a product
as a medium of value exchange between a user
and a business.

The product offers value to a customer—enter-

Entertainment Utility Utility
tainment, efficiency, status, etc.—and the
customer in return offers compensation to the Product Information Status Efficiency
business. At the core of building a product that Self expression Fulfillment Mastery
engages users is having a true understanding
of the actions within your product that provide
realized value to the customer.

These moments of value exchange look differ-

Ad engagement Purchase Subscription
ent depending on the kind of product you're
building and thus the engagement game you're Subscription Price signal Upgrades
Customer
playing. These days, business model innovation New content Referrals Referrals
and digital transformation have broadened the
number of ways in which customers can offer this Referrals
compensation. Apart from one-time or recurring
payments, customers can now offer their time by The product-customer value exchange summarized for all three of the engagement games
engaging with ads, offer referrals, or simply offer
information about their preferences.

Let's take a look at how to create customer value

in each of the three types of engagement games.

13 — Three Games of Engagement

 Three Games of Engagement 01

1.4.1 | Creating customer value

EXAMPLE
in the attention game

When your product is playing the attention game, Twitter video plays the
you are vying for your users' time. In return, you attention game A clear exchange of value had taken place:
offer them entertainment, information, stim- customers were receiving entertainment and
ulation and/or emotional relief. The easier and Twitter's video and live-streaming platform is a information and the business was receiving ad
better you offer this value, the more time cus- prime example of a product playing the attention engagement in exchange. This prompted the
tomers spend using your product. Industries that game. Twitter's number of daily video views nearly social media giant to sign up with companies like
typically play this game today are digital media, doubled in the past year and contributed to more NBCUniversal and Walt Disney to offer more news
social media, gaming and other types of products than half of their ad revenue for two consecutive and entertainment in video format(5).
showing you advertisements. quarters.

Entertainment, information and self expression

are the three core values that an attention prod-
uct can offer a customer. Great products playing
the attention game paint a picture of endless
content choice and use customer engagement
data to personalize the user experience (more on
this in Chapter 4).

For products playing the attention game, your

success in creating value for your users can be
measured by asking yourself how much of your
their time you are capturing. Examples of met-
rics you might care about are: time spent within
the product, number of sessions over a period
of time, or how many times users performed a
critical event over a period of time.

A Periscope (Twitter video) livestream from Forbes

[5]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-04/twitter-dissolves-live-video-team-in-broader-content-shakeup

Mastering Engagement — 14
 1.4.2 | Creating customer value in retail giants to smaller marketplaces and sub-
the transaction game scription services.

Products playing the transaction game generate Products playing the transaction game offer a
value via commercial transactions taking place few different types of value to a customer. Some
online. Companies you will most often find play- businesses, like Walmart.com and Amazon, chief-
ing this game are e-commerce platforms—from ly offer the customer utility. These companies are
extremely focused on price points and shipping.
In fact Eugene Wei, an early product manager at
EXAMPLE Amazon, said that customers cared about ship-
ping costs to an irrational extent(6). Customers
Bonobos plays the shopping experience to help men find their right who shop with these brands feel assured they are
transaction game fit, make purchases online, and have their orders getting the best deals on their purchases without
shipped directly to their home. In this value ever leaving the comfort of their home.
Men's clothing brand Bonobos seeks to solve exchange, customers make a purchase in order
a pain they believe most men seem to have: to fulfill a desire for clothes and for the utility of Transaction-focused companies that take a more
shopping. They've created a guided, hassle-free having those clothes delivered. curated approach in their product offer status
and fulfillment to their customers. In this value
exchange, the price of the purchase matters less
than the satisfaction it provides, or the pain it
relieves. For example, a customer may find value in
a luxury brand's e-commerce platform because of
the social status that the product offers them. On
the other hand, something like a weekly meal deliv-
ery kit fulfills a need they have to eat healthy, home-
cooked meals without worrying about groceries.

In this game, endless browsing or comparison

shopping might boost your vanity metrics but
they don’t add value. At the end of the day, you
should care about getting users to add things
to a cart, enter in their credit card number, and
Bonobos highlights the pain that their product solves
complete their transaction.

[6]
http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes

15 — Three Games of Engagement

 Three Games of Engagement 01

1.4.3 | Creating customer value in

the productivity game EXAMPLE

Products playing the productivity game are HubSpot plays the marketing hub, for example, offers everything from
focused on creating an easy and reliable way for productivity game blogging and landing page creation to marketing
a customer to complete an existing task or work- automation and SEO. Instead of using several
flow. These products provide value by solving Boston-based enterprise HubSpot offers a full different, disparate tools to accomplish the same
a problem customers have, helping customers suite of marketing and sales software that helps task, an all-in-one platform allows users to create
increase efficiency, or giving them mastery over a teams grow and scale their inbound marketing a single, integrated workflow. By easing the pain of
particular task. B2B software companies are the strategy. Each paid ‘hub’ of HubSpot offers its learning and managing different marketing tools
predominant players of the productivity game— respective user base efficiency and utility in the and workstreams, HubSpot promises marketers
think products like Evernote or Asana—but can form of an all-in-one software. HubSpot's paid mastery of their inbound marketing strategies.
be played by others as well.

More than any other game, those playing to win

productivity probably have the hardest time
getting customers to realize the full value of their
product. Software, no matter how useful or easy
you say it is, can be daunting and time-consum-
ing for new users to learn. That's why being good
at the productivity game in today's era of digital
innovation means being laser-focused on prod-
uct usability. Unlike in the attention game, time
spent can sometimes correlate negatively to this
value of efficiency.

As a product person, you need help customers over-

come the adoption barrier by creating a desire for
your product, making your interface easy to learn,
and worth their investment in time and money.
HubSpot’s homepage
describes their free and
Now you know not only how to identify your paid product offerings
engagement game, but also how it should inform for sales, marketing, and
customer service teams
your north star and the types of customer value
exchanges that it should take into consideration.

Mastering Engagement — 16
 In the next section, we introduce the concept of them back regularly. Maximizing value in the first
TERMS TO KNOW the engagement loop, which will help you apply session requires streamlining your product to
the game framework to your customer growth create value early. With decreasing consumer
An engagement loop is an interaction strategy. attention spans, you can longer afford to have an
framework describing the actions and onboarding flow that doesn’t also create value for
triggers that current engaged users the customer. The type of value created might be
cycle through when they use your 1.5 | Introducing the different from your product’s main workflow, but
product regularly. engagement loop it’s important to give the user an experience that
they want more of.
A customer-value exchange describes The engagement loop is an interaction frame-
the potential value that products work that describes the actions and triggers How to use the engagement loop
deliver to customers in exchange for your customers experience when they use your Product teams should use the loop to frame their
the customer’s investment of time and product regularly. interaction model and lay out a clear hypothesis
money. of how their customers go through each step of
What the engagement loop does the loop. Comparing this to the reality of what
An aha moment is the moment or set This framework helps product teams describe customers are experiencing helps clarify where
of actions within your product that your product’s complete interaction model from your UX needs to be streamlined and where your
leads users to first discovering value. the customer’s perspective. This in turn helps the product is simply not performing. Keep in mind
team make better decisions about where in the that companies which don’t have repeat use
A trigger is a stimulus that brings customer experience a particular feature area fits models (mortgage platforms, for instance) don’t
users back to a product. This can be in and whether it is serving the right purpose. typically need or have loops.
an external trigger, such as an email
or push notification, or an internal Why the engagement loop matters
behavioral trigger, such as a pre- In order to grow, every “engaging” product needs
existing habit. an interaction loop that maximizes the value
created in your user’s first session and brings
Social proof is the phenomenon
wherein a large group of people
conform to each others’ behaviors and
actions. If users of your product get
their friends and acquaintances to also
become users, this can be a point of
social proof for you.

17 — Three Games of Engagement

Let’s break down the steps in the considered activated. The most successful prod-
engagement loop ucts drive new users to an aha moment during or
The loop starts with curiosity. New potential after their first session.
customers of your product arrive at it because
they are curious. They either saw an ad, were Next you need engage users in a cycle of recur-
referred by a friend or found you through search ring value exchange, which we talked about in
and decided to find out more about your prod- the section titled, “Defining customer value
uct. Maybe they think your product will solve a exchange for your game.” With every interaction,
specific need they have or perhaps they are just you further the value that the customer received.
browsing.
Once people have sufficiently invested in your
At this point, your product’s only job is to get product, you can incentivize them to become a
them to an aha moment—i.e. show them the point of frequent, repeated social proof. Through
best possible value you have to offer in a first incentivized referrals or social media shares, your
session that correlates to them returning. Once existing customers can help make multiple future
they reach their aha moment, your new users are customers curious about your product.

02
Aha
moment

01 03 04
Value
Curiosity exchange Trigger

05

Social
proof

The engagement loop

Mastering Engagement — 18
 1.5.1 | Building in the right engagement Once you have defined the actions that fuel your
elements engagement loop, product and growth managers
need to design their UI/UX to accomplish the
Below are some questions you can ask to map following:
your product to this engagement model. This will
help you better understand whether your current 1. Remove any possible barrier to accessing
product workflow has the right engagement ele- your main value proposition. Streamline
ments built into it: your UI to make the aha moment idiot proof.
No distractions, no wandering, just the
• What am I doing to drive a curious customer minimum steps needed for users to realize
to their aha moment? that moment of magic. Spotify’s onboarding
• What is my recurring unit of value exchange? is a great example of a simple flow that gets
• What is the customer investing in that I can users to experience product value as soon
leverage to make each subsequent exchange as possible. Instead of prompting new users
of value more valuable? to enter their credit card information and
• How am I timing my ask for reviews and sign up for a Premium trial, it lets them start
referrals from customers? listening to their favorite songs right away(7).
Spotify's onboarding flow

[7]
https://www.pageflows.com/post/onboarding/spotify/

19 — Three Games of Engagement

2. Give the customer instant feedback on their
actions to affirm the value exchange. Use
subtle UX cues to affirm the value exchange
so that the customer can clearly follow what
happened and take a moment to internalize it,
but don’t overwhelm them with copy. Friendly
communication and positive reinforcement
have always been hallmarks of Slack’s product.
The example below shows how Slack changed
the last step of their onboarding flow; they
replaced their old, copy-heavy welcome and
reiterated their value prop in the simplest
words possible(8).

Before

After

[8]
https://www.appcues.com/blog/slack-user-onboarding-experience

Mastering Engagement — 20
 3. Create benefits for customers to increase
their investment in your product. Offer
rewards to encourage investment behav-
ior. Gamification of your product—by
offering login rewards or a weekly ranking
against other users, for example—is one
way of doing this, but even small, random
indicators of achievement can boost how
someone feels about using your product.
For example, Asana encourages productiv-
ity and collaboration with the “celebration
creature” that majestically zooms across
the screen when you complete a task(9).

4. Prompt for referrals and reviews after the

customer has already started investing.
Every smartphone user has at some point
received a popup asking them for feedback
or to leave an app store review. The key
here is timing. Timing your asks makes a Now you’ve learned at a high level how engage- In the next section, we’ll do a brief overview of
huge difference not just in conversion rate ment loops can help inform your growth strat- how you can use Amplitude or other product
for reviews and referrals but the quality of egy. We will dive deeper into the different parts analytics tools to measure your engagement.
response you will get. Make sure your cus- of this loop in Chapters 2 and 3 of this playbook
tomers have been receiving value from your but, first, let’s look at how to put numbers and
product and are satisfied before asking for a metrics to your engagement game.
review.

[9]
https://asana.com/guide/help/tasks/celebrations

21 — Three Games of Engagement

1.6 | Measuring your With the advent of web 2.0 and mobile applica-
engagement game tions, the world of digital products has changed TERMS TO KNOW
dramatically. Users now interact with content and
with each other online, performing thousands of In event-based analytics, an event is
What gets measured, gets done. actions to engage with products. some action performed by the user
– Everybody, at this point or taken by the product. Events and
Amplitude uses the concept of “events” to users also have properties, which
Every game needs a scoring system and engage- capture this user engagement with “properties” are attributes that provide context.
ment is no exception. In Section 1.3 on defining to capture the context of the engagement. This The process of recording events and
north star metrics that drive engagement, we framework has become the de facto standard for attributes as they happen in your
discussed the important of defining measures modern product analytics today. product is called instrumentation.
that were specific to your product strategy and
signified value to the customer as well as the An introduction to how events and properties For best practices on instrumenting
business. Metrics that can meet all these needs capture engagement your analytics, check out our
are often not trivial to measure. You might not An event is a description for an action taken Data Taxonomy Playbook.
be able to track them easily with traditional web either by a user engaging with a product or taken
marketing tools designed to track passive web by the product in response to a user action. Some
page consumption. simple examples of actions for user engaging
with a mobile gaming app might be:

1.6.1 | Amplitude’s approach to • Downloaded app

measuring engagement • Completed registration
• Completed onboarding step 3
Amplitude is a product analytics platform. We • Started game
help product teams analyze user behavior—like • Earned 70 XP
engagement—in digital properties. We built this • Reward displayed (inactive event)
platform for product teams worldwide because • Started level 2
the old ways and tools no longer worked. The first
generation of the internet was largely formed In Amplitude, properties provide more context
around passive consumption of media. The ana- for both events and users. These properties are
lytics platforms that grew around this behavior, sometimes called “attributes” or “dimensions” in
like Omniture Sitecatalyst (now Adobe Analytics) other analytics tools. Properties can range from
and Google Analytics, were optimized to mea- standard values like device type and location to
sure page views, bounce rates and sessions to custom values like the user’s current cumulative
reflect that passive consumption. spend to date in the product.

Mastering Engagement — 22
 Defining custom events for complex
user engagement patterns
Amplitude helps users create their own custom Custom Event Details
definitions in real-time using events that have
already been instrumented. This can be partic- Project
ularly useful when trying to measure complex AmpliTunes
engagement patterns that need, “AND” or “OR”
Custom Event Name
conditions to combine different actions together.
All US Purchases

For instance, consider our fictional demo product

“AmpliTunes.” In this product, you can:
When ANY of the events below are performed, it will count as user activity for this custom event.
1. Play and buy songs and videos
A Purchase Song or Video
2. Buy tickets to concerts
where Country = United States

If you’re a product manager at AmpliTunes and B Purchase Ticket

your product north star metric is number of pur-
where Country = United States
chases within the U.S., you can create a composite
event by combining the ‘Purchase Song or Video’
event with the ‘Purchase Ticket’ event and then Close
filter by the ‘Country’ user property.

The setup in Amplitude

23 — Three Games of Engagement

Key measures of user engagement

Using Event Segmentation in Amplitude, you Uniques Event Totals Active % Average Frequency Properties Formula
can segment events and the users who perform
them by user or event properties. In the Metrics ..measured as unique user(s)
Module of this chart, you can choose which
metric you want to query by over a selected time
frame or in real-time. In the next couple sections, The Measure Module in Amplitude’s

we’ll talk about how to use this module specifical- Event Segmentation chart

ly to measure north star metrics in each game.

Definitions of metrics found in Amplitude's

Event Segmentation chart type

Mastering Engagement — 24
 Measuring the attention game
AmpliTunes

Recall if you’re playing The Attention Game, you Monthly Total Hours of Content Played
care about capturing your customers’ time. In
exchange for entertainment, information, and/or
self-expression, your users might provide you with Events ..performed by Any Users

ad revenue, subscription fees, or referrals. Well- A Play Song or Video 1 United States
known products that are winning at this game are
grouped by Duration where Cohort = United States
Netflix, Spotify, and Twitter, for example.
and where Select event…
B Select event…
and who performed Select event…
Do it with Amplitude
+ Select property…

Suppose you are a product manager at AmpliTunes ..grouped by Select property…

focused on delivering value to your customers
through the music and video platform. You are
playing the attention game, and your team’s north
star is the monthly total time US AmpliTunes Uniques Event Totals Active % Average Frequency Properties Formula
customers have spent playing songs or videos.
Here’s how you would find your north star in ..measured as the result of formula PROPSUM (A)/(60*60) Applied
Amplitude:
Y-Axis Title Hours of Content Played
Step 1 Create a new Event Segmentation chart
and choose the user action ‘Play Song or Video’ in
Events Module on the left.
The setup in Amplitude

Step 2 Group this action by the event property

‘Duration.’ This property contains the duration of
the content played measured in seconds.

Step 3 To only look at the segment of your users

in the U.S., choose to view users who have their
‘Country’ property as the United States. You can

25 — Three Games of Engagement

also compare this segment to all of your users by
adding an All Users segment right below.
AmpliTunes
Step 4 Now it’s time to do the analysis. Move to Monthly Total Hours of Content Played in AmpliTunes
the Measure Module at the bottom and choose to
measure by the formula PROPSUM, or property
Monthly, Last 12 Months
sum. PROPSUM(A) will add up all the values in the
‘Duration’ property for the action you specified
in Step 1 at every data point. To convert this into 1.4M 115k 5.26% 78.0%
hours, divide by 60*60 (1 hour = 60*60* seconds).
Jun ’17 - Jun ‘18 May ‘18 since Apr ‘18 since Jun ‘17
Then, make sure the date picker is set to Monthly,
so you’re seeing monthly totals.

