Customer Case Study
“With Amplitude, we’re
answering complicated
questions that it would take
even a Zynga data analyst
quite some time to answer
– and we’re able to do it all
self-service, which is pretty
remarkable.”
- Siqi Chen, Founder & CEO,
Heyday
Behavioral Cohorting: How Heyday
Used Amplitude to Discover the User
Actions that Led to Long-Term Retention
Heyday is an app that helps people remember & share their days. It gathers the
places they go, things they do, and pictures they take to create a story for each
day – beautifully and effortlessly.
The Heyday team struggled with deciding whether their app should have a
greater focus on editing photos and timelines, or on the viewing experience.
Using Amplitude’s behavioral cohorting capabilities, Heyday discovered that
users who heavily edit their content retain far better when compared to other
user groups.
The Challenge: Which user actions correlate with long-term app retention?
Retention is Heyday’s most important metric. Like Facebook’s famous finding
that adding 7 friends within 10 days drives long-term retention, the folks at
Heyday wanted to know which actions within their app correlated most with
user retention.
In particular, Heyday was unsure how to focus their app. They didn't know
whether their users were more interested in customizing their photos and
timelines, or if they just wanted to sit back and view their Heyday timelines
passively.
For example, Heyday wondered what should happen when a user tapped a
photo in their timeline. Should it open an editing mode, or just display the photo
in fullscreen mode?
Why Heyday chose
Amplitude:
- Heyday’s CEO and founder, Siqi
Chen, was formerly a General
Manager at Zynga, where he
was accustomed to having a
team of data analysts to answer
any question. He needed an
analytics platform capable of
getting him these answers with
far more limited resources.
- With behavioral cohorts, Siqi
could answer 90% of analytics
questions just within the
Amplitude dashboards. This
saved Heyday a whole
headcount by relieving the
need for a data analyst.
- Heyday tried other analytics
platforms that all failed to
provide the depth of insights
needed.
Which actions were more important for long-term app retention and
engagement?
Heyday used Amplitude to
answer a key product
question: should they focus
the app experience on
content editing (left
screenshot), or content
viewing (right screenshot)?
The Solution: Behavioral cohorting in Amplitude
To answer this question, Heyday studied their user behavior to see which users
were currently the most engaged.
Heyday defined user groups using Amplitude's Behavioral Cohorting, which
allows you to group users based on what actions they took (or didn't take), and
when. Based on their hypotheses about which actions might matter most,
Heyday made cohorts of several different user groups, including: users who
heavily edit collages and users who primarily use Heyday to view photos. They
made even more detailed cohorts based on frequency of photo viewing versus
photo editing, the number of photos a user had uploaded, and user lifetime.
continued on next page >>
Questions? Reach out at contact@amplitude.com
https://amplitude.com
Heyday Case Study, continued
Customer Case Study
"Cohorting is the coolest
off-the-shelf feature. It
allows us to answer 90%
of all the analytics
questions we have just
within the Amplitude
dashboard. I was thinking
of hiring a data analyst,
but we literally saved a
whole headcount with
Amplitude."
Defining a cohort in
the Amplitude
dashboard.
Behavioral cohorting
allows you to define a
group of users based
on actions, properties,
and timing. In addition
to getting a full list of
users within a cohort,
you can also use
each cohort as a user
segment in the rest of
the Amplitude
dashboard.
Once they created these cohorts, Heyday measured their retention using the
Amplitude dashboard. Within the retention module, they could compare
cohorts side by side to see which cohorts stuck with Heyday the best.
- Siqi Chen, Founder & CEO,
Heyday
This graph is an example of how you can compare the retention of
different behavioral cohorts in Amplitude. This retention graph shows the
percentage of users that return to the app on the nth day after signing up.
The blue and red bars represent 2 different cohorts of users: for example,
users who heavily edit collages compared to users who primarily view
photos in Heyday. As you can see in the graph, the Blue Cohort has
significantly better retention than the Red Cohort between day 1 to day 30
after signup.
The Result: Focus on content editing
Based on the data, Heyday found that photo and collage editing is the action
most indicative of long-term user retention. As a result, the product team is
now doubling down on improving and focusing the editing experience.
You can find this case study, along with other stories from Amplitude’s
customers, at casestudies.amplitude.com.
Questions? Reach out at contact@amplitude.com
https://amplitude.com