How Square Used Amplitude to Enhance the Seller Experience and Power Growth

Insight/Action/Outcome: Square used data from Amplitude to redesign their home page and create a new seller journey. It transformed the home page from a purely navigational tool to having lead-generation and self-service seller-onboarding features, while revamping the content and embedding links to secondary pages. They then designed follow-up iterations and experiments to optimize the user experience, which would have been impossible without Amplitude. The key metrics analyzed after retooling the homepage saw double-digit improvements.

If you’ve ever tapped a credit or debit card to make a purchase at a small business, there’s a good chance you’ve used Square. But Square is much more than a point-of-sale (POS) platform. We’re a growth and lifecycle management system that empowers sellers to build their businesses and attract more customers.

Our offerings include financial services, customer engagement, and employee management software, and our public web onboarding dashboard allows sellers to start selling in minutes and serves as our help experience.

The DNA that brings all these functions together and maximizes value for our sellers is data. Our challenge has always been to find sufficiently deep data and segment it to understand sellers’ journeys so they can run their businesses smoothly.

Building on a positive feedback loop

As Square’s Head of Growth Platform and AI, I ensure these tools work seamlessly for our sellers. I rely on Amplitude Analytics and Amplitude Audiences to understand the complex data patterns that drive seller engagement with our products. Amplitude is more than an analytics platform: it’s a core component of our technology stack.

Square adopted the Amplitude platform to better understand seller growth and fine-tune our original product, maximizing its value and driving our internal growth. It created a positive feedback loop that drove us to launch dozens of additional solutions that help our sellers manage every aspect of their business. In 2021, we added Audiences to the mix to further refine our growth and lifecycle marketing tools. It enables us to target sellers in ways that address their needs, provide them with relevant insights, and cross-sell products that create actionable paths that boost their business growth.

Encouraging adoption to improve the seller experience

By the time I joined Square, Amplitude had good traction, but it was used by isolated teams. We couldn’t get meaningful insights from Amplitude due to data gaps because our CDP wasn’t fully integrated with all our products. We launched a strategic initiative to add all our products to our CDP and create events that would send high-quality data to Amplitude. We optimized our data stream and created a robust data governance framework that helped us collect useful metrics about our sellers. It began a company-wide transformation fueled by the expanded use of Amplitude.

Amplitude is incredible for self-service analytics, but our teams were too busy to learn all the intricacies of the platform. We hired a full-time enablement manager who educated our product teams about Amplitude and what they needed to monitor to understand our sellers’ journeys. Having an enablement manager helped accelerate adoption by walking our people through the process of setting up dashboards, building seller segments, and analyzing our funnels.

We didn’t stop there. Square is on a growth trajectory, and we take the time to educate new members of our product development and marketing teams on the power of Amplitude.

We initially focused on lagging indicators, such as revenue acquisition, retention, and lifetime revenue value. However, we wanted to shift to leading indicators, and that meant focusing more on experience metrics, which vary across user surfaces. Our primary value proposition has always been to save our sellers time and enhance their POS experience, and ultimately, succeeding at these two elements affects our bottom line. We started to analyze web performance metrics, looking for onboarding conversion signals as well as product information consumption. The hypothesis was that if we could prove that sellers were saving time or improving their customer experiences through the site, then we could effectively confirm the value of our platform.

Amplitude helped drive two key projects that tremendously benefited our sellers. The first was multi-product onboarding. It was a major overhaul of our onboarding experience, changing the seller experience and adding a personalized ranking model for multiple products and better product recommendations. Sellers can now select specific products instead of having Square automatically assign them. The new system also generates better product recommendations and adds a pricing confirmation screen to ensure continuity between the set-up and sign-up phases. We also added a multi-product set-up guide for our sellers.

We also used data from Amplitude to redesign Square’s home page and create a new seller journey that transformed our home page from a pure navigation tool. We added lead-generation and self-service seller-onboarding features, revamping the content and embedding links to secondary pages. We then designed several follow-up iterations and experiments to optimize the user experience, which would have been impossible without Amplitude. The key metrics we analyzed after we retooled our homepage saw double-digit improvements.

Leveraging the Swiss Army Knife of Analytics

Amplitude has given us unparalleled visibility into seller behavior. We use it to review and debug the seller experience and metrics like conversions, product adoption, and payment activation. We analyze the speed with which sellers complete actions in our products. And the most significant impact has been time savings. The ability to create charts very quickly in Amplitude has helped our data scientists build dashboards for product changes very quickly, without much heavy lifting. This enables the team to quickly iterate based on data. Because we have Amplitude, our data analysts spend 90% less time analyzing customer data, making them more productive by freeing them to do deep dives on projects that impact our bottom line.

If Amplitude didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it, and that would require years of development and a massive team of engineers, which would divert us from building new products and helping our sellers—and we wouldn’t come close to the great product that Amplitude provides.

Some companies measure ROI solely in terms of sales, but at Square, we see returns in productivity and a positive data culture. Amplitude isn’t a silver bullet, but we continually discover insights that generate accumulated value. There have been plenty of times when our teams hypothesized one thing, and Amplitude revealed another. In one instance, we initially presumed that the sellers would prefer to submit the lead form on the "Contact Sales" page as opposed to utilizing the chat option. However, upon creating a Pathfinder chart to examine the top user journeys, we found that engaging through chat resulted in greater seller engagement than the completion of the form. This noteworthy insight has played a key role in informing our redesign of the "Contact Sales" flow.

Amplitude allows us to deep dive into sellers’ complex, evolving behaviors, leading to the development of new products to keep pace with their changing needs. Amplitude’s deep instantaneous insights and adaptability help us track changing customer needs and optimize our seller experience. Its unique combination of depth, flexibility, and speed aligns with the way Square works. We haven’t found this kind of power in other analytics platforms.

It’s like a Swiss Army Knife, with dozens of useful tools that anyone at Square can leverage, whether they’re product managers or data analysts. In the past, working with user data involved specialized training to master complex analytics concepts and platforms. Now, anyone in the company can point and click their way to meaningful insights. It’s like having a data scientist’s toolbox at your fingertips whenever you need it.

Stepping Out of the Shadows with Amplitude

Amplitude’s team are specialists who understand the needs of product managers, data analysts, and the various professionals who use it. That’s why their platform fits so well with our workflows. They establish best practices and provide powerful tools that create a data-driven culture. Amplitude is a trusted partner and a provider of cutting-edge, state-of-the-art analytics technology.

Their engineers anticipate our needs while addressing the complexities of customer-oriented interactions. I witnessed their dedication firsthand as a member of the Amplitude Customer Advisory Board. They stand behind their product by continuously innovating and evolving it, and Square benefits from their expertise.

Thanks to Amplitude, there are no boundaries to data at Square. Product managers can do simple analyses so our data scientists and analysts can focus on complex problems. We have built a culture that values data by changing our analytics platform and adapting our practices. We are no longer working at cross purposes because everyone sees the same data, leading to more collaboration.

Shared data leads to shared alignment. Amplitude served as the spark. We educated our people and realigned our organizational priorities around analytics. Once that happened, our productivity improved. We stepped out of the shadows, taking steps toward the light, improving outcomes for Square and our customers.