8,500k
OR

Instead of using the Formula measure, you can 7,500k

directly choose the “Properties” measure and
in the dropdown, “Sum of Property Value.” Note
that if you do this, the resulting value will be in the 6,500k
whatever unit the property value is in; in this case,
the total monthly duration will be in seconds, not
hours. 5,500k

Takeaway
If you’re playing the attention game, you probably 4,500k
have a north star related to measuring how much
of a user’s time you are capturing. This means
3,500k
you’ll need to make sure you’ve instrumented an
event property related to the duration of some
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this metric either with custom Formulas or using

the Properties measure. Alternatively, if you care United States
about session time, you can create a User Sessions
chart type.
What the graph could look like

Mastering Engagement — 26
 Measuring the transaction game
AmpliTunes

Remember if you’re playing the transaction game, Monthly Total Purchases of Rock Music
you care about the number of transactions your
users make. In exchange for the ability to acquire
Events ..performed by Any Users
something they need or desire, your users provide
you with purchases, price signals, and sometimes A Purchase Ticket 1 United States
ad engagement. E-commerce businesses are where Genre_Type = Rock where Select property…
typically the main players of this game—including
and who performed Select event…
giants like Amazon, as well as monthly subscription B Select event…
boxes, and on-demand delivery services. + Add Segment

..grouped by Select property…

Do it with Amplitude

Uniques Event Totals Active % Average Frequency Properties Formula

Now suppose you are a product manager on the
other major product at AmpliTunes focused on
..measured as total events
delivering value to your customers through concert
ticket sales. Now you are playing the transaction
game, and your team’s north star is monthly total
The setup in Amplitude
purchases of rock music tickets customers have
made globally. Here’s how you would find this North
Star in Amplitude:

Step 1 Create a new Event Segmentation chart

and choose the user action ‘Purchase Ticket’ in
Events Module on the left.

Step 2 Filter the user action by setting ‘Genre

Type’ to Rock. This allows you to only look at ticket
purchases for the rock genre.

27 — Three Games of Engagement

Step 3 Since you want to look at rock music ticket
purchases made by all of your customers world-
wide, make sure the Segmentation Module on the AmpliTunes
right is set to Any Users. Monthly Total Purchases of Rock Music in AmpliTunes

Step 4 Now it’s time to do the analysis. Move to Monthly, Last 12 Months
the Measure Module at the bottom and choose
to measure by Event Totals. This will show total
number of times the action ‘Purchase Ticket’ with 14M 1.06M 5.94% 17.0%
the ‘Genre_Type’ Rock was performed at each Jun ’17 - Jun ‘18 May ‘18 since Apr ‘18 since Jun ‘17
data point. Then, make sure the date picker is set
to Monthly, so you’re seeing monthly totals.
1,500k
Takeaway
One of the north star metrics that most players
of the transaction game care about is the number 1,200k
of transactions happening over some period of
time, across various user segments. Use Event
Totals when you want a count of how many times a 900k
purchase action was performed in a specific time
frame.
600k

300k

0k
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All Users

What the graph could look like

Mastering Engagement — 28
 Measuring the productivity game
TeamChat
Players of the productivity game care about users % Monthly Paying Users Sending a Message
performing high-value digital tasks. In exchange
for the ability to complete tasks with efficiency and
Events ..performed by Any Users
mastery, customers often pay for a subscription or
license for the software. Players of the productivity A Send Message 1 Paying customers
game are often (but not limited to) B2B companies, where Paying = True
B Select event…
like Slack, Asana, Salesforce, and others.
+ Add Segment

Do it with Amplitude
..grouped by Select property…

Let’s consider a demo product called TeamChat,

a B2B communication software like Slack. Now
Uniques Event Totals Active % Average Frequency Properties Formula
you are playing the productivity game. This team’s
north star is the percent of monthly active paid
..measured as percent of user(s) active
subscribers who have sent a message. Here’s
how you would find this north star:

The setup in Amplitude

Step 1 Create a new Event Segmentation chart
and choose the user action ‘Send Message’ in
Events Module on the left.

Step 2 To only look at paying customers, create a

segment of all users who have their user property
‘Paying’ set to the value true using the Segmenta-
tion Module on the right.

Step 3 Now it’s time to do the analysis. Move to

the Measure Module at the bottom and choose
to measure by Active %. This will show the per-
centage of active paying users who did the action
‘Send Message’ at each data point.

29 — Three Games of Engagement

Note that by default, Amplitude defines an active
user is a user who has performed at least one
action on a particular day. Then, make sure the TeamChat
date picker is set to Monthly, so you’re seeing % Monthly Paying Users Sending a Message
monthly percentages.
Monthly, Last 12 Months
Takeaway
The core metric for products playing the
productivity game is number of active users 0.85 0.98 0.348% 13.4%
performing high-value tasks on a regular basis. Jun ’17 - Jun ‘18 May ‘18 since Apr ‘18 since Jun ‘17
One way to assess how well certain features of your
product resonate with your users and how much
value it delivers is to use Active % to see exactly 100%
what proportion of your active paying users use
that feature to complete an intended task.
75%

50%

25%

0%
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Paying customers

What the graph could look like

Mastering Engagement — 30
 1.7 | Taking action Before moving on to Chapter 2: New User Activa-
FURTHER READING tion, take a moment now to reflect on your learn-
This chapter introduced the Three Games of ings from Chapter 1 and consider the following:
If you’d like to dive deeper into some of Engagement model: the attention game, the
the topics we covered in this chapter, we transaction game, and the productivity game. q Which of the three engagement games is
suggest starting with these articles: Deciding which game your product is playing is your product is playing?
critical because it forms the crux of your engage- q Describe the customer value exchange
The Hierarchy of Engagement, expanded ment strategy. With the right game in place, you that happens within your product.
Sarah Tavel, General Partner at can then: q How does your product north star relate
Benchmark, formerly Product at Pinterest to the game you are playing? How does it
https://medium.com/@sarahtavel/the- • Define a good product north star reflect the value you want customers to
hierarchy-of-engagement-expanded- • Determine what value your product offers get from your product?
648329d60804 to your customers and the value they offer q Name some key engagement elements in
to the business in exchange your product that will move a new user
Don't Let Your North Star • Understand how to build an engagement through the engagement loop. -
Metric Deceive You
loop that keeps the value exchange going q Complete the following worksheet on your
Brian Balfour, CEO of Reforge; Shaun
north star metric.
Clowes, formerly Head of Growth at
Atlassian; Casey Winters, formerly
Product at Pinterest
https://www.reforge.com/blog/north-
star-metric-growth/

Hooked: How to Build

Habit-Forming Products
Nir Eyal

31 — Three Games of Engagement

WORKSHEET (Download this online at http://bit.ly/northstarwksht)

YOUR PRODUCT TEAM’S NORTH STAR METRIC

State your long-term product vision: Describe the customer value exchange in your product:

PRODUCT VALUE

Example (Amplitude):
help customers easily answer questions about what drives user behavior
Example (Amplitude):
Amplitude empowers companies to turn their product vision into
reality by helping them answer questions about user behavior and
power a better customer experience. CUSTOMER VALUE

Example (Amplitude):
Which engagement game are you playing? Customers purchase Amplitude and add revenue

q ATTENTION q TRANSACTION q PRODUCTIVITY

Describe the customer value exchange in your product:
Example (Amplitude): PRODUCTIVITY

What kind(s) of value do(es) your product provide customers?

q ENTERTAINMENT q INFORMATION q UTILITY What is your product team’s north star metric? How does this relate to
your product strategy and the customer value you deliver?
q SELF-EXPRESSION q STATUS q MASTERY
Example (Amplitude): Amplitude’s current north star metric is “weekly
q FULFILLMENT q EFFICIENCY querying users” -- the number of weekly users who use Amplitude
to answer at least one question. This metric is a direct measure of
Example (Amplitude): UTILITY, EFFICIENCY, MASTERY the product value Amplitude promises.

Mastering Engagement — 32
CHAPTER 02
ACTIVATING NEW USERS

Now you have two mental frameworks in your pocket: The Three Games of
Engagement as a way to think about what value your product offers users and
vice versa and the engagement loop as a way to describe the actions and triggers
an engaged customer experience. In this chapter on new user activation, we’ll
begin to put those models into practice. At the end of this chapter, we also share a
special case study on how Blue Apron uses product analytics and experimentation
to better activate their new users.

Mastering Engagement — 33
 Why activation matters zero. It doesn’t matter if your product is great
otherwise; a poor first-time experience could
Whether you’re at a job interview or on a coffee mean you’ve lost them forever.
date, first impressions matter—and the same
goes for your product. Remember when we men- No matter which game you’re playing—attention,
tioned that the average app loses almost their transaction, or productivity—engaging new
entire user base within a month? Turns out that in users is all about offering them a small but unfor-
a bracket retention analysis we did of 500 million gettable taste of your product’s value early, so
Android and iOS mobile devices, we found that that they come back for the second time, then the
66% of new users abandon apps within the first third, fourth, and more. In Chapter 1, we defined
week of install. the moment when a user first derives value from
your product as the aha moment. The process of
If you’re great at acquiring new users but unsuc- getting new users to the aha moment, and then
cessful at showing them value, you can expect to the point where you get business value back
that new user retention curve to dip straight to from them is called activation.

Average Retention Curves for Mobile Apps

100% This graph shows

average retention
Percentage of Users Returning

for the first 90 days

75% of use on mobile
apps—both Android
and iOS. Bracket
retention analysis:
50%
measured percentage
of users returning
on Day 0, Days 1–7,
25% 8–14, 15–30, 31–60,
61–90

0%
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

Days Since First Use

N-Day Retention Bracket Retention

34 — Activating new users

Activation matters because users who find value guide on how to quantitatively measure growth in
and invest within your product early on will likely the different phases of activation. Finally, we round
stick around longer. In the best case scenario, out the chapter by sharing a case study on how
you’ll find that increasing activation rate improves Blue Apron used Amplitude and A/B testing soft-
new user retention, and contributes to the real ware Optimizely to better activate their new users.
growth of your business.

In this chapter, we will discuss the three phases

of activation in detail and explain why new user
activation doesn’t just stop at the aha moment,
but continues up something called the ladder
of engagement. Then, we share a step-by-step

02

Aha
moment

01 04
03

Curiosity Value
exchange Trigger

05

Social
proof

In the engagement loop model, activation is the flow of new users

from curiosity → aha moment → value exchange

Mastering Engagement — 35
 Topics covered in this chapter: We calculate real growth in new users by measur-
ing activation.
2.1 - Defining growth in new users
2.2 - Breaking down new user activation Most of the existing content out there about
2.3 - The ladder of engagement activation define a new user as activated when
2.4 - Measuring new user activation they have a good user experience and derive val-
2.5 - Taking action ue for the first time. 500 Startups’ founder Dave
McClure describes activation as “users enjoying
Case study: How Blue Apron uses A/B their first visit”[11].
testing and product analytics to activate
more new customers Throughout this chapter, you’ll see that we
define activation more strictly than others.
Activation isn’t only about bringing users to the
aha moment. We define activation as the point
2.1 | Defining growth in new users at which a user finds value in the product and
goes on to provide value to the business. This
First, we have to talk a little bit about how we’re value can take the form of viewing an ad, making
defining activation in this playbook and why this a purchase, or converting from a free trial to
matters for measuring new user growth. paid subscription. What matters is that the user
make a tangible contribution to your business—
According to Tanner McGrath, Head of Analytics and, thus, contributes to the real growth of the
at Amplitude, and formerly PM of Growth Engi- business.
neering at Postmates, real growth is about driving
scalable and repeatable business outcomes. This With that, let’s explore the subphases of new user
means metrics like total number of app down- activation.
loads, new account sign-ups, and Daily Active
Users are poor measures of new user growth.
They’re vanity metrics that fail to measure real
usage or engagement in your product and the
real ROI of your marketing spend (10).

[10]
https://amplitude.com/blog/2016/02/25/actionable-pirate-metrics
[11]
https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version/2-Customer_Lifecycle_5_Steps_to

36 — Activating new users

 Awareness
2.2 | Breaking down new
TERMS TO KNOW
user activation Acquisition

You’re probably familiar with a typical growth Activation is the point at which a user
Activation
funnel. Let’s look at it through the lens of new finds value in the product and also
user activation. provides value back to the business.
Retention
Marketing teams typically own the awareness Onboarding is your product’s first date
stage, getting people to notice and learn about with a new user. The process by which
Revenue
your product and brand. Growth teams tend to new users get acquainted with your
own the acquisition stage, using both marketing product and first discover value.
and engineering efforts to increase the number Referral
of registered users. The product team touches all An aha moment is the moment or set
phases of the growth funnel, playing a major role of actions within your product that
in the activation, retention, and revenue phases. An example growth funnel based off leads users to first discovering value.
Dave McClure's pirate metrics

We can unpack the activation phase specifically Ladder of engagement is the “ongoing
into three critical steps: onboarding, the aha learning journey a new user embarks on
moment and the ladder of engagement, and the to become an expert.”
first value exchange.
First value exchange is the first
exchange of value between a new user

Aha Moment and the business.

Onboarding First Value Exchange
Ladder of Engagement

Activation

PMs rightly obsess over the journey a user takes into each subphase of activation in order to see
from registering for a new account, performing a how each one can make or break the early success
core action, and then coming back to the product of a product.
for the first time after account creation. Let’s dig

Mastering Engagement — 37
 2.2.1 | Activation Stage 1: Let’s dive into each one and see how it relates to Tumblr uses a large tool-tip next to the new post
Onboarding your customer engagement game. window to offer advice while you compose your
first post. They offer guidance first on styling your
Whether you're talking about a B2B product play- Doing-focused onboarding text, and then on managing your blog after your
ing the productivity game or a B2C app playing In a doing-focused onboarding flow, your goal is first published post.
the attention game, how you onboard your new to get users to test-drive the actions that make
users is mission critical to keeping them around. your product useful or interesting. Building a Doing-centric onboarding need only be as compli-
Onboarding, the first phase of new user acti- doing-focused onboarding flow makes sense cated as your product. In fact, it should definitely
vation, is a the process by which new users get if your product is built around a unique form of not be more complicated than your product—the
acquainted with your product and first discover behavior or around taking repetitive action—a ideal onboarding experience for a mobile game,
value. In other words, onboarding is your product’s mobile game is a good example. for example, is the minimum instruction neces-
first date with a new user. The type of experience sary to make sense of the mechanics of the game.
you provide your new users here will determine In this onboarding style, you need to quickly and
whether those users come back for a second time. effectively demonstrate how to use your product
not necessarily why to use it. A product like Tum-
When you think about improving activation, you’d blr, for example, needs to quickly instruct its new
be wise to dig into the onboarding process first. users on how to create a new post.
This means starting with the sign-up page and
understanding the first several steps a new user
needs to take in order to realize value. How can you
make those steps easier? Faster? More enjoyable?

ConversionXL, a leading source of education on

conversion optimization, categorizes onboarding
flows into three types [12].
• Doing-focused onboarding is an experience
that gets users to do meaningful actions
within the product.
• Benefit-focused onboarding is an experience
that walks users through a specific product
function that would be beneficial to the user. Tumblr’s onboarding tooltips onboarding encourages new users to create a post
• Account-focused onboarding is an experi-
ence that walks users through an account or
profile creation process.

[12]
https://conversionxl.com/blog/6-user-onboarding-flows/

38 — Activating new users

In Hole.io, for example—the #1 free game on the Benefit-focused onboarding core value of productivity-focused products is
App Store at the time of writing—the entirety of Benefit-focused onboarding is similar to improving efficiency for users.
onboarding is a 3-second message that flashes doing-focused onboarding, but you’re not just
across the screen before the game starts: “Drag getting your users to go through the motions Benefit-focused onboarding can be as easy and
your finger to move your hole.” of using the product. It’s all about making sure simple as literally stating your product’s benefits,
that the 2-3 core benefits of your product are as Evernote did.
While doing-focused onboarding is great for extremely clear to your end-user, and that they
products playing the attention game, it can equally know—once onboarding is said and done—how But in most cases, saying what you’re good at
benefit transaction and productivity players as to achieve those benefits through your app or is not enough. Most B2B software is complex
well. For example, the online marketplace, Etsy, product. enough that unless the onboarding walks
encourages brand new users to begin browsing through doing specific actions that offer value,
and favorite items they find interesting. Etsy’s This style of onboarding, which focuses specif- you risk your new users not understanding the
onboarding flow is centered around doing this par- ically on showing off a product’s core benefit or point of your product.[14]
ticular action. The flow makes it clear to the user function, is characteristic of products playing the
that favoriting items is linked to better recommen- productivity game. This makes sense, since the
dations and personalization of their feed [13].

Mobile game Hole.io’s Evernote’s first few

simple onboarding onboarding screens[14]
message

[13]
https://www.appcues.com/blog/mobile-onboarding-ecommerce
[14]
https://conversionxl.com/blog/6-user-onboarding-flows/

Mastering Engagement — 39
 Typeform, for example, walks new users through
creating their first new form, their core product
offering. By the time the user is finished, they’ve
hopefully gotten a good introduction to the the
product while also creating something beneficial
for themselves.

