For any analytics platform to start producing useful insights and help with important business decisions, it’s fairly important to set up the analytics tool in a way that ensures accurate and complete data. Because of the wide range of features that it provides, we highly recommend Amplitude.
Amplitude analytics is an advanced analytics platform, that tracks user based activity, but unlike Google Analytics, it collects very little data on it’s own and requires some tweaking. Here is our checklist of some basic tracking set up we implement whenever implementing amplitude on web apps.
The User’s First Touch
The Problem
Let’s start with a user’s first contact with the website. When user visits the website directly, without any referral, Amplitude records initial_referrer as none. Later same user comes to the website again from some other source (lets say google) amplitude will reset initial_referrer as google. Due to this, not only the actual source gets lost but at times the website hostname also gets stored as initial_referrer.
The Work Around
So that was that for the problem. Now to work around it, we can set first touch of user using Amplitude’s ‘set once’ feature. This helps overcome the issue to a great extent. In the following is the code that should be used with all page view event for amplitude tracking.
Properties
Since amplitude does not capture important dimensions like other analytics tools do (ie Google Analytics), we need to explicitly add some properties with all events sent to Amplitude. These properties, are listed in the following.
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Page url
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Page Path
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Page Title
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Referral Url
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Referral Path
Benefits
1- Analysis
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These properties can help understand if conversion has any relation with referred page / current page where the event was triggered.
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This can help group properties in Amplitude analyze performance of pages.
Page where the most users subscribed to the newsletter.
2- Audits
Adding these properties in all events will help drill down the data quality audit.
Scenario: Events are not always triggered when referred from a specific page.
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We can drill down to specific pages where an event is being triggered.
To see conversion rate when user redirects to infusionsoft after subscribing.
3- Complex Funnels
By using a combination of events, page urls and referrals we can also create complex funnels in amplitude.
Similar Funnel in Amplitude
In the following is the GTM code to add these properties along with other event properties.
Note: {{dl – details}} is a dataLayer variable that has properties object specific to the event being sent to amplitude.
Conclusion
I’m convinced that making sure you work in accordance with the best prescribed practices give you better, more accurate data, which greatly helps make better business decisions.
Following the above checklist makes your data in Amplitude a lot easier to debug and adds better context to your analysis. Curious to see if there are other common Amplitude properties that you feel could take data analysis to new heights? do drop a comment! We’d love to hear from you.
