Improving ROI Through Increased Data and Experimentation

Insights/Action/Outcome: The team saw a big dropoff point between users coming to the platform and placing orders. They discovered that users were dropping off when they had to complete a vertically-oriented, multi-step form. The team created a test that changed the form’s orientation to horizontal. Flipping the form to a horizontal orientation improved the conversion rate by 17%.

We have a unique B2B2C business model at Evocalize, and while that sets us apart from our competitors, it also makes working with data a lot trickier.

Businesses use our Collaborative Marketing Platform to quickly and easily create and run sophisticated marketing programs to reach their target customers. Rather than having to invest a large amount of time and resources required to build a marketing engine themselves, they can white label our platform, embed it into their existing stack, and customize their programs. Our flexible publishing engine allows us to templatize marketing programs, and we deploy particular templates depending on our partners’ needs, such as lead generation or event registration. An Evocalize implementation for Customer A might look very different from Customer B.

This flexibility and customization is a big value prop for our customers, but choosing a less standardized approach creates a challenge. We need to identify and then educate our partners on the choices that will work best for them and their businesses in order to achieve their marketing goals. From a data and analytics perspective, we have different accounts with different verticals and even different use cases within those verticals. It’s critical that we can both see everything in aggregate and also drill down and understand the intricate nuances between the various businesses and use cases we support.

In the year since we adopted the Amplitude Growth Plan and added Amplitude Experiment, we’ve gained the ability to measure and experiment and – most importantly – leverage these insights and data to help our partners make more informed, data-driven decisions with more predictable results.

The need for a powerful and consolidated analytics solution

Evocalize is a web-based application, and before Amplitude, our data was disparate. We used Google Analytics to view in-app activity, but it wasn’t well-maintained. No one owned it, and it didn’t offer robust event and tracking capabilities. We had detailed, lower-funnel transactional data from our database, such as orders, subscriptions, users, and renewals. And unless you were someone who knew all the tables in our database and how to use SQL, extracting insights from the data was challenging. When you think about it like a user journey funnel, we had a bit of information at the top and a lot at the bottom—and there wasn’t much in the middle to stitch it together.

We also didn’t have any solution for in-app experimentation. We could do some basic testing, such as trying different kinds of ads and seeing what performs best, but these efforts were limited by the lack of a more detailed experimentation framework.

Who wants to spend a lot of time building visuals? Take the fastest path to extract actionable insights and improve products.

We needed a simplified, consolidated solution that offered robust analytics and extensive experimentation. As a small yet growing team, we wanted something straightforward to implement and easy to use. We didn’t want to spend a lot of time building visuals; we wanted the fastest path to extract actionable insights to improve our product and best advise our customers. And it had to be something that checked all the boxes and would sail through the budget approval process so we could get moving quickly.

A commitment to product-led growth

We evaluated existing products on the market, but Amplitude was already on our radar. Several of our partners already used Amplitude, so we were somewhat familiar with its capabilities. It’s well-respected as a best-in-class platform, and I felt confident it could do everything we needed.

Right away, we saw Amplitude’s commitment to product-led growth. It was easy to sign up and immediately see the demo environment and get a feel for the charts. Since the documentation was publicly available, we had a good understanding of what we would need for implementation. Our developers could look at our needs and the available options, decide which would be best for us, and begin implementation.

We weren’t blocked by a sales process, and this frictionless implementation enabled us to achieve our primary goal, which was to get up and running quickly.

Leveraging data to understand customer needs and nuances

One of the first things we did within Amplitude Analytics was to take a deep dive into the funnel charts. We knew that people were dropping off—we knew how many users were coming in and how many orders we received, and there was a pretty big delta between them. We established our desired events and set up our main conversion funnels so we could start looking closely at the user journeys and identify where that dropoff was happening. (More on that minute.)

We love that we can simply slide from the macro to the micro, taking both that high-level view while also going deeper to examine individual user behavior and create cohorts. It’s easy to filter by different accounts to see what actions our clients take, what products people use, and understand the nuances of the various groups.