Account-focused onboarding
Social media applications, common attention
game players, are prime examples of products that
follow account-focused onboarding. A core part of
onboarding in Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, for
example, is having new users complete a profile
and connect with other users. The goal is to make
sure the new user has their account populated
Typeform’s onboarding flow walks new users through building their first form[15]
with interesting content when they first arrive, as
well as a network of people to interact with.

Twitter’s latest onboarding flow captures this to

a tee. When a new user first signs up, Twitter asks
them to create a username and then immediately
asks what type of content the user would be inter-
ested in. The next screen prompts the user to find
friends who are already on Twitter.

Twitter’s account-focused
onboarding

[15]
https://www.appcues.com/blog/5-things-to-love-about-typeforms-user-onboarding

40 — Activating new users

If these styles of onboarding are blurring together, Regardless of what engagement game you’re
don’t worry! Most products use a blend of doing, playing or how you design your onboarding, keep
PRO TIP
benefit, and account-focused elements along in mind that the goal of onboarding isn’t to show
with a number of other strategies outside of the off every single amazing feature of your product ACTIVATION IS NOT
JUST ABOUT ONBOARDING
product itself (like emails and tutorials) to get new in one session. It’s to tantalize them just enough
users started on the right foot. that they experience an aha moment and know Activation is about building trust

just enough about the product’s value they see a with your users. Onboarding is about

reason to use it again. logistics. A 10x improvement to your

north star metric doesn’t come from
endless, minute optimizations of your

BEST PRACTICES
onboarding flow or sending yet another
email. It comes from providing a core
General onboarding best practices value of your product early on in the new
user experience.

DO DON'T

• Be strategic: think about how to best get to • Try to optimize every square inch of your
the core value of the product at the end of the onboarding flow to create an increase in a
onboarding flow. top-level metric like revenue or growth.

• Complement in-app onboarding with other • Spam and pester your new users with multiple
things, such as docs, emails, phone calls. emails immediately after they first start using
your product.
• Use analytics to see what power users are
doing differently from everyone else. • Build a product only for your power users.
• Look at your new user retention to gauge how • Make a snap judgment based off only a week's
well you're keeping users around. worth of retention data from your app.

• Run A/B tests regularly to see how changes • A/B test something because you can't decide
to parts of your onboarding flow affect what it should be from a design or product
conversion. perspective.

• Collect enough information about your users • Make your users input a ton of data manually
that you can follow up with them after their before they can start playing around with your
first experience. product.

• Lay off the mandatory tutorials and let your • Toss your users "into the deep end" with
users get a chance to try your product out. no assistance right at the beginning of the
onboarding process.

Mastering Engagement — 41
 2.2.2 | Activation Stage 2: aha moment—contributed to better activation
The aha moment and growth to 1 billion users. When reflecting
about this aha moment, Palihapitiya said:
Onboarding is the series of actions that drives a
curious new user to an aha moment. Experiencing
an aha moment is what separates users who find We were able to reframe the
value in your product (and will hopefully continue entire experience around that one simple
to find value) from those who do not. premise, a very simple elegant statement of
what it was to both capture core product
There’s a ton of content out there on why the aha value, to define what it meant to be able to
moment matters and how to determine what it onboard into a product that allowed you to
is for your product (this article [16] by Apptimize communicate, to get into a network, to find
and Amplitude is a good place to start). The most density, and then to basically
important thing to know is that the aha moment iterate around that.[17]
helps companies connect their higher-level
goals to actions that users take within their The aha moment concept has its merits: it can
product. The aha moment lets you think more serve as a north star for product teams working
upstream of that goal. Instead of just asking, on activation and it can be used to unite the entire
“How do I increase activation or conversion,” you company around a single elegant insight. But
can ask yourself, “What early core actions best take this with a grain of salt—discovering an aha
correlate with long-term success?" moment for your product might be great for kick-
starting your growth. But a long-lasting engage-
This is exactly what Facebook did. ment strategy isn’t built off one magical moment.
In Section 2.3, we’ll take the aha moment to a
Whenever people think about the aha moment, level deeper.
the infamous story about Facebook’s path to 1
billion users always comes to mind. Chamath Pali- Before that, let’s cover the third stage of activa-
hapitiya, who was Facebook’s VP of User Growth tion: getting to the first value exchange between
at the time, said the entire Facebook team dou- customer and business.
bled down on one metric: getting new users to
add 7 friends in 10 days. This single action—their

[16]
https://apptimize.com/blog/2016/02/this-is-how-you-find-your-apps-aha-moment/
[17]
https://genius.com/Chamath-palihapitiya-how-we-put-facebook-on-the-path-to-1-billion-users-annotated

42 — Activating new users

2.2.3 | Activation Stage 3: Products paying the transaction game have the
The first value exchange most straightforward first value exchange. It hap-
pens with the first transaction. Keep in mind that
The third and final stage of activation describes for two-sided marketplaces, like Airbnb, the first
the first exchange of value between a new user value exchange for buyers versus sellers might be
and the business. different.

Again, keep in mind that most existing content

talks about activation from the perspective of Product Engagement Game First value exchange Other value exchanges
the new user finding value in your product; in
this playbook, we describe activation as a mutual Pinterest Attention User views “promoted pins” N/A
exchange of value.

User passively provides Player purchases “PokeCoins”;

As we described in Section 1.4, customer value Pokemon Go Attention
geolocation data Player goes to a sponsored location
exchange takes different forms depending on
the type of engagement game you’re playing, Listener subscribes to
Spotify Attention Listeners hear an ad
whether that’s ad engagement, upgrades, sub- Spotify Premium
scriptions, referrals, or something else.
Washington
Transaction Readers view ads on the homepage Reader subscribes
For free attention products and games, the first Post

value exchange often happens passively, with little

to no added effort from the user. For example, as Guests book first stay
(Airbnb receives a transaction fee)
soon as new users of Pinterest and Instagram finish
Airbnb Transaction Users purchase airbnbmag
onboarding and begin engaging with the product, Property owners book first guest
they become targets of sponsored content and (Airbnb receives commission)
ads. The exchange of value is in motion—the user
gives value by liking and engaging with content, Slack Productivity Team upgrades from free to paid plan N/A
the business receives value in ad impressions.

On the other hand, for products with a subscription

model—productivity products like Evernote, for
example—the first value exchange happens when
users convert from a free trial into a paying user.

Mastering Engagement — 43
 An important thing to keep in mind is that the has found value in your product, provides your
first value exchange doesn’t necessarily have business with value. A core objective of your
to be the most frequent or most valuable type of business might then be to nudge these activated
exchange that happens within your product. It’s users towards a higher-value value exchange
simply the first instance at which a new user, who over time and ultimately increase their LTV.

EXAMPLE

How Pokemon Go (and other free analyze the behaviors of their biggest spenders,
games) make money “whales", in order to optimize their experience
(and maximize revenue), while also balancing the
Many free-to-play mobile games make money experience of their free users.
through ads, sometimes even offering an ad-
free experience for a small price. But what about
Pokemon Go’s
games that don’t seem to serve their users ads? “ad-free” experience.

Games like Pokemon Go have a wealth of user

data that they can share (in aggregate) to
advertisers and other third-parties to make
money. This is probably the first way Niantic, the
developers behind Pokemon Go, derived value
from their new users, but it’s certainly not the main
source of revenue.

It’s more likely that the highest-value value exchange

for Pokemon Go and other free-to-play games
is the thousands of in-game microtransactions
that happen over a relatively small subset of users
everyday. Mobile game developers often track and

44 — Activating new users

2.3 | The ladder of engagement: 2.3.1 | Defining the ladder
going beyond the aha moment of engagement

We’ve talked about the stages of new user activa- According to Josh Elman, Partner at Greylock
tion at a high level, but let’s go back for a moment and former product leader at Twitter and
to our discussion about the aha moment. LinkedIn, the ladder of engagement is the
“ongoing learning journey a new user embarks
The weakness of the aha moment concept is that on to become an expert.”
it treats activation like a straightforward path from
A to B. In Facebook’s case, the aha moment seems The ladder of engagement is useful because it
to imply that “friending” leads directly and obvi- breaks down your product into tasks that your
ously to retention. This type of direct correlation users either need to do or understand in order to
is simple, elegant, and easy to rally around and, see value[18]. The first few rungs of your product’s
as such, the aha moment can be a highly useful ladder should set the stage for deeper engage-
internal motivator. But as an entire framework for ment. Here at the bottom of the ladder, you are
product strategy, it is insufficient on its own. onboarding new users, showing them the ropes,
nudging them to perform critical actions, facilitat-
Retaining customers for the long term requires ing learning, and so on.
the product 1) provide continuous value to users
and 2) users develop new habits that include As users delve deeper into your product, and
using the product. Users don't just snap into ascend the ladder, you need to bring them more
habits because they added a certain number of value and deepen their engagement. The higher
friends within a certain number of days. They they go, the better they should feel. The topmost
acquire habits over time. They make decisions rung of the ladder is usually where you’ll find your
over the course of many moments—not just one power users—the people who are highly engaged
“magical” one. And if a product can keep giving and have usually achieved the highest degree of
them value across those many moments, then sophistication in your product.
users will stick around.
In Elman’s original blog post on the ladder of
Rather than a direct path from A to B, it’s more engagement, he lays out what it looked like for A ladder visualization for Twitter’s example

realistic to think about activation like a ladder: a Twitter circa 2010.

series of increasingly sophisticated steps that
eventually lead the new user to the top, aka the
point of long-term retention.

[18]
https://medium.com/@joshelman/building-your-growth-model-and-ladder-of-engagement-3b3a18f2d1a8

Mastering Engagement — 45
 PRO TIP On the bottommost rung, a user understands • If defining the first rung of the ladder is tough,
what a tweet is. At the topmost rung, a user start at the topmost rung and work down.
THE TOP OF THE LADDER learns to build their following. Twitter considered What do you want your power users doing and
The topmost rungs of your ladder of onboarding and first value exchange as Rungs why? How should users arrive at this point?
engagement might be behaviors or 1–4. They determined that those were the most
actions that only your most savvy important steps to getting new users successful- • Understand the proportion of users who live
power users do. And that’s okay! Users ly onboarded, activated, and retained. at each rung of the ladder. If there’s a huge gap
don’t have to make it to the top of your between users who reach the aha moment
ladder to get value out of your product Why does all of this matter? Understanding the and users who make it beyond that point,
or to be retained (and, in fact, most of steps involved in a user mastering your product you might have to “add” a new rung of two
users probably won’t make it here). Value helps you think holistically of multiple ways to between steps and nudge the users to climb.
exchange can occur at different rungs of tackle activation and adoption, beyond creating
the ladder. a single, perfect aha moment. Breaking the pro- • Keep in mind that you will have to rethink and
cess of activation into many ladder rungs gives iterate on your ladder of engagement as your
your product strategy specific areas of focus. product evolves and/or as you uncover new
insights about your users’ behavior.
And from the perspective of the user, the further
they go up the ladder, the more effort it takes to For activation PMs, product strategy is all about
come down. If they're investing more time and figuring out the bottom rung of their engage-
energy and realizing more value from the prod- ment ladder. The bottom part of the ladder is
uct, then switching to something else becomes actually one of the most critical and challenging
more and more costly. aspects of building an engaging product. Here,
PMs in charge of activation should be asking
It’s easy to look at an example of an already success- themselves what action is simple enough to get
ful product and work backwards to build out their users to see enough of the product’s that they
engagement ladder in your mind. But, building your would want to continue to engage with the prod-
own engagement ladder isn’t always so straightfor- uct. In some cases, it might be what’s thought
ward, so we’ve included some tips below. of as the traditional aha moment—the first time
a user discovers value. In Facebook’s case, this
General tips on building your ladder would be the “new users add friends” action. In
of engagement: Twitter’s case, the bottom rung is not necessarily
the aha moment—it’s about educating new users
• Before you start, know which engagement what a Tweet is. Without this as the bottom rung
game you’re playing and what customer new users won’t be able to perform any other
value exchange looks like for your product. actions within the product.

46 — Activating new users

A key success metric for activation PMs is the The first rung of the ladder reflects the aha
conversion rate between signup and the bottom moment that the team rallied around—the seven
rung of the product. We’ll discuss this in more friends in ten days insight. If users failed to get
detail in Section 2.4. on this rung, they were far less likely to stick
around. At Rung 2, users arrive at the first value
Now, let’s look at the ladders of engagement for exchange—in the beginning of 2012, the content
companies playing either the attention, transac- they consumed here included sponsored content
tion, or productivity game. and ads.

Rungs 3–6 reflect actions that typical, engaged

2.3.2 | Attention Game: users performed and Rung 6 reflects the behavior
Facebook’s ladder of engagement of their power users.

Remember that products playing the attention You’ll notice that there are two types of engage-
game seek to capture their users’ time by offering ment within Facebook. Users can engage with the
them entertainment, information, stimulation, or content that their friends have created by liking,
relief. Facebook is an obvious example of a prod- tagging, commenting, etc. Or, users can create Hypothetical example of Facebook’s ladder of engagement

uct playing the attention game. their own original content by making a status
update or uploading an album, etc.
Before the world knew what Facebook was, Mark
Zuckerberg and his team faced a challenge when According to a report by Pew Research Center, at
it came to getting new users to engage with the the time, engaging with other people’s content
product: they needed to convince people to was the most frequent type of engagement
leave the social networks they knew, give their on Facebook in 2011. Therefore, these actions
information to a new one, and start using it, even are closer to the bottom of their engagement
if their friends weren't all there yet. ladder—it’s easier to engage with others than
create yourself. On the other hand, creating orig-
Let’s look at what a hypothetical ladder of inal content was an activity mainly performed by
engagement for Facebook would look like circa power users in 2011 so it follows that this action
2011–2012—right around the time it began sky- makes up the topmost rung[19].
rocketing to 1 billion users.

[19]
http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/02/03/why-most-facebook-users-get-more-than-they-give/

Mastering Engagement — 47
 2.3.3 | Transaction Game: The bottommost rung of Lyft’s ladder of engage-
Lyft’s ladder of engagement ment—completing a ride—might be the simplest
way a new user can engage with the product, but
Remember that products playing the transaction it’s probably also the most common way users
game generate value via commercial transactions exchange value with the company. That is, if every
taking place online. These products are typically Lyft user just stayed on this rung and just regu-
trying to maximize how much and/or how often larly requested a ride, the company would stay in
users spend. E-commerce platforms, two-sided good shape. Higher rungs may reflect additional
marketplaces, ride hailing services like Lyft are ways that riders can engage with the product, but
among some of the types of companies that play the core of this transaction game stays near the
this type of game. bottom of the ladder.

Let’s take a look at what Lyft’s ladder of engage- As a transactional company, it's unlikely your
ment might look like for their riders. ladder is going to have as many rungs as that of an
attention- or productivity-driven product. It's in
the nature of the game that you're generally more
interested in customers getting on and off the
ladder at regular intervals rather than getting on
and climbing further up and up at a constant rate.

2.3.3 | Productivity Game:

Evernote’s ladder of engagement

Companies playing the productivity game care

about whether their users are efficiently and suc-
cessfully completing tasks. When you're running
a product based on productivity, your goal as a
product manager is to bring people to the place
where they're the most successful. Note—taking
app Evernote is an excellent example of a produc-
Hypothetical example of Lyft’s ladder of engagement for a rider
tivity player.

48 — Activating new users

Here’s a hypothetical ladder of engagement for
Evernote.

An example of Evernote’s visual search

engagement could be built to point towards that At this point, you might be wondering how exactly
feature, with every rung of the ladder designed to you should help nudge users between rungs
accumulate value for the user. of your ladder and where this all fits in with the
engagement loop that your product needs to
The first rung might be the very basic act of con- have. Never fear: this is what we’ll be discussing
Notice the topmost rung is use visual search. The tent creation—writing a note. Rungs 2–4 can then in Chapter 3.
feature is a powerful one for Evernote since one familiarize the user with the product and nudge
of their differentiators is the ability to transcribe them towards adding more multimedia content We’ve covered a lot of models and frameworks so
uploaded images and handwritten notes, then to their notebook. As users add more visual con- far in this chapter—now let’s look at how to put
allow you to search them. tent, the chances that they use the visual search numbers to each phase of activation.
feature increases. Pretty soon, they’re taking
Let’s say this feature is one of the stickiest advantage of this and other features that make
features of the product, but it’s something only switching to another note-taking app costly.
power users do regularly. Evernote’s ladder of They’re locked into the product.

Mastering Engagement — 49
 2.4 | Measuring activation • engagement game: attention
• aha moment: new user plays a song or video
In the last section of this chapter, we will cover the • first value exchange: new user buys a song
analyses you can perform to diagnose and improve or video
new user activation in your product. Remember
that we’ve divided up activation into three phases: Keep these points in mind; we’ll come back to
onboarding, aha moment (or ladder of engage- them in the sections that follow. Now let’s get
ment), and the first value exchange. into the analyses.

