CSMs have a daily goal of helping customers implement Amplitude so they can unlock its full potential and achieve their objectives—whether that’s understanding their customers better, identifying which product features perform best, or finding areas for improvement in a funnel.
For this reason, here are the three most common mistakes that occur when implementing the solution.
1. Not Establishing a Standardized Taxonomy or a Data Governance Process
From the very beginning, it is essential that your taxonomy is standardized across the organization and that a data governance process is in place. This means not only having a taxonomy that follows best practices but also establishing processes and rules for when new team members want to add events to Amplitude.
Here are some tips to consider when defining your taxonomy:
- Make it understandable for anyone in your organization.
- Don’t: Screen 1 Onboarding Step 4
- Do: Onboarding Started
- Follow a consistent taxonomy, considering capitalization, spacing, language, and even verb tenses.
- Don’t: Onboarding_started / onboarding complete
- Do: Onboarding Started / Onboarding Completed
- Maintain the established rules for new events. Ensuring consistency over time is crucial for reliable data and governance.
2. Not Assigning a Data Governor Within Your Organization
Closely tied to the previous point, and a critical part of the data governance process, is the need for a Data Governor within your organization.
The Data Governor is responsible for ensuring data reliability and making sure that taxonomy, events, and properties comply with predefined requirements and rules. This role also involves answering questions related to your data.
3. Implementing Events for Every Action in Your Product
At first, it’s common to think that all user interactions are important. But if everything is important, nothing is important.
Some recommendations when deciding what to implement:
- Ensure your events and properties answer key business questions that provide value to your organization.
- For example, if you want to know how many sign-ups you had in a month by country, you need an event that tracks user registrations and includes a country property.
- Start with no more than 15 events.
- Your events should align with your use cases—there’s no need for 50 events to understand your onboarding flow! Setting a limit per use case simplifies your implementation, initial analysis, and even your QA process.
- Make sure each event provides value.
- Before adding an event, ask yourself: What would I do if this event’s numbers suddenly dropped or spiked? If the answer is nothing, then the event probably shouldn’t be in Amplitude. Many organizations implement events just for the sake of it and struggle to make data-driven decisions because those events don’t truly impact their business.
If you’re considering implementing Amplitude in your organization and don’t know where to start, we can help.
