61–70 of 79 posts
The thing I don't like about analytics as a service is that, most of the time, it's highly opinionated about how to track and visualize data. We tried a number of analytic services in the past, but no matter how flexible they were, we always found corner cases or certain ways of visualizing and presenting the data that we wished existed but for some or other reason weren't possible, because each respective service al…
Hi all, founder of Amplitude here. We've always felt volume based pricing to be bad for analytics culture as it discourages tracking and so are taking as aggressive of a stance as we can here. Would love HN's feedback!
It always strikes me that data collection and data analysis are tightly coupled, when it comes to pricing. And then when you look at the tiers that are available (995 a month really?) it makes even less sense. Yes its cheeper than me hiring in house to "do it myself" but it still feels like I'm being taken advantage of. Here is the reality of how this works. Someone on the business side sees a shiny dashboard and wan…
Really sorry about issues on Zendesk, thanks for pointing them out! We've rolled out new docs today and are still ironing out a few bugs. Any pages that aren't working for you in particular? Also- totally agreed on there being a lot of other analytics products out there, which is why we felt the need to be aggressive with giving away so much data for free. What do you mean to tier out data? Would love to hear how we…
1. Product person A, adds your product into the stack and pushes RIGHT UP to the limit you have set. 2. Product person B needs "some new slice of data" but guess what... your 12k annual cost is way more than they want to or need to spend out of their P/L, and their data is going to push the organization over the cap, so they look at a new product.
1. Product person A adds in your product to whatever portion of the platform they are responsible for. it lives in a vacuum there. 2. Product person B comes along and lacks awareness or training on how to use your tool. They can implement another tool, get free training and not have to involved them selves with product person A.
1. Product person A adds your product into the stack, the engineers who implement it find issue with your API/documentation/support. 2. Product person B wants to add your product into the mix, and the ENGINEERS say "were not doing that again find another vendor".
All of the above situations create "fragmented" insights. As an example one of my employers used Mixpanel for mobile analytics. They were happy with "real time sales numbers" but the reality of "were not shipping a sub set of those orders" is where the rubber meets the road. Not only does fragmentation make it hard to get real insight but it makes it hard to troubleshoot things as well.
You want my data, take it, but take ALL of it. Don't just take the events I want to send you, take the logs, take it from mobile and web, take it from the backend systems, take it from my shippers. Take more than JSON over http, let me open up a socket and give you the fire hose, give me librarys in Go, java, php, python, C*. Give me a set of logging tools that gets you that data quickly. Give engineers a way to send you more context than just the user (process, session, transaction, response time). Give me a way to tell YOU what data to keep "hot" and what data to archive... Just take all the data. If you have it all in one place, your going to make the engineers life easy, the first time some product person runs up and says "conversions are up on our new launch" and wants to take credit for the UI changes, and I can lay a graph of response times over it and say, "well it might be cause the server is faster, and people aren't walking away" your going to not only have my business but everyone else I can convince to adopt your product.
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Engineer at Amplitude here. Thanks for your thoughts! We've been thinking a lot about this exact issue over the last few years and have come to the same conclusion: when dealing with a platform that provides a ton of value out of the box, you need to be somewhat opinionated, and you can't expect to cover every use case. Different customers can have very different questions about their data and unique insights that th…
Can you say what you charge for SQL access? I have been unsatisfied with 100% of analytics solutions we've tried because of our inability to answer specific questions about how our games are played. SQL or SQL-like query access to the data is something I've wanted for a while.
Well, this was stupidly easy to integrate into a web-app, but my first (and only) session has consistently been grouped into the 30-60 minute session length bucket, from the moment the session was born (first event logged) to ten minutes later. (The user event stream for the individual user shows the correct session length though.) This would make me wary of the rest of the data. Not to mention that all of the more i…
Thanks for bringing this up! As CanioX mentioned, it'll be easiest for us to figure out what's going on with your numbers if you contact us directly at support@amplitude.com. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us regarding this. To give a little more context around how web sessions work, the first event creates the session and each subsequent event triggered within 30 min of the previous one will be considered in…
So the trends were similar, but the actual numbers where completely different.
I don't understand why people will use "analytic tools" that doesn't actually document what they're counting, and how. At least with Free software, one can have a look and try to figure it out (eg: piwik, visitors). With a lot of "services" your only option for a sanity check is to look at access logs -- which of course is one of the things one tries to get away from when moving to an analytics platform...
(Note: Haven't yet looked at what documention amplitude provides, just noting that documenting how you're counting is actually an essential part of the product -- and something any user needs to know. Seeing your comment here, at leasts hints that that information isn't (readily) available on amplitude.com/docs. If it is, you'd just have linked to it, right? ;-)
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Thanks for bringing this up! As CanioX mentioned, it'll be easiest for us to figure out what's going on with your numbers if you contact us directly at support@amplitude.com. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us regarding this. To give a little more context around how web sessions work, the first event creates the session and each subsequent event triggered within 30 min of the previous one will be considered in…
This reminds me of when our "business intelligence people" moved from WebTrends (I think) to Google Analytics. I remember a manager saying: If I hadn't worked with webtrend's data for a couple of years, I'd have no idea what the Google Analytics data means. The reason being, that how Google Analytics counts sessions/visits/bots etc is completely opaque. So the trends were similar, but the actual numbers where complet…
Has anyone tried both Mixpanel and Amplitude? What are your recommendations? We are deciding which one to use for our startup. We are specifically interested in measuring: 1/ retention (as per Amplitude's video), 2/ usage patterns on mobile, and 3/ user flows. Thanks
https://medium.com/@illscience/mixpanel-vs-amplitude-6b3ba36...
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Because we have a huge infrastructure advantage, we try to structure it in a way where you don't even have to worry about data volume- as long as it's not killing us on server costs we're fine. We actually tried to make a fully automated version of growth discovery engine and customers hated it! To our surprise- people don't trust the result if Amplitude hands it out on a silver platter. They want control in setting…
That is actually shocking about not trusting the results. From the screenshot, they appear easy enough to verify (although some might require significant resources to implement/act on). Out of curiosity, what sorts of things was your initial attempt spitting out as insights? Also, as someone likely in your target audience (senior digital marketing/analytics guy), I have a suggestion for your site that I see lots of s…
Has anyone tried both Mixpanel and Amplitude? What are your recommendations? We are deciding which one to use for our startup. We are specifically interested in measuring: 1/ retention (as per Amplitude's video), 2/ usage patterns on mobile, and 3/ user flows. Thanks
This is a good blog post about how a customer switched from Mixpanel to Amplitude! https://medium.com/@illscience/mixpanel-vs-amplitude-6b3ba36...