Measuring new user activation is really all about

two metrics: 2.4.1 | Analyzing onboarding

• Conversion between the different steps of We can break down our onboarding analysis into
your onboarding funnel, and especially to the three questions.
aha moment and the first value exchange.
• Retention of newly activated users who 1) WHAT IS THE CONVERSION RATE TO
repeatedly perform the value exchange THE AHA MOMENT?
event.
The first stage of activation is getting users to
And finally, to measure real growth in these met- complete onboarding and onto the first rung of
rics after product changes have been made, we’ll the engagement ladder—the aha moment. To
look at how new user acquisition cohorts track for understand how many new users are getting from
these metrics over time. the sign-up page to this moment, you first need
to define an onboarding funnel.
Since these analyses are best illustrated by an
example, let’s go back to the AmpliTunes example Some digital products have a well-defined
product we introduced in Chapter 1. sequence that users move through during their
first-time experience. If that’s the case for you,
First, we’ll set the scenario using some of the defining your onboarding funnel is simple: just
models and frameworks that we’ve discussed so track an event for each step, and that’s your funnel.
far. AmpliTunes is an iTunes-like music platform
that lets users play and buy songs and videos.
As an AmpliTunes product manager, you already
know the following:

50 — Activating new users

Do it with Amplitude

Let’s say our new user onboarding flow in

AmpliTunes has 5 steps: User lands on welcome
page User signs up for a trial account User
lands on the main page User searches for
content User selects content User plays
content (the aha moment). And we want to see
how many new users complete their onboarding
to aha moment flow within 30 days of signing up.

Step 1 Create a new Funnel Analysis chart and

build your onboarding flow. In the Events module,
choose the events that make up funnel.

Note that you can choose Events in this order if

you want to analyze users who went through your
funnel exactly in this sequence. If the exact order
of events doesn’t matter to you and you’re just
interested in if users performed these onboard-
ing steps, you can choose to analyze Events in
any order.
The setup in Amplitude

Step 2 In Segmentation module, choose to

analyze the New Users segment. By default in
Amplitude, New Users are users who perform
any action for the first time. Users are considered
new at the time of their earliest action.

Step 3 Now it’s time to do the analysis. Choose

to measure by how many users completed the
funnel within 30 days from their first day. This
is known as the conversion window—the amount

Mastering Engagement — 51
 of time a user has to complete all the steps in the
funnel in order to be considered “converted.” Keep
in mind that you can set your conversion window AmpliTunes
to be anywhere from seconds to days, depending New User Play a Song
on how you expect your product to be used.

Daily, Last 30 Days Funnel Conversion

The from their first day selection restricts the
analysis to only include new users who are new on
the day they performed the first step of the fun- 69.5% 1 Welcome
nel—in this case, landing on the welcome page.
Conversion Rate 6 Play Song or Video
Keep in mind, that these settings counts unique
users who pass through the funnel across a
number of different sessions—i.e., they can 100%
exit AmpliTunes in the middle of the funnel and
come back on another day and still be counted.
If it’s important for your new users to complete
onboarding and reach their aha moment in one
50%
session, you can change the subsequent drop-
downs to read holding constant Session ID. This
will count users who complete every step of the
funnel in the same session.
0%
Takeaway Welcome User Sign Up Main Landing Search Song Select Song Play Song or
From this funnel analysis, you can see that the Page or Video or Video Video
conversion rate for users who were new on any
day in the last 30 days, is 69.2%. That is, 69.2% of All Users
new users in this time frame completed every step
of the onboarding funnel, in this order, and arrived
at the aha moment—the Play Song or Video AmpliTunes onboarding funnel analysis chart

action. They’ve arrived at the bottom rung of the

AmpliTunes engagement ladder. If your first-time user experience is open-ended sider conducting some user research. Or, you can
or flexible, think about the key actions they need make a hypothesis about your onboarding funnel
Help! to perform before they can start getting value by doing path analysis.
What if I don’t know my onboarding funnel? out of your product—you may even want to con-

52 — Activating new users

Do it with Amplitude

Let’s suppose that we don’t know our AmpliTunes

onboarding flow. Pathfinder is a great way to get a
EventPaths taken starting with ..performed by Users
sense of the most common paths your new users
are taking in your product. 1 Main Landing Screen 1 [Amplitude] New User >= 1
2 Top Paths who performed New User >= 1 time
The report lets you specify a starting point and
3 Top Paths any time during Last 30 days
then see the top sequence of actions and that
users performed after it. Or, you can specify an 4 Top Paths and where Select property…
ending point and then see the top actions that and who performed Select event…
5 Top Paths
users performed leading up to it. You can use
this information as a starting place to design an
onboarding flow or to test different ones.

Let’s say we want to know the most common

sequence of actions new users in the last 30 days
..representing at least 5 % of total paths grouped by Select Event/Property
took after landing on the main landing screen
AmpliTunes. Here’s how you would build that
report for AmpliTunes:
The setup in Amplitude

Step 1 First, begin a new Pathfinder report. In the

Events module, choose to look at the paths taken
starting with Main Landing Screen for the new
users.

OR

Let’s say we care more about knowing how new

users get to the aha moment. In this case, in the
left module, you’d choose to look at the paths
taken ending with Play Song or Video.

Mastering Engagement — 53
 Step 2 For each subsequent step in the path,
choose the event Top Paths. These are the top
events (counting by event totals) at the time of
the query.

Step 3 Set up the Segmentation module so you’re

only looking at new users in this report. To do this,
choose to analyze Users who performed the
[Amplitude] New User event 1 time, any time
during Last 30 days. This setup analyzes only the
segment of users who performed their very first
action in the last 30 days (i.e. users who were new
in the last 30 days).

Step 4 Now it’s time to do the analysis. In the date

picker on the report, you can choose to look at
the most common paths in the last 30 days.

Takeaway
Interestingly, Pathfinder highlights other common
paths that new users take that are different from
the onboarding flow we had defined before. AmpliTunes Pathfinder report showing the top outgoing paths after the new user lands on the Main Landing Screen

Some users go on to edit their profiles and then

download content, while others immediately select
and play a song, and still others begin following a
playlist. At this point, it might also be worth looking
at an incoming path analysis of users who end up
playing content. Then you can think about whether
to redesign a completely new onboarding flow or
whether to make UI/UX improvements to your
existing flow in order to redirect new users down a
specific path.

54 — Activating new users

2) WHERE ARE YOUR BIGGEST
ONBOARDING FUNNEL DROP-OFFS?
Conversion Conversion/Time Time to Convert Frequency AB Test-Improve AB Test-Sig
To be fair, AmpliTunes’ onboarding flow is unusu- Dropped o
ally impressive. Over half of the new users signing ..completed within 30 days from their rst day grouped by Select Step/Property
vent
up eventually end up getting to the aha moment. Main Landing Screen
Users
All Users
Whether your goal is to diagnose problem areas
in your onboarding flow or to optimize something 100% 16.0% 33,491 of 209,318
283,648
that appears to be working, the first place to inves- click to inspect
254,597
tigate is where most of your users are dropping off. 75%
209,318 203,775 201,702 198,401
Once you have this identified, you can then begin
to hypothesize why those users are dropping off
50%
and identify what they are doing instead.

25%

Do it with Amplitude 0%

Welcome User Sign Up Main Landing Search Song Select Song Play Song or
If you’ve already built your onboarding funnel, P Vd Vd Vd
identifying your biggest drop-offs won’t be
AmpliTunes onboarding flow showing the step with the most dropped-off users

difficult. Going back to AmpliTunes’s onboarding

funnel at the beginning of this session, you can
see that the biggest drop-off in the funnel hap-
pens between the user signing up for an account
and arriving at the main landing page—once new
users get here, nearly all of them complete the
flow. In Amplitude, it’s easy to get a snapshot of Takeaway
how many users are dropping off in your funnel: For AmpliTunes, you can see that 16% of all
Just mouse over the striped section of the bar new users in the past 30 days abandoned the
you care about and a new window pops up. onboarding funnel after signing up.

Mastering Engagement — 55
 3) WHAT ARE NEW USERS
DOING INSTEAD OF ONBOARDING?
Top User Paths starting with “User Sign Up” between Jul 18 and Aug 17
Path analysis can be really useful for seeing what
Users User Sign Up Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5
users are doing once they drop out of a funnel,
like the onboarding flow we looked at earlier. Are
these users leaving the app for good, or are they 41,562
Users
doing something else instead?
100%

User Sign Up End Session

Do it with Amplitude 41,562 (100%) 41,652 (100%)

5
Users
Again, in Amplitude, it’s very simple to get a quick
sense of what’s happening to your dropped off 0.012%
users. Once you’ve identified where your biggest User Sign Up Welcome End Session
drop-off is, you can just click on that region to 41,562 (100%) 5 (0.012%) 5 (0.012%)
inspect it further—you have the option to view
or download individual users, create a cohort,
and see the paths these dropped-off users took After clicking ‘Click To Inspect’ on the dropped-off region of this AmpliTunes onboarding
funnel analysis, you can then choose to view user paths for this group of users
without ever leaving your chart.

User path analysis shows that of 16% of users

who dropped-off after signing up for AmpliTunes,
almost all of them left the app and never came
back.

Takeaway
User path analysis can help you begin to diagnose experience for some users? Or, this could prompt
problem areas and/or opportunities for optimizing you to explore ways to bring new users back to the
your conversion rate. In this example, you could dig app, through email reminders or push notifications,
into the individu al users who left the app to see if for example, so users who do exit AmpliTunes after
they share any commonalities—perhaps a certain signing up will more likely complete onboarding
browser or device type is resulting in a bad within the conversion window.

56 — Activating new users

2.4.2 | Analyzing the first
value exchange Events performed in this order .. by New Users

Next in our analysis of new user activation, is look- 1 Welcome 1 All Users
ing at the conversion rate of users who perform 2 User Sign Up where Select property…
the first value exchange. Remember that at this and who performed Select event…
3 Main Landing Screen
rung of the ladder of engagement, not only does
the product provide value to the user, the user also 4 Search Song or Video + Add Segment
provides value (usually money) to the business. 5 Select Song or Video
There are two important analyses we can look at
6 Play Song or Video ..grouped by Select property…
with respect to this stage of activation.
7 Purchase Song or Video
1) WHAT IS YOUR ACTIVATION RATE? 8 Select event…

The name of the game for this analysis is, again,

conversion rate. We’re defining activation rate as
the conversion rate to the first value exchange Conversion Conversion/Time Time to Convert Frequency AB Test-Improve AB Test-Sig
event.
..completed within 30 days from their rst day grouped by Select Step/Property

Do it with Amplitude
The setup in Amplitude

If you have your onboarding funnel already set up,

it’s not difficult to find out what your conversion
rate to the first value exchange is: just add that
step to your funnel. In AmpliTunes, we already
know that our first value exchange moment is
when a user purchases a song or video.

Since we care about the purchase event and not

necessarily the exact sequence it took to get there,
one thing to consider this time around is to set your
analysis for Events performed in any order.

Mastering Engagement — 57
 Takeaway
The funnel analysis shows that the conversion rate
between a new user first landing on the welcome AmpliTunes
page to purchasing a song or video is 24.1%. New User Purchasing a Song or Video

If you want to find ways to improve this conversion

Daily, Last 30 Days Funnel Conversion
rate, path analysis is a great place to start. For
example, you could find out the most common
inward flowing paths that users took to get to 24.1% 1 Welcome
the purchase event, and then build in hooks and
Conversion Rate 7 Purchase Song or Video
triggers in those places to nudge them in the
direction (more on that in the next chapter).

100%

75%

50%

25%

0%

Welcome User Sign Main Landing Search Song Select Song Play Song Purchase
Up Page or Video or Video or Video Song or Video

All Users

AmpliTunes funnel analysis chart for conversion to the first value exchange

58 — Activating new users

2) WHAT ARE NEW USERS
DOING INSTEAD OF ACTIVATING?

We saw in the previous analysis that there’s a sig-

nificant dropoff between users who play content
and users who purchase content. Path analysis is
useful for seeing what users are doing instead of
activating.

Using the same funnel you used to look at con-

version to the first value exchange event, you can
use Pathfinder to see what dropped off users do
instead of purchasing a song.

Takeaway
The funnel analysis shows that the conversion rate
between a new user first landing on the welcome
page to purchasing a song or video is 24.1%.

If you want to find ways to improve this conversion

After clicking ‘Click To Inspect’ on the dropped-off region of this AmpliTunes activation
rate, path analysis is a great place to start. For funnel analysis, you can then choose to view user paths for this group of users
example, you could find out the most common
inward flowing paths that users took to get to
the purchase event, and then build in hooks and
triggers in those places to nudge them in the
direction (more on that in the next chapter).

Mastering Engagement — 59
 3) HOW FAST DO NEW USERS ACTIVATE?

Events performed in this order .. by New Users

Put another way, this analysis is to understand
how long new users take to convert into a paying 1 Welcome 1 All Users
(and, by our definition, activated) customer. where Select property…
* User Sign Up
and who performed Select event…
* Main Landing Screen
Do it with Amplitude * Search Song or Video + Add Segment

* Select Song or Video

You can look at the time it took new AmpliTunes * Play Song or Video ..grouped by Select property…
users to convert as a distribution of the time it * Purchase Song or Video
took to complete the entire funnel—from the new
* Select event…
user Welcome page to purchasing a song or video,
in this case.

To see this view, you simply have to build out your Conversion Conversion/Time Time to Convert Frequency AB Test-Improve AB Test-Sig
funnel to the value exchange moment, as we did
in the previous section. Then choose to analyze ..completed within 30 days from their rst day grouped by Select Step/Property
time to convert.

The setup in Amplitude

60 — Activating new users

 Takeaway
According to the time-to-convert view of this
AmpliTunes
funnel, over 20% of new AmpliTunes users
New User Purchasing Song or Video Time to Convert complete the entire activation funnel within 1 hour.

Daily, Last 30 Days Funnel Conversion

20%

10%

0%
0m

0m

0m

0m

0m

0m

0m

0m

0m

0m
m
10

h1

h1

h1

h1

h1

h1

h1

h1

h1

h1
0-

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1

-1
1h

2h

3h

4h

5h

6h

6h

6h

6h

6h
All Users

AmpliTunes time to convert

Mastering Engagement — 61
 PRO TIP 2.4.3 | Activated new
user retention

For a review on retention curves, The proportion of activated new users who come
product usage intervals, and different back for the first time within a certain time frame
methods of measuring user retention, should be a key measure of activation success;
check out Chapter 2 of the Product this metric directly reflects not only how many
Analytics Playbook Volume 1: new users found value in their early exploration of
Mastering Retention[20]. your product, but how many users then decided
to invest in your product themselves.

Improvements in your activated new user reten-

tion can shift your product’s entire retention
curve upward, by decreasing the initial dropdown
that happens during a user’s early experience.
This means, better overall retention of your
users, a greater number of value exchanges, and,
ultimately, better customer lifetime value.

Do it with Amplitude

In the previous section, we said that the first val- chase Song or Video and the return event also
ue exchange event for AmpliTunes is purchasing to Purchase Song or Video. This setup indicates
content. New users who complete onboarding, that we will count users as retained if they pur-
play content, and then purchase content will be chase content, and then come back and purchase
considered activated. Here’s how you would build content another time.
the retention curve of activated new users:
Step 2 Set up the Segmentation module so
Step 1 Create a new Retention Analysis chart. you’re only looking at new users in this report. To
In the Events module, set the first event to Pur- do this, choose to analyze Users who performed

[20]
https://amplitude.com/mastering-retention/critical-event-product-usage-interval

62 — Activating new users

the [Amplitude] New User event 1 time, any time
during Last 30 days. This setup analyzes only the
First event ..performed by Users
segment of users who performed their very first
Purchase Song or Video
action in the last 30 days (i.e. users who were new 1 [Amplitude] New User >= 1
in the last 30 days). ..then the return event who performed New User >= 1 time
A Purchase Song or Video any time during Last 30 days
Step 3 Now it’s time to do the analysis. In the Mea-
sure module, you can choose to measure reten- B Select event… and where Select property…
tion by N-Day Retention, Unbounded Retention or and who performed Select event…
Custom Bracket Retention. If you need a refresher
on how these differ, check out our help desk arti- + Add Segment
cle[12] or our first playbook, Mastering Retention.
..grouped by Select property…
For AmpliTunes, we will measure N-week reten-
tion, because we’ve already determined that the
product has a weekly usage interval—that is, we
..measured by N-Day Retention shown as Retention
expect users to come back on a weekly basis.

The setup in Amplitude

TERMS TO KNOW

The product usage interval is the

frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)
with which you expect people to use
your product.

