The End of Annoying Popups: Introducing Amplitude Guides and Surveys

Popups are everywhere. And everyone hates them.

Yet they persist across the internet, disrupting our workflows in the digital platforms and apps we use. The original promise of popups was simple: to help users discover features, share their feedback, and make digital experiences more engaging. The reality? A constant barrage of irrelevant messages that users reflexively close.

Businesses want to guide their users—to make onboarding easier, encourage feature adoption, and promote product upsells—but they don’t have the right tools to do it effectively. Traditional popups treat every user the same way, showing identical messages regardless of who you are or what you’re doing. They appear at the wrong times, measure success by clicks rather than user value, and prioritize short-term engagement over long-term satisfaction.

We think there’s a better way, which is why we’re excited to announce Amplitude Guides and Surveys—built on Amplitude’s acquisition of Command AI. Guides and Surveys are a new approach to in-product and website engagement that put users first. They’re built on a simple idea: The best way to guide users is to understand them.

A different kind of guide

Amplitude Guides and Surveys don’t just show messages—they deliver personally relevant experiences. By using deep behavioral insights from the Amplitude Digital Analytics Platform, Guides and Surveys know when users need help and, just as importantly, when they don't.

Want to introduce a new feature? Rather than blasting all of your customers with the same announcement, you can target users who would find it most valuable based on their actual behavior. Looking to gather feedback? Instead of interrupting users at random moments, you can ask for their thoughts right after they’ve completed a meaningful action.

This isn’t just about better targeting. It’s about respecting the user experience. Guides and Surveys offer:

• Smarter timing that recognizes user context
• Built-in protections against message fatigue
• Multiple form factors, from subtle tooltips to full guides
• Automatic measurement of user engagement or annoyance

Guides and Surveys display user engagement and annoyance.

With Amplitude Guides and Surveys, you can actively differentiate between a user closing a popup and a user rage closing a popup (closing it quickly after it appears). The latter means the user found the popup annoying, a signal that it was poorly timed or targeted.

The power of an integrated platform

Most teams end up cobbling together multiple tools to understand and engage their users. One for analytics and segmentation, another for messaging, and yet another for A/B testing or session replay. Switching between tools creates friction, and integrating more solutions is both costly and complicated.

Amplitude changes that with one unified platform. With Guides and Surveys built directly into Amplitude’s Digital Analytics Platform, you can move seamlessly from insight to action. See users struggling with a new feature? Launch a targeted guide instantly. Wonder if your guides and surveys are working? A/B test different approaches and see the impact in real time with Session Replay.

Guides and Surveys is integrated across the platform

This seamless integration creates opportunities that weren’t possible before:

• Spot patterns in session replays, then deploy guides that address common friction points.
• Create dynamic segments based on user behavior and automatically adjust messaging.
• Test different engagement approaches and measure their impact on long-term retention.
• Track not only if users click but if they progress to a meaningful action afterward.

For product teams, this means you can now create smart onboarding flows that adapt to how users actually use your product. For growth teams, you can now create personalized conversion paths based on each user’s journey. And for marketing teams, this opens up the ability to deliver personalized campaigns and promotions that target users based on their actual product usage

Real impact, real results

Take Homebase, for example, an all-in-one team management platform for small businesses. Using Amplitude, it’s now able to deliver better targeted campaigns for users and get precise with its onboarding.

Delivering on the original promise

The original promise of popups was compelling: Help users get more value from your product. But somewhere along the way, that promise got lost in a flood of generic and pushy messages.

Amplitude Guides and Surveys bring everyone back to that original vision. It’s not about interrupting users; it’s about understanding them. It’s not about forcing engagement; it’s about facilitating discovery. And it’s not about what you want users to do; it’s about helping them achieve what they came to do.

The future of in-product guidance isn’t about more popups. It’s about smarter ways to drive real value for your customers. And with Amplitude Guides and Surveys, you can achieve that today.