Profile Connect Preview: Portable Customer Profiles from Snowflake

In a recent webinar, we looked at how Amplitude can help unlock data from your data warehouse. We showed how this is done via our connection with one of our major data warehouse integration partners, Snowflake.

We presented an exclusive demo of our new feature, Profile Connect. With Profile Connect, we give our users the ability to query the data in Snowflake from Amplitude directly, then combine it with behavioral data that already exists within their platform.

The role of data warehouses in business intelligence

Curtis Liu, Co-Founder and CTO of Amplitude, emphasized how “data is at the heart of business” today. Customer data is the foundation of developing products and services and making operational decisions. Because of this, data warehouses have become central to business intelligence.

This emphasis on data means that data literacy is a growing need across multiple teams within an organization—from product managers to marketers to UX designers. Based on IDC data, only 32% of data available to enterprises is put to work.

Organizations need to find ways to harness citizen data analysis by streamlining and simplifying exploratory analysis. This includes making it easy to extract and analyze data from data warehouses.

Amplitude + Snowflake

“Amplitude makes it easy for everyone at a company to explore and gain insight from their product behavioral data,” Curtis says. “If you’ve used Amplitude before, you may have experienced just how easy that is.”

With just a few clicks, Amplitude allows users to:

• Monitor the usage rate of features
• Analyze the causes of a drop-off in a conversion funnel
• Examine weekly retention
• Compare two variations in an A/B test
• And more

But we learned through conversations with our customers that getting computed business data from data warehouses for analysis has been challenging and tricky. Customers have had to build flaky data pipelines that are difficult to maintain and require significant engineering time.

Amplitude has invested in building integrations with major cloud data warehouses to make it easier for our customers to unlock the valuable data found within them.

One of our key data warehouse partnerships is with Snowflake. Over 350 of our customers are using Amplitude and Snowflake to gain valuable and actionable insights from their customer data. Through this integration, business users have a 360-degree view of their customers through real-time user journey analysis.

Teams across any organization no longer need to depend on data analysts and use up significant resources to extract insights from places like data warehouses and turn their data into action. Many customers are harnessing Amplitude to create customer cohorts using their Snowflake data and then sending them straight into their engagement platform. Or they’re reverse ETL-ing the newly discovered customer cohorts back into Snowflake for their data science and machine learning models.

How Block used Amplitude + Snowflake to double its free-to-paid conversion

Christopher Selden, Principal Product Manager at Amplitude, presented a real-life example of how Block (aka Square) is using the Amplitude and Snowflake integration to harness data and drive user engagement. Block was looking for better ways to cross-sell its services to its clients.

It uses the Snowflake integration to bring behavioral data sets into Amplitude. Block captures event-based data, like when a customer processes a refund online or requests a return in other business systems. It then combines this transactional data brought in from Snowflake with the existing behavioral data already found in Amplitude.

With the data and insights collected, Block’s marketing team is able to split their users into different audiences based on their behavior and experiences. They then design personalized cross-sell and upsell campaigns aimed at these audiences.

These campaigns have resulted in the doubling of Block’s conversion rate from free to paid products. The data analysis and activation that previously took weeks of collaboration with the data science team is done completely self-serve by their marketing team in just a few minutes.

The current barriers behind getting value from your trusted data source

To truly obtain a 360-degree view of your customer, you need much more than just behavioral or product usage data. For example, there is still data that is inaccessible to the teams closest to customers, locked in platforms that data teams are using. We see three other main barriers to getting value from your data sources:

• Data drift. Less SQL-oriented teams (product, design, and marketing) often begin their questioning and data processes within tools like Amplitude. Meanwhile, data analysts and engineering largely operate within a data warehouse. This leads to different teams having discrepancies between their source of truth and the point of data consumption, which increases the lack of trust in the data and resulting insights.
• Collaborative friction. With the data warehouse being an organization’s single source of truth, data-driven teams naturally work across both Amplitude and the warehouse. However, if objects exist in one platform only or do not translate into the other, it leads to siloes between teams and missed collaboration opportunities. These teams need to reverse engineer their work in multiple platforms, then translate from one platform to the other.
• Time to value. Ultimately, all of this can slow down the speed at which you can leverage data, converting it from a raw data set into insight into action. Whether you are centralizing all customer data in your warehouse or building pipelines to democratize data access across various self-service analytics tools, the goal is to maximize the value of the customer data.

When we talk about data sets beyond the behavioral data currently captured by Amplitude, we are referring to information such as:

• Demographic data
• Account data
• Subscription data
• Machine learning models

The ability to include these in your analytics can truly provide organizations with a 360-degree view of their customers. This problem is that, until now, doing so was practically impossible. Consider the following scenarios:

• How would you monitor the engagement rates of subscribers and non-subscribers if your engagement data is in one system and your subscriber status data is in another?
• How would you measure the impact of interacting with a newly launched feature on your customer lifetime value (CLV) if your interaction data and CLV data are totally separate?
• How do you re-engage your churned users if they never reappear in your engagement data?

This is why Amplitude is proud and excited to announce Profile Connect, a new Amplitude product capability launched in partnership with Snowflake.

Introducing Profile Connect

Profile Connect is the first time Amplitude customers can directly query the data in Snowflake and combine it with already existing behavioral data within our platform. Amplitude is now the only platform that allows you to build customer profiles and segment audiences based on customer data living in Snowflake.

Profile Connect will give data-driven teams the ability to make customer profiles portable. It allows them to access a full view of data across both Snowflake and Amplitude.

To see how it works, watch the demo below:

Creating the query is simple. You need a user ID to determine which user this is being tied to in Amplitude. You then stipulate which property you want to bring from your data warehouse.

In the demo, the property is the propensity score that determines how likely a customer is to upgrade to a paid subscription. This propensity score was computed in Snowflake based on analysis by the data science team and considers both behavioral and non-behavioral data.

Once you have imported your query, you can model the customer funnel. In this case, we modeled the journey of a customer who landed on a subscription page, then sent a message.

You can then apply the propensity score from Snowflake, which shows the likelihood that the customer will upgrade to a paid subscription.

Conducting funnel analysis is just one example of how you can leverage non-behavioral data through Profile Connect. Other methods include conducting cohort analysis and audience segmentation.

Try out Profile Connect for yourself

If you’re an existing Amplitude customer on our Growth or Enterprise plan and would like to be a Profile Connect beta user, simply fill out this form to get started. This is a great opportunity to work with our Amplitude Product teams to test out this groundbreaking feature while helping Amplitude shape our vision.

If you’d like to see the full webinar, you can do so here.