Mastering Engagement — 63
 Takeaway
The resulting retention curve shows the proportion
AmpliTunes
of new, activated users within the past 30 days
who have returned to AmpliTunes and purchased N-Week Retention of Activated New Users
content sometime during the week. According
to the curve, Week 1 retention is around 60%. Daily, Last 4 Weeks Retention
This means, about 60% of new users who made a
purchase, came back and made another purchase
during the same week. Once again, this analysis 100%
gives you a sense of the proportion of new users
that provide continued value to your business.
75%

50%

25%

0%
Week 0 Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4

New User >= 1

Weekly retention of activated users who come back

and perform another value exchange event

64 — Activating new users

2.4.4 | Measuring real growth
TERMS TO KNOW
Now that you’ve established baseline measure- At Amplitude, we often talk about behavioral
ments of activation, the last type of analysis is cohorts—groups of users who behave in a certain An acquisition cohort is a group users
understanding whether your new user activation way. An acquisition cohort is, instead, a group of who started using your product (i.e.,
is actually growing or not. You can measure users who start off being new during the same were new) during the same time period.
the effects of product changes or targeted period of time.
campaigns on new users by tracking conversion
and retention of acquisition cohorts of new users
over time.

Do it with Amplitude

Analyzing growth in terms of a change in activa-

tion is similar to the funnel analysis that we did
New Users May 2018
in Section 2.4.2. The only difference is that first
you’ll have to create cohorts of new users who
began in the period of time that you care about. The Users who ..had been new
For AmpliTunes, we’ll look at real growth of users
anytime during May 1, 2018 - May 31, 2018
who were new in May, June, and July 2018.

1) ANALYZING THE CHANGE IN

And also ..performed Event ..had been Active ..had been New ..had user Property
ACTIVATION RATE

Step 1 Create the May acquisition cohort by choos-

ing Users who had been new any time during May
1, 2018 - May 31, 2018. Save this cohort. Create
Acquisition cohort definition for users who were new in May

the June and July cohorts the same way, changing

only the time component, and save these cohorts
as well.

Mastering Engagement — 65
 Step 2 Create a funnel analysis. In the Events
module on the left, choose the first step of the
Events performed in this order .. by Any Users
funnel as new users landing on the Welcome page
and the final step is Purchase Song or Video. 1 Welcome 1 New Users May 2018
2 Purchase Song or Video where Cohort = New Users May 2018
Step 3 In the Segmentation module on the right,
3 Select event… and where Select property…
choose to view the acquisition cohorts you define
in Step 1. and who performed Select event…

2 New Users June 2018

Step 4 Now it’s time to do the analysis. In the Mea-
sure module, make sure Conversion is selected where Cohort = New Users June 2018
and the conversion window is set. and where Select property…

and who performed Select event…

3 New Users July 2018

where Cohort = New Users July 2018

and where Select property…

and who performed Select event…

+ Add Segment

Conversion Conversion/Time Time to Convert Frequency AB Test-Improve AB Test-Sig

..completed within 30 days from their rst day grouped by Select Step/Property

The setup in Amplitude

66 — Activating new users

Takeaway
If you pushed a product update or ran an effective
campaign between May and July, you might see a AmpliTunes
satisfying jump in activation rate between cohorts
Activation Rate by Cohort
of users. The sample chart, for example, shows
that the July 2018 cohort of new users had higher
Weekly, Last 24 Weeks Funnel Conversion
activation rate than the May 2018. This is one way
to measure the impact and effectiveness of your
product and growth marketing changes. 100%

75%

50%

25%

0%

Welcome Purchase Song or Video

New Users May 2018 New Users June 2018 New Users July 2018

Activation rate of different acquisition cohorts

Mastering Engagement — 67
 2) ANALYZING THE CHANGE IN
ACTIVATED USER RETENTION RATE
First event .. performed by Users
Purchase Song or Video
Analyzing growth in terms of a change in activated 1 New Users May 2018
user retention is similar to the retention analysis ..then the return event where Cohort = New Users May 2018
that we did in Section 2.4.3, the only difference Purchasing Song or Video
A and where Select property…
being the addition of multiple acquisition cohorts.
B Select event… and who performed Select event…

Step 1 Create your acquisition cohorts.

2 New Users June 2018

Step 2 Create a new Retention Analysis. In the where Cohort = New Users June 2018

Eventsmodule on the left, set the first event to and where Select property…
Purchase Song or Video and the return event also and who performed Select event…
to Purchase Song or Video. This setup indicates
that we will count users as retained if they pur- 3 New Users July 2018
chase content, and then come back and purchase where Cohort = New Users July 2018
content another time. In other words, this is look-
and where Select property…
ing at retention of activated users.
and who performed Select event…
Step 3 Set up the Segmentation module on the
right so you’re only looking at new users in this + Add Segment
report. To do this, choose to analyze Users who
performed the [Amplitude] New User event 1
time, any time during Last 30 days.
..measured by N-Day Retention shown as Retention
Step 4 Now it’s time to do the analysis. In the
Measure module, choose to measure N-week
retention. The setup in Amplitude

68 — Activating new users

Takeaway
In the example chart, the July cohort has higher
AmpliTunes
activated user retention compared to May or
June, indicating that a timely product change or Retention Rate by New User Cohorts
campaign has positively impacted user growth.
In addition to tracking changes in activation Weekly, Last 8 Weeks Retention
rate, this is another way to measure the impact
and effectiveness of your product and growth
marketing changes. 100%

75%

50%

25%

0%
Week 0 Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Week 8

New Users May 2018 New Users June 2018 New Users July 2018

Example retention rates for different acquisition cohorts

Mastering Engagement — 69
 2.5 | Taking action See it in action

Building Your Growth Model and

This chapter discussed the three phases of new In the last part of this chapter, we share a case Ladder of Engagement
user activation: onboarding, the aha moment, study from our customer and transaction-game Josh Elman, Partner at Greylock and
and the first value exchange. We expanded the player Blue Apron. The Blue Apron Growth Team former product leader at Twitter and
concept of the aha moment into the ladder of significantly improved conversion rates by fig- LinkedIn

engagement and shared examples of how com- uring out where a significant proportion of new https://medium.com/@joshelman/
building-your-growth-model-and-
panies playing each of the three engagement users were coming from and redesigning the first
ladder-of-engagement-3b3a18f2d1a8
games might build out their ladder. We then time experience for those users.
shared several types of analyses that can help
How AdRoll Drives 97% Customer
you measure new user activation. If you’re wondering what actions you can take Retention By Helping Customers
to improve engagement and stickiness of your Outside the App
Before wrapping up this chapter, take a moment product like Blue Apron, that’s coming up next in Trevor Sookraj, Clearbit
now to reflect on your learnings. Consider the Chapter 3. https://blog.clearbit.com/how-adroll-
drives-97-customer-retention-by-
following: helping-customers-outside-the-app/

• What does onboarding look like for your 5 Habits to Building Better
product? What percentage of new users Products Faster
complete onboarding? Hiten Shah, Founder of KISSMetrics
https://hitenism.com/5-habits-better-
products/
• What does your ladder of engagement
look like? What is the topmost rung? The FURTHER READING
A User’s Manual for Quantifying
bottommost rung? How many new users
Qualitative Research
make it past the bottom rung?
Three Defining Components of Airtable
Authentic Growth https://blog.airtable.com/a-users-
• What is the first exchange of value that manual-for-quantifying-qualitative-
Brian Balfour, Founder & CEO of Reforge
occurs in your product and how does that research/
https://brianbalfour.com/growth-
relate to yours business model? At what machine/authentic-growth/
rungs of your ladder of engagement do you 5 of The Best User Onboarding Examples
Jackson Noel, Co-Founder/COO of
also have an exchange of value? 6 User Onboarding Flow Examples Appcues
Shanelle Mullin, ConversionXL https://www.appcues.com/blog/the-5-
• What does retention look like for your https://conversionxl.com/blog/6-user- best-user-onboarding-experiences
activated users? onboarding-flows/

70 — Activating new users

Case Study

Blue Apron Uses Optimizely and Amplitude For Rapid

Experiments That Activate More New Customers.

John Cline

John Cline is a senior engineering

manager for the Growth and
Member Experience teams at Blue
Apron, where he leads engineering
efforts around customer acquisition,
merchandising, and personalization.
The Company Prior to Blue Apron, he led the
Blue Apron creates incredible experiences. Founded tools, utensils, and pantry items, which are tested web homepage team at eBay. He
in 2012, Blue Apron is a consumer lifestyle brand that and recommended by Blue Apron’s culinary team. graduated from Seattle University
with his BS in Computer Science in
symbolizes a love of home cooking, excitement and
2008, and completed an MBA from
discovery, and deep, meaningful human connections. Blue Apron has developed an integrated ecosystem
the W.P. Carey School at Arizona
that employs technology and expertise across State University in 2011.
Blue Apron’s core product is a meal experience that many disciplines. The company’s supply-demand
customers create using the original recipes and coordination activitiess—demand planning,
fresh, seasonal ingredients that are included in every recipe creation, recipe merchandising, fulfillment
box. All recipes are accompanied by printed and operations, and marketings—drive its end-to-end
digital content, including how‑to instructions and value chain.
stories of suppliers and specialty ingredients. Blue
Apron also sells wine, which can be paired with
its meals, as well as a curated selection of cooking

Mastering Engagement — 71
 The Product Challenge of user pathing and funnel analysis in Amplitude understanding of the Blue Apron meal experience.
The primary focus of Blue Apron’s Growth team is to to investigate the pages consumers were visiting Using Amplitude, the team learned that its Recipe
build and consistently refine a digital experience that before they entered the sign-up flow, he discovered page was an important component of the digital
attracts new consumers and deepens engagement that a significant proportion of people who visited experience that could help attract new consumers
with current customers. the Blue Apron Recipes page continued on to begin to its product. Making the upcoming recipes
the sign-up process. more prominent on the page has helped improve
The Solution conversion by 5.5%.
The Blue Apron Growth team needed a tool to “We have a page that lists all of our upcoming
quickly generate hypotheses about how consumers recipes. We did not think many people visited this “We’ve found that Amplitude is very
were behaving on the digital platform and run page prior to signing up, but we realized the Recipes user-friendly. Even someone who is not
experiments on those hypotheses. page actually had a higher percentage of traffic particularly technical can use Amplitude
than we expected,” John said. to dive into, study, and interpret complex
Discovering where new customers are coming product data. Amplitude helps the Blue
from using Amplitude In order to take advantage of this insight, the Apron Growth team own and drive results
team conducted a full refresh of the Recipes page for customers.”
When John Cline, Senior Engineering Manager of to include sign-up CTAs and display even more WALKER FULLERTON
Growth/Member Experience, used a combination recipes for consumers to peruse and gain a better Product Manager, Growth, Blue Apron

Blue Apron's old page design New page design

72 — Activating new users

Using Optimizely to test personalized emails to
consumers who expressed intent to purchase
During a review of the abandoned cart experience,
the team saw an opportunity to improve how Blue
Apron contacted consumers who expressed intent to
purchase a meal (i.e. left the product in their online
shopping cart), with a more personalized approach.

As part of updating the design, the team

hypothesized that customers who received a
personal email, sent on behalf of a member of the
Customer Experience team, would be more likely to
try the product.

The team conducted an experiment to study whether

sending these customers a personalized email—one
that introduced the Customer Experience team,
offered several options to speak directly to an expert
on the team, and highlighted a favorite recipe—
would help improve conversion. After testing the
personalized email using Optimizely Full Stack, the
team saw a 7% increase in conversion. Old email design New personalized email design

The Results

5.5%
• Using Amplitude, Blue Apron learned that their “We can now get an early signal from the
recipe pages were a great way to acquire new Optimizely Results Dashboard within
users. Making these more prominent has helped a few days, which helps empower Conversion increase using Amplitude

improve conversion by 5.5%. product and engineering managers to

• Using Optimizely, Blue Apron was able to test a make decisions on their own.”
personalized email to consumers who expressed
intent to purchase Blue Apron that improved
JOHN CLINE
Senior Engineering Manager of
Growth/Member Experience, Blue Apron
7%
conversion by 7%. Conversion increase using Optimizely

Mastering Engagement — 73
CHAPTER 03
MAKING USERS STICK

You’ve activated your new users and introduced them to your product’s
engagement ladder. How do you now make sure they continue to see value over
time? In this chapter, we talk more about the engagement loop and the triggers
you can use to engage and re-engage your current users. We also introduce
stickiness as a way to measure your loop. We round out the chapter with a special
case study on how Postmates uses product analytics and timely email campaigns
with Braze to re-engage their customers.

Mastering Engagement — 74
 Why loops matter

The fastest growing products are An important part of the engagement loop is the To summarize a fantastic article authored by the
better represented as a system of journey that new users take from signup to the team at Reforge[21], thinking about growth as a
loops, not funnels. Loops are closed first exchange of value between themselves and funnel leads to a few major problems:
systems where the inputs through the product. But the journey can’t stop there.
some process generates more of an Users have to keep finding the product engaging • Strategic silos: Funnels cause us to think
output that can be reinvested in the and invest in it for real growth to happen. about channel distribution, product devel-
input. There are growth loops that serve opment, and monetization separately when
different value creation including new But let’s take a step back. Why do we talk about they should be considered together.
users, returning users, defensibility, or engagement and growth as a loop in the first • Functional silos: As we mentioned in Chapter
efficiency. place? 2, often, certain teams “own” certain parts
BRIAN BALFOUR
of the funnel and the metrics aligned to it.
“Growth Loops are the New Funnels” Historically, when we think about moving users Problems arise when teams don’t talk to each
from one stage to the next, we talk about funnels. other and optimize for only their portion of
In fact, when we introduced new user activation in the funnel.
Sections 2.1 and 2.2, we alluded to the well-known • One-directional thinking: Funnels don’t pro-
AARRR funnel framework from Dave McClure. vide a good picture of where outputs can be
reinvested back into the product.
As a model and learning tool, this funnel is a great
starting point for thinking about product growth This is why our interaction framework for engage-
Virtuous loops are the flywheels that strategy. There’s a wealth of information on how ment is based on a loop, not a funnel. As we’ll
convert your users’ engagement into to set strategy and tactics for each stage, what see in the next couple sections, the most pow-
fuel to power your company forward. metrics to track, and who should be responsible erful way to grow your user base and re-engage
for each part of the funnel. In reality, however, your current users is to create self-perpetuat-
the product landscape is changing so quickly that ing loops.
SARAH TAVEL
“The Hierarchy of Engagement, growth for most successful products doesn’t
expanded” actually look like this.

[21]
https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-loops

75 — Making users stick

Topics covered in this chapter: 03 | Value Exchange: The new user makes their REMINDER
first investment into your product and becomes
3.1 - The engagement loop revisited activated. In Chapter 2, we name this as the last THE ENGAGEMENT LOOP
3.2 - An intro to stickiness phase of new user activation.
What it is: An interaction framework that
3.3 - Build triggers into your loop
describes the actions and triggers your
3.4 - Set your stickiness strategy 04 | Trigger: Different kinds of triggers prompt
customers experience when they use your
3.5 - Measuring stickiness users to come back to the product and to keep
product regularly. See Section 1.5.
3.6 - Take Action using it. Current users then become engaged in
recurring value exchange—i.e., they get more
When to use it: When you’re testing how
Case study: Postmates uses Amplitude and value with every product use and, in turn, invest
users move through your product and
Braze to build an engagement strategy that more time and money back into the product.
identifying the steps at which they derive
gets users to stick
value.
05 | Social Proof: Once users are invested suffi-
ciently in your product, they can help promote to
Why you should use it: To understand
future customers through incentivized referrals or
3.1 | The engagement loop revisited social media shares. whether your product has the right
elements to drive growth and re-
engagement. To make smarter product
In Chapter 1, we gave an overview of the steps of
decisions that enhance the customer
the engagement loop and why the framework is
experience and keep users coming back.
useful. Recall that the steps of the engagement
loop are: 02
Aha
01 | Curiosity: A user finds out about your product moment
through some means, becomes curious, and signs
up. This is the acquisition phase of your product. 01 03 04

02 | Aha Moment: The new user finds value in your Curiosity Value
exchange Trigger
product, usually after or during the process of
onboarding in the first few sessions. Usually this
‘aha moment’ is the first rung of your product’s 05
ladder of engagement. In Chapter 2, we explain
Social
onboarding and the aha moment as the first two proof
phases of new user activation.

Mastering Engagement — 76
 Essentially, the engagement loop illustrates two Depending on what engagement game you’re
interrelated concepts. The loop as a whole illus- playing, your engagement loop might look dif-
trates what needs to happen to drive real growth ferent. But the most important characteristic
in new users, as we defined it in Chapter 2. And of this Loop is that there’s an input that leads to
the mini feedback loop between value exchange value being created which results in some output
and Trigger describes re-engagement of your that can be fed back into the loop. Thinking about
current users. your product engagement as a loop—an inter-
connected system of inputs and outputs—is
the foundation for building a highly engaging,
EXAMPLE sticky product.

In the next several sections we will dive into why

Growth loops stickiness matters for your engagement loop,
and re-engagement loops best practices to measure product stickiness, and
strategies on how to make your product sticky no
According to Sarah Tavel, currently a General number of virtuous loops. While most people are matter what engagement game you’re playing.
Partner at Benchmark and formerly a product familiar with the network effect, growth and re-
manager at Pinterest, sticky products create a engagement can also be modeled as loops. First, here are some examples of what hypotheti-
cal engagement loops might look like some of the
most engaging digital products to date.

