Amplitude Unites Customer Data To Arm Media Organizations With Actionable Insights

Many firms struggle to effectively engage customers with continuous, individualized, and emotionally engaging experiences. This is especially true for organizations in the media and entertainment industry that must pull customer data from many sources including, web, mobile, over-the-top (OTT) devices, and internet of things (IoT). Part of the challenge is in not understanding the full customer journey from individual touchpoints with campaigns through to lifetime value in the complex media landscape. Adding to this challenge are global issues such as data privacy regulations and the death of third-party cookies. Having the right tool to connect data sources, leverage data in decision-making, and activating the data can result in: 1) better understanding of the user base, 2) higher customer engagement, and 3) optimized monetization strategy that can drive topline revenue growth to the business.

Amplitude is a digital analytics platform that provides organizations with full visibility into customer journeys, which they can use to expose the realities of how customers utilize and engage with digital media entertainment investments. Organizations can not only improve visibility, they can also use the insights to build in more value for their customers. This drives better experiences, which can result in both topline revenue impacts as well as bottom-line operational efficiencies and cost savings.

Amplitude commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview four representatives of organizations with experience using the platform and conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with Amplitude.¹ This abstract will focus on the media industry’s use of Amplitude and the platform’s value for organizations in the industry.

The interviewee for this spotlight is the chief product officer at an entertainment organization.

Investment Drivers For Media

The interviewee said their organization adopted Amplitude to improve its digital analytics capabilities, and they cited previous struggles with several challenges in their legacy environments, including:

• Growing concerns regarding data privacy and security with the continuous growth of collected user data. The interviewee noted that as their organization continues to collect user data to improve the personalization feature of its solution, there continues to be a growing concern from their users and customers on data privacy and security issues. The interviewee noted: “In our industry, there’s a lot of concern about user information. We have to be careful with any web-tracking technologies in terms of data collected.”
• Complexity and difficulty in collecting data to create a seamless customer experience. With the intense competition between content streaming providers, the interviewee noted that being able provide multichannel content while maintaining a seamless experience is key to succeeding in the media space. They noted that the inherent complexity of the customer journey in addition to the difficulty in obtaining related data means that attempting to influence metrics and important business KPIs (e.g., viewing time, engagement for content consumption and retention) is a challenging yet important endeavor. The interviewee said, “If [analytics] teams were not able to calculate results quickly enough, instead of making a data-driven decision, the decision-making was put in the hands of the product managers without the necessary data to drive those decisions.”
• Lack of analytic solution tracking and supporting efforts to improve user experience. Additionally, the chief product officer noted that prior to using Amplitude, their organization did not have a trusted source for customer journey data that tracked from initial conversion and beyond. This resulted in a lack of transparency into how products or applications were being used as well as an inability to do comprehensive analytics to generate key insights or trends to determine the best courses of action. The interviewee stated: “[Before using Amplitude,] there was a tool implemented, but nobody trusted [it]. The [measurement] features were not relevant. So, there was nothing done [with] the metrics and analytics generated from the tool.”
• Inability to understand the most effective monetization strategy. The combination of the complexity of user behavior and the lack of an analytic tool leads to the core of the pain point for the interviewee’s organization: not knowing how best to monetize its customers’ behaviors and interactions with its tools. The interviewee told Forrester: “We need to understand why people are paying for the platform. [This means understanding] which features are engaging our users and what they are looking for. By understanding this, we can replicate that into our monetization strategy to convince an even larger [portion] of our customers to be core users of our platform.”

Reasons For Choosing Amplitude

The interviewee said their organization chose to invest in Amplitude for the following reasons:

• Capabilities in collecting the right data. The interviewee said their organization was looking for a solution to provide a single source of truth for trusted data of high-level user behavior analysis that demonstrates both quality and depth.
• Faster time to value in providing insights. In addition to speaking about the quality of insights, the interviewee also highlighted Amplitude’s ability to generate insights at a faster pace than other tools they compared it against.
• Ease of adoption. The interviewee shared that their organization was also looking for a tool that was intuitive to use for data and analytics resources but that also offered a self-service element to allow different teams across the business to easily access the tool and extract the information or insights they need.

Key RESULTS For Media

The results of the investment for the interviewees' organizations include:

Revenue-impact benefits. The investment in Amplitude enables the interviewee’s media organization to leverage customer journey insights to improve product offerings by eliminating conversion friction, personalizing experiences, and prioritizing high-value audiences. As a result, the organization improves revenue by:

• Enhancing customer engagement rate by 15% from better understanding of users. Amplitude functionality enables the interviewee’s organization to test product improvements and track and analyze impact on customer experiences. In this way, the organization can quickly optimize those experiences to drive up engagement. The interviewee described: “Anytime we have a new feature that we conceive or we are thinking about one to add to the product roadmap, we have people who dive into the Amplitude data to find supporting analysis. Additionally, once the new product or feature is launched, we analyze the result.”

  The interviewee said that as a result, their organization tied better product experiences to enhanced engagement: “In terms of engagement, we have improved by 15% [due to Amplitude]. With Amplitude, we can focus on how people discover content, improve features, and track user retention rates.”

• Better conversion rates of free to paid users from clearer understanding of customer value. As previously stated, the goal of the interviewee’s organization was to improve customer experiences. The chief product officer indicated that if their company was able to eliminate friction in its customer journey and increase engagement with the content, churn rates would decrease and this would improve customer loyalty: “We know that the more people [spend time watching] videos, the less churn we see on the app."

  The organization also improved its ability to acquire new customers. The interviewee noted: “With Amplitude, we were able to triple our conversion rate of people becoming paid consumers. By being able to focus on how people discover our content, we have been able to improve engagement and conversion.”

Operational efficiency benefits. The chief product officer said that prior to their organization’s investment in Amplitude, it experienced challenges related to irrelevant data and inefficient processes supporting customer journey analytics. The investment in Amplitude improved product design and customer experiences while creating operational efficiencies by:

• Eliminating up to 80% of ad hoc requests. The interviewee noted that the self-service aspect of Amplitude enabled team members to access the platform and gather the necessary information or insights. This eliminated many ad hoc requests to data scientists, engineers, product managers, and leaders, which opened up their time to be allocated to higher-value work.
• Creating an insights-driven business. The interviewee’s organization balanced driving operational efficiencies with creating more effective digital products by establishing an insights-driven business. The interviewee described the value of understanding and optimizing customer journeys to drive business impact like this: “The value we’ve seen is that we understand what we are doing on the digital side. We know what our users are doing, and we know why they are doing it. It has an impact on everything, and [we] understand that impact.”

Appendix A: Endnotes