We have also enhanced our segmentation. Through digging into Analytics and understanding what was available to track and measure, we integrated revenue-generating events and realigned some new product KPIs for Evocalize, like funnel conversion rates and average revenue per active user. The built-in formulas in Analytics made those calculations easy.

A new outlet for experimentation

A few months after we went live with Analytics, we upgraded to the Growth Plan and added Amplitude Experiment. We’d known from the beginning that we wanted Experiment; it was one of the main reasons why we chose Amplitude. We typically have at least one test running at any given point, and we’re looking to increase our velocity.

Experiment gave us early wins, including a boost to our conversion rates. From our initial use of funnel charts, we had identified a couple of big dropoff points. Now we could use Experiment to create tests that proved (or disproved) our hypotheses around why these points caused such friction.

One of these friction points was asking users to complete a long, multi-step form. This form was vertically oriented, with users having to scroll down to complete it. We ran a test in which we flipped the orientation horizontally. The user would complete a part of the form, click next, and then be taken from left to right to the next step. That single change improved our conversion rate by 17%.

We hit the ground running because setting up and validating the experiment is so easy. It’s a new process, but we’re building that muscle and getting faster. Experiment has been the most tangible way to prove ROI, too. We can run a test, clearly demonstrate improvement, and directly attribute successes to the ability to run these experiments. And even if a test doesn’t have a conclusive result, we can take these learnings and uncover new opportunities for testing.

We’re better consultants because of data-backed results

Bringing data to the table to add validity to our recommendations allows us to position ourselves as a thought leader with our partners. Since we can dig into the nuances and differences between our accounts, we can get more granular when we want to understand why a certain partner might perform better or worse than others. We can have informed, data-driven conversations with customers who want to do something that wouldn’t be in their best interest in terms of performance or revenue. We can explain why something won’t work the way they want it to—and we can prove it based on what we’ve seen in Analytics or Experiment.

One example is our Blueprints engine, which operates much like a typical e-commerce funnel. Users input some optional information like ad copy, creative, and where to target the ad before then looking at a preview and checking out. A basic chart in Analytics shows us that for every additional field on that form, the purchase conversion rate goes down by 1%. Our implementation team works with our partners to set up some of these programs, so if we have partners that want to color outside the lines, we can say, “Here’s what you should expect if you do that and why we recommend you don’t.”

As we uncover new insights, we can arm our client success and marketing teams with suggestions and courses of action that help them become better advocates and champions for our customers.

Democratizing self-service analytics with Amplitude

Our product team members have been the primary owners and users of Amplitude, but our goal is to democratize the platform across the organization. Amplitude doesn’t charge per seat, so there’s no downside to adding more users and transitioning to more shared control. I know our CEO references Analytics for top-level business insights, and I want members of our client success team to tap into the platform as well to gather more information about their customers.

We’re excited to lean into more of the marketing features within Analytics, such as cohort syncing for certain marketing channels. When we know which series of email or activation messages a particular cohort responds to, we can create a template for it. We’ve added several key roles to our marketing team, and these capabilities will increase the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns across the board.

Democratizing self-serve analytics empowers teams and individuals to become more data-driven.

People might hesitate to explore a data and analytics platform because they’re afraid of messing things up, but the risk is low with Amplitude. You can set a baseline and encourage curiosity by inviting people to go in, play around, and see what events are firing. We start with the learning modules within Amplitude Academy. From there, we’ve curated modules most relevant to specific teams and created learning paths, which we keep in Confluence—our own Evocalize-specific Amplitude Onboarding Academy. By distributing that knowledge of analytics and lowering the barrier to entry, we can empower teams and individuals to become more autonomous. Amplitude’s resources and ease of use make that possible.

Great people + great product = great results

We’ve been super impressed with Amplitude’s client success and implementation teams. From collaboration to the response rates on support tickets, it’s been a great experience. We’re a relatively new customer, but our rep has already helped facilitate opportunities for us, like getting involved in some early beta tests. We feel valued, and the team does a great job supporting the product.

We still have a lot of learning to do, but it’s great to see how anyone can start small and make noticeable, impactful progress toward product improvements.