77 — Making users stick

EXAMPLE

Attention game:
Instagram’s engagement loop

01 | Curiosity: View a friend’s Instagram photo on 05 | Social proof: Invite friends

Facebook Finally, once the user has invested time and ener-
Let’s say a potential user’s curiosity is piqued by gy into engaging with Instagram content–possi-
a friend’s Instagram photo that showed up on her bly rising through the rungs of the engagement
Facebook feed. She signs up for a new account and ladder by leaving more comments, sharing stories,
undergoes standard onboarding. and initiating live videos—she may invite more
people with her network to join Instagram. The
02 | Aha moment: Share a photo loop then begins again.
The new user then lands on the first rungs of Ins-
tagram’s ladder of engagement where she follows
her friends and consumes and likes content on
her feed. She finds her aha moment when she first
shares her own photo.

03 | Value exchange
The new user becomes activated when the first
value exchange occurs: in exchange for entertain-
ment and relevant content, the new user provides
value to the business through ad engagement.

04 | Trigger: Push notification

Instagram’s stickiness is a result of consistent,
repeated value exchanges between the user and
product, until the new user becomes a habitual
user. These value exchanges can be triggered
through external cues like a timely push notifica-
tion or email.

Mastering Engagement — 78
 EXAMPLE

Productivity game:
Dropbox’s engagement loop

Dropbox is a workspace designed for creative 04 | Triggers: Email campaigns 05 | Social proof: Invite collaborators
collaboration. It brings a user’s files together in one The new, free user may have to be nudged through Finally satisfied, a regular user of Dropbox may be
central location and allows them to sync those email campaigns or other external triggers to set up incentivized to invite friends and colleagues, thus
files across devices. Features like Dropbox Paper, his devices with the Dropbox app. setting the whole loop in motion again.
document scanner, comments, and version history
are designed to increase team productivity and As this new user takes full advantage of Dropbox’s
decrease busy work. free functionalities, he may convert to a paying user
to unlock more features, increase storage space, or
01 | Curiosity: Receive a Dropbox invitation collaborate with others. This begins a cycle of value
An engagement loop for Dropbox might begin with exchanges.
a potential user receiving an invitation from a friend
or a team they need to collaborate with.

02 | Aha moment: Upload a file

This new user signs up for a new free account,
undergoes onboarding, and then lands on the first
rung of Dropbox’s ladder of engagement–uploading
a file–which also happens to be the product’s aha
moment [22].

03 | Value exchange
Since Dropbox follows a freemium model, this new
user may need to see value several more times and
climb more rungs of the ladder before he’s activated
to a paying customer. It’s important to make these
free features sticky and show value as frequently
as possible so that conversion happens.

[22]
http://www.growhack.com/2012/12/discovering-your-aha-moment/

79 — Making users stick

EXAMPLE

Transaction game:
Postmates’ engagement loop

Some transaction players monetize entirely on pays a fee. Through repeated value exchanges, or push notifications with special deals on a
habit-formation rather than infrequent pur- some customers might climb the ladder of weekly cadence to trigger a new user to place
chases. Ride hailing apps, meal subscription kits, engagement and sign up for a Postmates Unlim- another order, thus continuing the cycle of value
and on-demand delivery services, for example, ited subscription. exchange
are products that serve to fulfill a users’ regular
needs—e.g., getting from point A to point B, 04 | Triggers: Special delivery deals 05 | Social proof: Invite friends
ordering food, buying groceries. Since these trans- Postmates users probably don’t come back on After repeated use, the new user may be incentiv-
actional apps depend on frequent purchases, It a daily basis—the natural cadence of ordering ized through free delivery credits to reach out to her
makes sense for them to think about their product groceries online is more likely to be weekly than network and invite their family and friends to use
in terms stickiness and engagement loops. daily. Postmates may send promotional emails Postmates. The whole loop begins again.

Postmates is a on on-demand delivery service

for food, groceries, and alcohol. Let’s look at the
engagement loop for their product.

01 | Curiosity: Receive a promo code

An engagement loop for Postmates might begin
with a potential user receiving a promo code and
signing up for a new account.

02 | Aha moment: Receive first order

This user has an aha moment after placing and
receiving her first order.

03 | Value exchange
The new user becomes activated when the first
value exchange occurs: in exchange for the conve-
nience of on-demand delivery, etc., the customer

Mastering Engagement — 80
 3.2 | An intro to stickiness As Facebook began to tout the DAU/MAU metric,
TERMS TO KNOW
more and more consumer apps also began mea-
If you’re in the world of product development, suring it as a core KPI.
Stickiness is the frequency with you’ve probably heard the phrase “sticky prod-
which a user engages with your uct”. And you probably know that in this context, Certainly, building a product around which users
product. Specifically, it measures “sticky” doesn’t refer to the uncomfortable phys- can develop a habit is important to businesses
the number of days out of a given ical sensation on your hands. In a product setting, in every vertical, regardless of the engagement
time period that a user was active or “stickiness” has evolved to be synonymous game they’re playing. But measuring stickiness
completed a specific action. with engaging or addicting. And the prevailing as # of days used per month (DAU/MAU) does
assumption is that stickiness in products is the not work for every product. As we’ll see in the
goal—that anyone building products is designing next section, the stickiness metric is only useful
them so that the customers stick around. if it’s defined in a way that makes sense for your
business.
Well we’re here to deconstruct stickiness as a
metric and a concept and correct the assumption
that all products should strive to achieve maxi- 3.2.2 | Stickiness depends on your
mum stickiness. product usage interval

Before you go measure your product’s worth on

3.2.1 | The history of stickiness monthly active users, remember that stickiness
as a metric is product-specific. It relates to your product’s
natural usage cadence.
As a metric, stickiness is usually defined as the
ratio of daily active users to monthly active users Some products like Twitter and Netflix—typically
DAU/MAU and interpreted as on average, “people attention-game players—are naturally daily-use
use the app X out of 30 days in a month”. This products. It makes sense that highly engaged
definition of stickiness first rose to prominence in users come back every single day.
social gaming, alongside the exponential growth
of Facebook. Facebook itself has incredibly Other products are naturally used on a weekly,
high stickiness—historically over 50%. By the biweekly, monthly, or even quarterly basis. These
DAU/MAU definition of stickiness, this means are typically transactional or productivity-driven
that the average Facebook user is using the prod- products whose usage is tightly coupled to exter-
uct more than 15 out of 30 days that month[23]. nal cycles. Think e-commerce sites, tax software,

[23]
https://andrewchen.co/dau-mau-is-an-important-metric-but-heres-where-it-fails/

81 — Making users stick

enterprise resource planning software, expense PRO TIP TERMS TO KNOW
reporting software.

The first step to measure what healthy stickiness Is stickiness the right Your product usage interval(24) is the
looks like for your product—and how it compares metric for you? frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)
to other similar products—you need to under- with which you expect people to use
stand how customers naturally use your product. Sometimes stickiness isn’t the right measure your product.
You need to calculate your product usage interval. of user engagement or delivery of product
value. Make sure you know what customer
Your own intuition about your product will help pain you’re solving and the business model in
you figure out your product’s usage interval, but if place before setting your KPIs.
you’re unsure, we share a framework for how you
can better calculate it with data in Section 3.5. Here are 2 examples where tracking
stickiness isn’t useful:

E-commerce: You might not always think

about stickiness in terms of frequency of
visit in e-commerce; wallet share is what
matters more. If customers visit your site
only three times a year but make high
value purchases, your “stickiness” number
might be low, but the value exchange is still
happening. Transactional companies like
Airbnb fit into this bucket as well.

Productivity software: If users are engaging

repeatedly with your product they find it
valuable, right? Not always. Users of B2B
accounting software, for example, desire
ease and efficiency; if these customers used
the product less, that would be a win.

[24]
https://amplitude.com/blog/2016/10/11/product-usage-interval

Mastering Engagement — 82
 3.2.3 | Understanding stickiness your users. Some of your users might be slightly
TERMS TO KNOW
through your power users engaged, while others are power users, but there’s
no way to tell these groups apart from a single
The power user curve or non- The DAU/MAU ratio is a useful measure of engage- number.
cumulative stickiness depicts the ment if your monetization depends on users see-
proportion of users who were active ing value on regular basis with tight engagement Instead of moving your DAU/MAU number through
in your product for exactly X number loops. haphazard growth hacks, identifying your power
of days. users and exploring their behavior is a great place to
A major shortcoming of the DAU/MAU ratio, start thinking through a stickiness strategy. Luckily,
however, is that it masks the variability among the power user curve can help you do just that.

The power user curve as depicted in Andrew Chen

and Li Jin’s blog post “The Power User Curve: The best
way to understand your most engaged users” (source:
https://andrewchen.co/power-user-curve/)

83 — Making users stick

The power user curve—also called ‘non-cu- 3.3 | Build triggers into your
mulative stickiness’—depicts the proportion engagement loop
of users who were active in your product for
exactly X number of days. In the example power Triggers are a key way to re-engage users and
user curve below, 17% of users were active for nudge them to behave more like your power
exactly one day out of the month; 10% of users users. Put simply, they stimulate users to come
were active for exactly 2 days; 7% of users were back to your product and do something.
active for exactly 3 days, etc.
They play an important role in driving the cycles
The power user curve is a useful way to identify of value exchange for the example engagement
segments of users with different engagement loops we we reference in Section 3.1. The more
levels and understand the overall health of your effectively you can use triggers to help users see
product. product value on a regular basis, the more value
exchange cycles, and the stickier your product
For products that drive value through repeat will be.
engagement, getting your curve to take the
shape of a smile is a sign of healthy growth. This If you’ve read our Mastering Retention playbook,
means that over time, you have a proportion of you might recall us talking about using triggers to
power users who are engaging with your product “resurrect” inactive users (Mastering Retention,
almost every single day (or whatever your ideal Section 7.3). This is the same deal.
usage cadence is).
In his book Hooked, behavioral designer and
On the other hand, if you see your power user author Nir Eyal describes two flavors of triggers
curve tapering off to the right, you might have that habit-forming technologies use: external
to rethink your strategy. In Section 3.4, we will triggers and internal triggers.
discuss a few fundamental questions you can
ask yourself to set your engagement strategy. • External triggers are specific sensory stimuli
that companies/products use to nudge users
But first, we’ll explore a key part of the engage- into taking action.
ment loop that drives product stickiness: • Internal triggers are feelings and emotions
triggers. that manifest in the mind and cue users to
take action on their own.

Mastering Engagement — 84
 3.3.1 | External triggers as well as re-engagement in a number of different
ways. Here are a few examples of triggers and the
External triggers are things like push notifications, purpose they serve.
emails, ads, and referral incentives that contain a
specific call-to-action. A good external trigger You’ll notice that there are a number of different
tells a user what they should do next–this is the kinds of external triggers you can employ in your
stuff that marketing campaigns are made of. product. In the Section 3.4 we’ll go a little bit into
how you can set up a strategy for using the right
Used in the right way and in the right place, external triggers to improve your product’s stick-
external triggers can drive new user acquisition iness and drive that cycle of value exchange.

External trigger for new user activation: Email prompting a

new Dropbox user to download the desktop app

85 — Making users stick

 External trigger for new user acquisition: New
Amplitude user receives an invite to collaborate
with an existing user

COMPLETE YOUR PURCHASE

External trigger for new user activation: Email

prompting a current Old Navy online shopper
user to complete checkout

Mastering Engagement — 86
 3.3.2 | Internal triggers and they become a regular, committed user.
Eventually, the product might become so hab-
Internal triggers happen in the mind without it-forming that users won’t need external triggers
external prompting. According to Eyal, an internal to keep them coming back.
trigger occurs “when a product becomes tightly
coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-ex- Products that successfully develop internal trig-
isting routine” [25]. gers are ones that create value for the user con-
tinuously; with every value exchange, it becomes
The stickiness of attention-grabbing social media more stressful for users to leave because of that
products like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram now loss of value they would experience. Compa-
run almost entirely on internal triggers. ny-wide B2B software like G Suite and Jira are
great examples of this. When an entire company
Users don’t need prompting to open up these invests time and resources into learning the soft-
apps–we’re cued by our emotions or thoughts, ware, it becomes incredibly difficult to leave the
to the point that using these apps feels like a part product, even if there seems to be a better alter-
of our natural routine. Our brains have come to native. The product has successfully achieved
crave the feeling of fulfillment and reward that stickiness.
accompany using these products.

Some examples of how products use internal 3.4 | Set your product
triggers are: stickiness strategy

• Browsing Facebook when you feel lonely As we’ve seen in the previous section, there are
• Checking Twitter first thing in the morning different types of triggers you can build at differ-
after waking up ent points in your product’s engagement loop.
• Checking your email when you feel anxious Perhaps even more importantly, there are ways
• Posting on Instagram when you want to to build your product as a whole for better value
capture memories delivery and, ultimately, better engagement and/
• Playing Spotify while working or stickiness.

Products start out with external triggers to ini- How do you know where to invest your time and
tially attract and educate the user. Over time, as money so that you get the most return on your
users invest more time and energy engaging with investment while also continuing to delight your
the product, it becomes a part of their lifestyle users?

[25]
https://www.nirandfar.com/2012/04/billion-dollar-mind-trick.html

87 — Making users stick

 How sticky is your product now? Measure your
Simply, sticky products use the baseline stickiness according to your product’s
data a user creates while engaging usage interval. If you can, benchmark your prod-
with the product as fuel to make the uct’s stickiness against others’ in your industry or
experience even more engaging for that against yourself.
user (accruing benefits), and at the same
time harder to leave (mounting loss). What does your power user curve look like? Plot
the proportion of users who are active in your
SARAH TAVEL
"How to create a sticky product like
product every day or week over a select period of
Facebook and Evernote" [26] time. Does your curve ‘smile’? Does it taper off to
the right? What hypotheses can you make about
As we’ve seen in the previous section, there are the shape of your curve?
different types of triggers you can build at different
points in your product’s engagement loop. Perhaps Are there any early gaps in engagement? Check
even more importantly, there are ways to build your your signup, onboarding, and activation conver-
product as a whole for better value delivery and, sion rates for major drop-offs.
ultimately, better engagement and/or stickiness.
How can I make my current users behave like
How do you know where to invest your time and my power users? Dig into the behaviors and
money so that you get the most return on your personas of your power users (more on this in
investment while also continuing to delight your Section 3.5). Do your power users take certain
users? actions or paths, or some from certain market-
ing channels?
Here are the questions you should ask yourself
before setting your product’s stickiness or Where do your users come from? If you have
engagement strategy: a website or web app, look at session UTM
parameters and referrer data to look for common
How frequently do people use your product? sources, like an email campaign or ad. Are you
Ask yourself how often users should come back getting a ton of engagement from an Instagram
to see consistent value in your product. Can you ad or a promoted tweet? If so, it makes sense to
justify why your product is a daily (or weekly, go to where your users are and double down on
monthly, etc.) use product? Are you making any paid social efforts.
assumptions about your product usage? Calcu-
late your product usage interval.

[26]
https://medium.com/@sarahtavel/how-to-create-a-sticky-product-like-facebook-and-evernote-2b47627fce3a

Mastering Engagement — 88
 What devices do your users use? Are you seeing In Section 3.5, we will outline how to find your
TERMS TO KNOW
higher engagement on mobile versus web? On user personas and analyze their stickiness in
iOS or Android? These differences can give you more detail.
A product’s critical event is an action a clue as to what kinds of external triggers to
that users take in your product that test first—mobile push notifications and versus What habits can you tap into? Think about where
aligns closely with the value you something else, for example. your product fits into your user’s life. Can you
want your product to deliver. When leverage routines or internal triggers they may
measuring engagement metrics like Who are your users? This is the broadest but also already have to nudge them into re-engaging
retention and stickiness, it is more the most important question you can ask before with your product? For example, if you’re a meal
valuable to look at the users who and during product development. Who exactly delivery service, sending a timely push notifica-
perform this critical event as your are your users? What do they care about? What tion about a new restaurant might bring a user to
pool of “active users,” as opposed to pain are you solving for them? How well do you open up your app during lunchtime. We will see an
users who do any arbitrary action. know your users today? You can begin to uncov- example of this in our case study with Postmates
er user personas through interviews, surveys, and Braze at the end of this chapter.
The critical event is also usually and other qualitative means. You can also use a
closely tied to the value exchange in clustering algorithm on your existing user base
your product. to identify behavioral personas—groups of users 3.5 | Measuring stickiness
who use your product and get value from it in in Amplitude
distinctly different ways. For example, Instagram
users might fall into two behavioral personas: Here in the last section of this chapter, we will
“content creators” who upload photos and use cover the analyses you can perform to under-
hashtags, and “content viewers” who spend most stand your product’s stickiness.
of their time viewing others’ photos and Stories
and “liking” content. As you do these analyses, keep in mind that stick-
iness, retention, and conversion are different
Once you’ve identified personas in your prod- dimensions of understanding user engagement.
uct, you can analyze which personas retain Stickiness should not be examined in a vacuum;
better and use the product more frequently. it’s part of a broader tapestry of metrics you should
From there, you can begin to think about which measure and monitor. Otherwise, it becomes
external triggers you can use to engage each too tempting to try to “game” stickiness with a
persona or whether it might be worthwhile to try ton of push notifications or clickbait emails. Also,
to nudge users of one persona to behave more remember that healthy stickiness depends on how
like another. often your product realistically should be used:
e.g. a tax product that is used once per year vs. a
meditation app that might be used daily or weekly.

89 — Making users stick

Measuring stickiness involves knowing two Do it with Amplitude Step 2 Switch to Usage Interval View. This view
things: who your users are and how often they do shows the percentage of users who performed
something. the Play Song or Video event with a median fre-
Here is a simple way to determine your product quency of ‘n’ days.
To illustrate how to do the analyses, let’s go usage interval in Amplitude. Here’s how you
back to AmpliTunes, the example product we would do it for AmpliTunes. Step 3 Identify the inflection point of the curve.
worked with in Chapter 1 and 2. AmpliTunes is This is the usage interval.
an iTunes-like music platform that lets users Step 1 Create a new Retention Analysis Chart and
play and buy songs and videos. Let’s add the set the return event to AmpliTunes’ critical event
following to what we know about AmpliTunes: Play Song or Video. This ensures that only users
who came back and performed this critical event
• product usage interval: daily will be counted as active and retained.
• critical event: playing a song or video

This means that we want AmpliTunes users to

Return event ..performed by Users
come the product every day and perform the
‘critical event’ they derive product value from. A Play Song or Video 1 All Users
B Select event… where Select property…
Now let’s get into the analyses.
and who performed Select event…

+ Add Segment
3.5.1 | Finding your product’s
usage interval
..grouped by Select property…
How often do people naturally engage with
product? It’s important to know this so that you
can benchmark and analyze your stickiness and
retention metrics appropriately. Keep in mind
that not all products are daily-use. Retention View Usage Interval View

..shown as Usage Interval

If your product has a daily or weekly usage
interval, you should measure weekly stickiness
metrics. If your product has a biweekly or month-
The setup in Amplitude
ly usage interval, you should measure monthly
stickiness metrics.

Mastering Engagement — 90
 Takeaway
The usage interval curve shows that roughly 50% of
users play content with a median frequency of 1 day;
AmpliTunes
about 70% with a median frequency of 4 days. The
usage interval of AmpliTunes is most likely around AmpliTunes Usage Interval
1-4 days.
Daily, Last 30 Days Usage Interval
For an in-depth look at calculating the product
usage interval, see Chapter 2 of our first product
analytics playbook, Mastering Retention.
100%

75%

50%

25%

0%
s s s s s s s
ay
s
ay
s
ay
s
ay
s
day day day day day day day
0d 3d 6d 9d 12 15 18 21 24 27 30

All Users

Usage interval curve for AmpliTunes

91 — Making users stick

3.5.2 | Stickiness of user personas
Event .. performed by Users
After you’ve figured out your product usage
interval, you can begin slicing the stickiness of A Play Song or Video 1 All Users
your product or feature.
where Select property…

You should think about measuring stickiness in and who performed Select event…
terms of:
• general usage stickiness: How many days 2 Favorite Song or Video >=10
out of a week or month did users do anything who performed Favorite Song or Video >= 10 times
in your product?
anytime during Last 30 days
• critical event stickiness: How many days
out of a week or month did users do an action and where Select property…
that gets to the core value of your product? and who performed Select event…

The first type of stickiness looks at the metric in 3 Post Community Content
terms of any kind of activity while the second type
who performed Post Community Content >= 5 times
of stickiness looks at a specific, important action
that you’d want highly engaged users performing anytime during Last 30 days
in your product. and where Select property…

and who performed Select event…

Do it with Amplitude
+ Add Segment

Let’s say we want to compare the stickiness of

our product’s critical event across two different
..grouped by Select property…
personas—users who engage by favoriting
content and users who engage by creating new
content. Let’s say we define our two personas as:
• content favoriters: users who favorite 10 or ..shown as Stickiness
more pieces of content per month
..computed as Cumulative
• content creators: users who post content to
the community 5 or more times per month
The setup in Amplitude

Mastering Engagement — 92
 PRO TIP

How do you figure out AmpliTunes

user personas?
Weekly Stickiness
Figuring out your user personas is an
entire playbook of its own! If you are just Weekly, Last 4 Weeks Stickiness
getting started with this important task,
we recommend you read section 4.2 of our
100%
first product analytics playbook, Mastering
Retention.
75%
Here are some tips to get started: Start
with a qualitative approach and do some 50%
user research and user testing. Then, follow
up with a quantitative approach and 25%
segmenting your user base by different
user and event properties a we did in the
0%
example in Section 3.5.2; you can then
bucket users based on the frequency at 1 day 2 days 3 days 4 days 5 days 6 days 7 days
which they perform key events. Alternatively,
you can use a clustering algorithm like All Users Favorite Song or Video >= 10 Post Community Content >= 5
Amplitude’s Personas feature[27].

AmpliTunes weekly stickiness chart for two different user personas

Step 1 In Amplitude, create a new stickiness STEP 3 Calculate weekly cumulative stickiness. For example, over 75% of content creators
chart and choose to view the stickiness of the This will show the the proportion of users who played a song or video for four or more days per
critical event (Play Song or Video). did the critical event—Play Song or Video—on week, compared to only about 60% of content
‘n’ or more days per week. favoriters. If playing content is critical to driving
STEP 2 In addition to looking at all of your users, the value exchange cycle in your product, then a
segment your users by those who favorited a Takeaway potential next step would be to think about what
song or video multiple times and those who Comparing our two personas, we see that a triggers you can use to get more users to post
posted community content multiple times within greater proportion of content creators play a song community content.
the last month. or video on any given number of days per week.

[27]
https://amplitude.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/235648588-Personas

93 — Making users stick

3.5.3 | Stickiness of power users
Event ..performed by Users
Looking at the stickiness of different personas is
useful if your product has multiple distinct ways A Play Song or Video 1 All Users
of delivering value. You can also look at stickiness
where Select property…
of certain user cohorts:
and who performed Select event…
behavioral cohorts: Are certain behaviors cor-
related with higher stickiness? + Add Segment
acquisition date cohorts: Did a feature launch
or marketing campaign affect general or critical
event stickiness? ..grouped by Select property…

In Section 3.2, we talked about how your cohort

of power users can help you better understand
and set stickiness strategy. In Amplitude, you can
build power user curve by viewing non-cumula- ..shown as Stickiness
tive stickiness. ..computed as Non-cumulative

Do it with Amplitude The setup in Amplitude

Let’s say we want to understand the behaviors

that are characteristic of AmpliTunes power
users. We’ll define power users as people who
play a song or video almost every single day of
the month.

Step 1 Create a new Stickiness chart and choose

to view the stickiness of the critical event.

STEP 2 Calculate weekly non-cumulative sticki-

ness. This will show the proportion of users who
played a song or video on exactly ‘n’ days of the
month.

Mastering Engagement — 94
 Takeaway
Note that there’s a slight “smile” to this curve
because of the uptick at around 20 days. This means AmpliTunes
there is a small, but highly engaged proportion of
users who are coming back everyday for roughly 20 Power User Curve
days to play content in AmpliTunes. The next step
would be to figure out what these power users are Monthly, Last 3 Months Stickiness
doing differently from other users, so you can drive
more users to act like them.
100%

75%

50%

25%

0%
s s s s s s s
ay
s
ay
s
ay
s
ay
s
day day day day day day day
0 d 3 d 6 d 9 d 12 15 18 21 24 27 30

All Users

Non-cumulative stickiness for users who play content

95 — Making users stick

To contrast cumulative and
non-cumulative stickiness analysis:

3.5.4 | Figuring out what your power Do it with Amplitude

users are doing differently

One way to develop stickiness strategy is to Once you’ve created a power user curve in
hypothesize what your power users do differ- Amplitude, you can build a cohort of users
ently than other users. You can do this through straight from the stickiness chart. Use Ampli-
qualitative research and path analysis of specific tude’s Cohort Comparison tool quickly see what
user groups. (We mentioned these analyses in the differences are between your “Power Users”
Chapter 2 in the context of new user onboarding cohort and your “Active Users” cohort.
and activation; they can also be applied here.)

Mastering Engagement — 96
 Takeaway
Cohort Comparison shows you the proportion of
users in each cohort who perform certain actions
AmpliTunes
in your product. It’s a good way to easily spot
differences between cohorts and begin to develop Power User Curve
hypotheses about their behavior. In this example,
you can see that 4x as many power users added Monthly, Last 3 Months
friends or posted community content than other
active users. You might then begin digging into
whether it’s worth revamping AmpliTunes’ social
100%
features–making them more visible might make
more users behave like power users. 21 Days
All Users: 4.40%
75%

Show User Paths

50% View Users

Create Cohort

25% Download Users

0%
s s s
ay
s
ay
s
ay
s
ay
s
d ay d ay d ay
0d 3d 6d 9 d 12 15 18

All Users

Saving your cohort of power users

97 — Making users stick

 Cohort Comparison Daily Last 45 days

This cohort Power Users 50,606 users Select another cohort to

Compares to Active Users - -- nd users in common…

Looking at Event Distributions

Adoption Engagement
% of users did event Avg event count per user

! Search Results

Event Name Ratio This Cohort Other Cohort

Showing 29 events

Add Friends 4.13 97.2% 23.5%

Post Community Content 3.78 99.1% 26.2%

Join Community 3.75 99.2% 26.5%

Error Screen 3.51 17.6% 5.00%

ViewSongOrVideo 3.49 0.146% 0.0417%

Share SongOrVideo 3.25 64.5% 19.9%

Purchase Ticket 3.18 0.128% 0.0404%

Comparing ‘power user’ and ‘active user’ cohorts

Mastering Engagement — 98
 FURTHER READING 3.6 | Take Action

To review, we began this chapter by revisiting the See it in action

DAU/MAU is an important metric to
measure engagement, but here’s where engagement loop framework in the context of In the last part of this chapter, we share a case
it fails each of the three engagement games–attention, study from our customer Postmates and inte-
Andrew Chen, General Partner at transaction, and productivity. We then zoomed gration partner, Braze. The Postmates team
Andreessen Horowitz into the value exchange <> trigger steps of the was able to build an effective stickiness strategy
https://andrewchen.co/dau-mau-is-an- loop and specifically discussed engagement in with a unique external trigger using Amplitude
important-metric-but-heres-where-it-fails/
terms of stickiness. and Braze. If you want to know what tools you
The Power User Curve: The best way to should have in your engagement stack to improve
understand your most engaged users Next, we discussed external and internal triggers engagement like Postmates, that’s coming up in
Andrew Chen, General Partner at that help propel users through the engagement our final chapter.
Andreessen Horowitz
https://andrewchen.co/power-user-curve/ loop and put them in context of a larger strategy
to increase product stickiness. Finally, we ended
The Hierarchy of Engagement, expanded
the chapter with analyses you can do to measure
Sarah Tavel, General Partner at Benchmark
stickiness in Amplitude.
https://medium.com/@sarahtavel/the-
hierarchy-of-engagement-expanded-
648329d60804 Before wrapping up this chapter, take a moment
now to reflect on your learnings. Consider the
Growth loops are the new funnels
following:
Brian Balfour, Founder/CEO at Reforge
https://www.reforge.com/blog/growth-
loops • Draw out an example engagement loop for
your product. What is the value exchange?
Engagement drives stickiness drives
retention drives growth • What external triggers do you use? What
Data Science Team at Sequoia Capital internal triggers might exist?
https://medium.com/swlh/engagement- • How frequently do people use your prod-
drives-stickiness-drives-retention-drives- uct?
growth-3a6ac53a7a00
• How sticky is your product overall? How
Two-sided marketplaces and engagement sticky is your product’s critical event?
Data Science Team at Sequoia Capital • Review the questions in Section 3.4.
https://medium.com/swlh/two-sided-
marketplaces-and-engagement-
ded7d5dcfe71

99 — Making users stick

Case Study

Postmates uses Amplitude and Braze to build an

engagement strategy that gets users to stick

Andrew
Touchstone

Andrew Touchstone was formerly

Director of Growth Marketing and
Growth Lead at Postmates where
he was focused on acquisition,
expansion, onboarding, engagement,
and retention for the Postmates
The Company their platform, while also maintaining an impeccable consumer marketplace. He is
Postmates is transforming the way goods move around customer experience. currently the Director of Growth
cities. Their core product offering is a web and mobile Marketing at Credit Karma.
platform that connects customers with couriers who The Solution
offer delivery from local businesses in just minutes. According to data from Braze, users who receive
messages from brands using a single channel (either
The Product Challenge email, push, or in-app messages only) saw average
Postmates’ product North Stars are centered around engagement levels that were 179% higher than
making local inventory easily accessible to everyone. users who received no messages at all. That means
One way the Growth Marketing team supports these an email, push, or in-app message could be the
metrics is by making Postmates more sticky. The team difference between a lapsing user and an actively
has to figure out how to develop the right kind of engaged customer. Knowing this, Postmates sought
triggers to help users repeatedly see the value of a versatile engagement platform that could help

Mastering Engagement — 100

 them increase customer stickiness, build loyalty, and viewing party and enjoy free delivery.”
increase LTV through omnichannel messaging. And, “Then, share your order with us on social with
just as importantly, they needed a way to measure how #TheBachelorette and @Postmates for a chance to
their customers were behaving in response to those win 1 year of free Postmates! (Rules).”
messaging campaigns.
The Postmates team used Amplitude to analyze
Tying together marketing- and product- resulting customer behavior, and Braze to make real-
based experiments with Braze and time campaign optimizations on the fly.
Amplitude
Touchstone, Director of Growth at Postmates,
“You can make small incremental changes in described the Bachelorette campaign as a “product-
messaging but the more transformative result comes based experiment to a marketing experiment.”
from better understanding your customer experience,
and augmenting your product and marketing to “We were able to improve marketing spend
work together,as opposed to doing both of those efficiency by 3x, as measured through
independently. With Braze and Amplitude, we were able A/B tests and LTV improvements.”
to bring marketing and product a lot closer together,” ANDREW TOUCHSTONE
said Andrew Touchstone, Director of Growth Marketing Director of Growth Marketing at Postmates
at Postmates.
“We were testing how this messaging and this new
A stand-out example of product and marketing at product experience worked together,” he said. “In
Postmates working hand-in-hand to drive customer Amplitude, we could view which experiment a customer
engagement was their campaign with ABC’s The was in, which marketing message they received, and
Bachelorette. During this campaign, Postmates used how that changed their behavior downstream.”
Braze to deliver different types of “Bachelorette
experiences” to their customers. Monitoring their campaign in real-time helped
Postmates use their marketing budget for this
Postmates partnered with The Bachelorette to bring campaign far more effectively. Their behavioral “Braze’s commitment to open access and
viewers free delivery for one night only. They launched insights from Amplitude helped them answer where their investments in near instantaneous
the promotion via emails and social media posts that in the campaign they needed more communication event updating with Currents allows our
said: and which variants were resulting in the highest team to access, analyze and action off of
conversions. Braze then allowed them to iterate on this customer data in real-time.”
“Before the drama unfolds, open the Postmates app their messaging in real-time, driving more effective ANDREW TOUCHSTONE
at 5 PM and look for your code. Then order in an epic customer engagement. Director of Growth Marketing at Postmates

101 — Making user stick

CHAPTER 04
SETTING UP YOUR ENGAGEMENT STACK

We’ve introduced a new model and frameworks for building engaging products.
In this final chapter of Mastering Engagement, we introduce the tools you
need in order to do so.

Mastering Engagement — 102

 Topics covered in this chapter: In the past, software companies could ask
customers to pay an up-front fee for a product,
4.1 - Why you need an engagement stack then roll out updates every once in a while, and
4.2 - Choosing your stack ask those customers to buy the new version on a
4.3 - Understanding the layers yearly basis (sometimes even longer!).
4.4 - Spreading adoption
4.5 - Maintaining the stack Now, in the digital age, both the nature and
4.6 - Taking action the speed at which we build products–and,
consequently, the way we grow and monetize
businesses–has fundamentally changed. With
4.1 | Why you need an the exploding number of product offerings in
engagement stack every market, the companies that make it big
are the ones that know how to grow by meeting
In order to win, businesses need a modern the changing demands of their customers and
engagement stack because product develop- continuously delivering value [28].
ment has fundamentally changed.

In 2005, “online” was a new acquisition channel, now it’s the product

[28]
https://amplitude.com/blog/2017/05/18/analytics-stack

103 — Setting up your engagement stack

 Instead, we believe every business should build
One thing I love about customers is an engagement stack suited to their needs using
that they are divinely discontent. Their the best-in-breed tools that are available for each
expectations are never static—they go up. layer.
It’s human nature.
JEFF BEZOS
To develop the next several sections of this chap-
in his 2018 letter to shareholders[29]
ter, we had the pleasure of speaking with Austin
Hay. In his role as VP of Consulting at The Growth
Practice, a subsidiary of mParticle, and GM of HBE
But engaging customers is hard to do. Ventures, he helps Fortune 500 businesses and
Product analytics, which we’ve highlighted in enterprises like Walmart, Turner, and Sam’s Club
every chapter of this playbook, is powerful for evaluate, implement, and maintain their growth
analyzing in-product engagement and deciding stack.
what to build next.
4.2 | Choosing your
But to really drive your North Star metric and engagement stack
execute on a full engagement strategy that
aligns across product and marketing, you need When you’re figuring out exactly which combina-
an engagement stack: best-in-class software tion of tools should make up your engagement
to help you get data into your analytics solution, stack, you need to consider two things:
test hypotheses, assign attribution, do marketing
automation, and more. • What you want to accomplish from a business
perspective
Why do we support the best-in-breed software • How you want to prioritize the different ini-
approach versus other alternatives like build- tiatives you want to take on
ing in-house or an all-in-one solution? Well, it
is impossible to find a third-party all-in-one Says Hay, “The number one thing to do is just be
solution for engagement that is truly excellent. very objective and straightforward in outlining
And in-house tools are often hacked together your business criteria upfront. Go through and
and/or complicated to use, making them only document, ‘I want to be able to achieve X. I want
usable for the most technical teams within a to be able to create an audience. I want the capac-
company. Moreover, they’re usually slow, difficult ity to have a UI that sends data as an output to Y.’”
to maintain, and generally inflexible.

[29]
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm

Mastering Engagement — 104

 Knowing exactly what your business objectives Here are some general best practices for setting
are will then help you prioritize your initiatives. up an engagement stack. We’ll be referring to
This, in turn, will help you understand the tools some of these in more detail later in the chapter.
and systems you need in place to be successful.

BEST PRACTICES
Setting Up Your Engagement Stack

DO DON'T

• Choose tools that do one or a couple of things • Go for solutions that promise to do a hundred
really really well. things mediocrely.

• Choose tools that allow you to move data in • Choose tools that are closed off and can’t work
and out easily, thus enabling interoperation in an ecosystem with other tools.
with other engagement software. • Choose tools that require endless configuration
• Choose tools that democratize data for and hacking to get work done.
all teams. • Jump to using the coolest new technology
• Consider choosing tools that are known to be without proper vetting–you don’t want to risk
reliable and built by experienced teams an integral layer of your engagement stack
suddenly going out of business.
• Think through the order of implementation for
your stack. • Drink a seller’s Kool-Aid and jump to
implementing the most interesting tool.
• Have a serious conversation about business
objectives and priorities.

• Document your stack, including why you

implemented certain tools and when/why you
make changes to the stack.

105 — Setting up your engagement stack

4.3 | The layers of your Customer data platforms make this easy to do by
engagement stack pulling data from multiple sources, then cleaning
and consolidating it into a single database. Using
Every company’s needs are different, so are the tools a CDP is the simplest way to connect all the tools
they’ll need to measure and drive engagement. in your engagement stack–you can easily send
Here are the main layers we believe any product-led customer data to your analytics platform for
business should consider when building their analysis, and also to the experimentation and
engagement stack. There are many tools for each marketing layers of your stack when it’s time to
of these categories; we’ve included some of the act on the insights.
best in the industry that work well with Amplitude.
Customer data platforms let teams focus on
building better experiences for their customers,
instead of worrying about how to get data from
tool-to-tool.

Our recommended CDPs:

• mParticle
• Segment

Product Analytics
If you’re reading this playbook, then you probably
already have some idea of the value of product ana-
lytics. Building an engagement stack requires that
you have not just data, but the means to get the
insights that help you build an engaging product.

As we covered in great depth in the previous

Customer Data Platform (CDP) chapters, product analytics allows teams to ask
Web and mobile applications generate immense deep questions of their customers’ behavior.
volumes of customer data. For this data to have Questions like:
any value, teams should be able to better under-
stand their customers and then act on those • How long does it take a new user to become
insights with both product and marketing efforts. a habitual user?

Mastering Engagement — 106

 • What kind of user personas do I have in my experience can we understand and then make
product and how do they behave differently? better so that we can have a better experience
• What actions do users who convert do differ- that requires less activation energy.”
ently compared to users who do not?
• How can I reactivate lapsed users and get Attribution
them to see the value in the product? The attribution layer fills in the context of a user
• How has our new marketing campaign or when they first get into your product. The reason
product launch changed user growth in the this is more complicated than it sounds is simply
last 3 months? because the user journey is more complicated
than it used to be. People can come into your
Answers to questions like these lead to ideas product through a variety of ways–referrals, ads,
for product improvements, new experiences, or App Store searches, and so on.
campaigns that are backed by data. Dashboards
with vanity metrics like page views or app Attribution is particularly important if you plan to
downloads are not enough. Product analytics run and measure the impact of paid campaigns. If
give product managers, growth marketers, you don’t have a proper linking infrastructure in
analytics teams, and leaders the insight to build place before you start measuring engagement,
systematically for product growth and deeper you can’t be confident that the data you’re look-
engagement [30]. ing at is sound and complete.

Another key value proposition of a product Attribution tools that can also do deep linking are
analytics platform like Amplitude is unifying dif- useful for actually leveraging that data to point
ferent data streams into a single source of truth. users to specific content on the web or in a mobile
Not only do businesses care about bringing user app [31].
data into their systems, but also sending data
out to marketing vendors. An attribution layer lets you immediately assess
how a user arrived in your product, where they
When we asked Austin Hay about why analytics came from, and all of the other information that
should be a core part of anyone’s engagement can help you distinguish them, even when the
stack, he said, “It’s a two-fold thing. It’s [the abil- path into your product is a complex, multi-chan-
ity to understand] one, what marketing-based nel journey.
behaviors and actions can we take off this fun-
nel, and two, what qualities about the product

[30]
https://amplitude.com/blog/introducing-the-amplitude-growth-engine
[31]
https://branch.io/what-is-deep-linking/

107 — Setting up your engagement stack

Our recommended Attribution tools: Whether through email or in-app messaging,
PRO TIP
• Adjust push notification or SMS, marketing helps
• AppsFlyer you ask users for feedback, provide them with
• Branch relevant content and nudge them in the right Implementing your stack in the
direction. right order
A/B Testing
Experimentation starts with building conviction The information you gather from all of your One of the big mistakes that teams make
around an idea before spending significant product’s digital touchpoints is crucial to in building their growth stack, according to
resources to roll it out to all of your users. The understanding how you should be re-engaging Hay, is not prioritizing which layers of your
most reliable way to execute on your ideas for customers. For example, if you figure out that stack to implement first.
improvement is to A/B test them. some segment of users aren’t activating in your
product, you can send them a personalized mes- Hay suggests starting with a customer data
In an A/B test, you deliver two experiences to sage to ask for more information. Given what platform first, which will make integration
users. One features your product in its original you learn from that request, you might decide with product analytics (we recommend
state; the other features a version of your prod- on any number of ways to grow awareness and Amplitude) easy. Once you have your
uct with some change. After a certain period of understanding of the new feature among your customer data platform and your analytics
time elapses, you can examine the results of the wider user base–from a customized transac- layer, then focus on what tools you’ll need to
experiment to see if there was a significant differ- tional email campaign to a well-timed push carry out your next most important business
ence between the two groups. notification. objectives.

Our recommended A/B Testing tools: Many of the “external triggers” that we mentioned
• Apptimize in Chapter 3 as tactics for re-engagement can be
• Optimizely delivered through marketing automation tools.
• Taplytics
Our recommended Marketing Automation tools:
Marketing Automation • Braze
In the previous chapters, we talked about how • Leanplum
to measure and build for in-product engage- • Urban Airship
ment. A good engagement stack also includes a
marketing layer to engage users outside of the
product.

Mastering Engagement — 108

 4.4 | Spreading adoption you execute that on that in Braze over the
course of the week with experiments. Then
Once you decide on the layers of your engage- you evaluate your progress in Amplitude."
ment stack and finish implementing them, the
next step is to gain adoption within your organi- Having at least one team member work in multi-
zation. ple tools regularly will quickly demonstrate how
each part of the stack works.
Adoption is critical. The quicker you can imple-
ment and understand a tool, the quicker you and
others in your org can get value. Getting repeat 4.5 | Maintaining your
value from the tool ensures that it becomes a true engagement stack
fixture in your daily work. “If not, you typically end
up churning, looking for other tools, repeating, and Once you have the right tools in your stack and all
before you know it, you’ve gone through three or the right people in your organization using them
four tools in the course of a couple years,” says Hay. (easier said than done, we know), the third thing
According to David Reyneke, Director of Growth you’ll need to keep in mind is maintenance.
at Prolific Interactive, a mobile-focused product
development agency: Repetition is the key to As your business scales, it’s important to peri-
getting value out of your engagement stack. odically go through and audit your stack. More
often than not, as people leave, find other tools,
Reyneke suggests a simple framework for getting and time passes, maintenance winds up being a
adoption: thankless task that falls through the cracks.

• Start by performing a sprint-like runthrough It is best to start documenting early and make
of all the tools in your stack. sure there’s a process in place to keep your docs
• Allow people to play around with the more updated. Some tips:
intuitive tools to spark curiosity. • Keep nomenclature consistent by creating a
• Set parameters and goals around usage of spec sheet for all the data points you want to
the tools for the first few weeks. capture at the very beginning.
• Include in your spec sheet: what tools you’re
Reyneke describes one example workflow, "For using; how and why they were implemented;
Braze and Amplitude, we would recommend which tools are sending data where.
every week sitting in Amplitude, looking for • Assign someone to maintain the spec sheet.
insights, and setting a KPI that you want to • Update the spec sheet every time a change is
try to move the needle on for the week. Then, made to the stack.

109 — Setting up your engagement stack

"How you implemented things, why you
FURTHER READING
implemented things, when you make chang-
es, why you make changes: all of that should
How great product companies are
live in a document that lives with the com- transforming their product analytics stack
pany," says Hay. Justin Bauer, VP Product at Amplitude
https://amplitude.com/blog/2017/05/18/
analytics-stack
4.6 | Taking action Growth Instrumentation
Austin Hay, VP Consulting Services at The
In the final chapter of this playbook, we discussed Growth Practice
https://www.slideshare.net/
why you need an engagement stack and our rec-
amplitudemobile/growth-instrumentation
ommendations for the specific tools to choose
for your business: a customer data platform, Building Apps for Mobile Growth: Tech
product analytics, attribution and deep linking, Layer Choices
Andy Carvell, Co-founder at Phiture Mobile
A/B testing software, and marking automation.
Growth Consultancy
We went over some best practices for setting up https://mobilegrowthstack.com/building-
your stack, gaining internal adoption, and main- apps-for-mobile-growth-tech-layer-
taining your stack as your business scales. choices-986849df053e

Take a moment now to reflect on your learnings.

Consider the following:

• What does your engagement stack look like

today? Is there up-to-date documentation
on it?
• What does each tool in your stack do? What
data flows in/out?
• How many people on your team or organiza-
tion have adopted these tools?
• Are able to get a full picture of your customer
journey and act on those insights using your
engagement stack?
• Is your stack meeting the needs of your
business?

Mastering Engagement — 110

 GLOSSARY

A value you want your product to deliver. When you accomplish deeper segmentation on your
Activation is a point or phase at the end of measuring engagement metrics like retention events and the users who perform them.
Onboarding during which a new user obtains and stickiness, it is more valuable to look at the
enough value from the product such that they users who perform this critical event as your external trigger: Specific sensory stimuli that
become a current active user of the product. pool of “active users,” as opposed to users who companies/products use to nudge users into
do any arbitrary action. The critical event is also taking action.
An acquisition cohort is a group users who start- usually closely tied to the value exchange in your
ed using your product (in other words, were new) product. F
during the same time period. First value exchange is the first exchange of
A customer-value exchange describes the value between a new user and the business.
An aha moment is the moment or set of actions potential value that products deliver to custom-
within your product that leads users to first dis- ers in exchange for the customer’s investment of I
covering value. time and money. internal trigger: Feelings and emotions that
manifest in the mind and cue users to take action
attention game: In the three games of engage- E on their own.
ment framework, products playing the attention Engagement is a measure of how much or how
game try to maximize the amount of time users often users interact with your product or with a instrumentation: The process of recording
spend in-product. Industries that typically play feature. events and attributes as they happen in your
this game today are media, gaming and any com- product.
pany displaying advertisements to you. An engagement loop is an interaction framework
describing the actions and triggers that current K
B engaged users cycle through when they use your A KPI, also known as a Key Performance Indicator,
bracket retention: A flexible version of N-day product regularly. is a measurable value that demonstrates how well
retention where you can look at the proportion an organization is achieving its current objective.
of users who return during custom time frames event: In event-based analytics, an event is an
that you define. action performed by the user or taken by the L
product. The ladder of engagement is the ongoing
C learning journey a new user embarks on to
A product’s critical event is an action that users Event Segmentation (Amplitude chart): In become an expert.
take in your product that aligns closely with the Amplitude, the Event Segmentation chart lets

111 — Glossary
A leading indicator is a value or measurement product analytics: The application of data and retention curve: A line graph depicting user
that can be used to indicate future business analytics to detect patterns of usage and identify retention over time. It shows the percentage of
outcomes. Good north star metrics are leading opportunities for product improvement in order users who return to the product during a speci-
indicators of success. On the other hand, metrics to improve business outcomes and solve cus- fied time period after acquisition.
like ARPU and monthly revenue are lagging indi- tomer pain points.
cators. retention lifecycle framework: a framework
Your product usage interval is the frequency for analyzing retention depending on whether
N (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) with which you a user of your product is new, current, or resur-
N-day retention: Retention method that mea- expect people to use your product. rected.
sures the proportion of users who are active in your
product on a specific Nth day after an initial event. productivity game: In the three games of S
engagement framework, products playing the Social proof is the phenomenon wherein a large
A north star metric defines the relationship productivity game create an easy and reliable group of people conform to each others’ behav-
between the customer problems the product way to complete an existing task or workflow iors and actions. If users of your product get their
team is trying to solve and the revenue the busi- for the user. This game is predominant in busi- friends and acquaintances to also become users,
ness aims to generate by doing so. ness-to-business software. this can be a point of social proof for you.

O properties: User properties and event prop- Stickiness is a measure of the frequency with which
An OKR, also known as Objectives and Key erties can give you a deeper analysis into people use your product; specifically, a measure of
Results, is a framework for defining and tracking how users are engaging with your app. User the number of days out of a week or a month that a
company, team, or personal objectives. properties are attached to users and reflect user was active, or did a specific action.
the current state of the user at the time of the
Onboarding is a series of steps within your prod- event while event properties are attached to Stickiness (Amplitude chart): In Amplitude, the
uct designed to show new users how they can events and reflect the state of the event that Stickiness chart lets users plot cumulative stick-
use the product to obtain value. was triggered. iness, non-cumulative stickiness, and stickiness
over time.
P R
The power user curve or non-cumulative stick- Retention is a measure of how many users return T
iness depicts the proportion of users who were to your product over time after some initial event three games of engagement: A framework
active in your product for exactly X number of days. (usually first use). for thinking about your product’s engagement

Mastering Engagement — 112

 strategy, which includes the attention game,
transaction game, and productivity game.

transaction game: In the three games of

engagement framework, products playing the
transaction game help customers make pur-
chase decisions with confidence. Companies you
will often find playing this game are e-commerce
platforms.

A trigger is a stimulus that brings users back to

a product. This can be an external trigger, such
as an email or push notification, or an internal
behavioral trigger, such as a pre- existing habit.

value exchange: Modern management theory

defines a product as a medium of value exchange
between a user and a business. The product
offers value to a customer—entertainment, effi-
ciency, status etc.—and the customer in return
offers compensation to the business.

113 — Glossary
THANK YOU FOR READING
MASTERING ENGAGEMENT!

We hope this installment of the Product Analytics Playbook series gave you a good foundation
for building products that engage and deliver value to your users. We wrote this to help you
measure and improve product engagement through best practices, frameworks, and models
that we believe in and use ourselves here at Amplitude.

How are you using this content to build better products in your own team or organization?
We’d love to hear from you with questions, comments, epiphanies, or just a ‘hello’.
Email us at playbook@amplitude.com.
Also by Amplitude

Product Analytics Playbook:

Mastering Retention
Get it at amplitude.com/mastering-retention

This book distills the industry’s best proven methods Really excited to see this book come out from the
into a clear, practical framework on which companies folks at Amplitude. They’ve developed a repeatable
at any stage can take immediate action–it’s a must framework for analyzing retention that can be
read for product and growth teams. adapted to any web or mobile product. Highly
recommend for product and growth teams working
JULIE ZHOU – Director of Product at Adroll, on retention and engagement.
formerly Lead PM of Growth at Yik Yak
NIR EYAL – The Wall Street Journal best-selling
author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Read this Playbook online: Find more great content from Amplitude at
amplitude.com/mastering-engagement amplitude.com/content-library

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