Engagement Matrix: discover what your users love (and don't love) about your product

This article will help you:

• Assess the overall level of engagement of features in your product
• Identify and examine clusters of data points

With Amplitude's Engagement Matrix chart, you can develop a better understanding of the high-level pattern of feature engagement in your product, by breadth and frequency. By breaking out the top and bottom events for engagement into a four-quadrant matrix view, the Engagement Matrix will enable you to identify features that aren't performing well, so you can either refactor or deprecate them, and the features that are performing best, so you can find ways to extend that engagement to other areas of your product.

NOTE: This feature is only available to customers on the Enterprise, Growth, and Scholarship plans.

Before you begin

First and foremost, events will not appear in any Amplitude charts until instrumentation is complete, so make sure you've got that done. You'll definitely want to read our article on building charts in Amplitude, as this is where you'll learn the basics of Amplitude's user interface. You should also familiarize yourself with our helpful list of Amplitude definitions.

Set up an Engagement Matrix chart

The Engagement Matrix can be used to compare up to 100 events based on breadth and frequency of usage. Breadth is based on adoption metrics, such as % Monthly Active Users who have performed a particular event, while Frequency is based on the number of times or days an event has been performed.

Build your chart

To build an Engagement Matrix, follow these steps:

1. In the Events Module, choose the events you'd like to include in your chart. You can select up to 20 individual event types; however, many Amplitude users find more exploratory value in using one of the default, out-of-the-box options:
   • [Amplitude] Top Events: Shows the top 50 active events (by event totals) in your project
   • [Amplitude] Bottom Events: Shows the lowest 50 active events (by event totals) in your project
   • [Amplitude] Top and Bottom Events: Shows the combined top 50 and lowest 50 active events (by event totals) in your project, giving you a matrix view comparing frequent and infrequent feature usage
     
2. If you've selected your events individually, you can add properties to them by clicking + Filter by, selecting the property name, and specifying the property value you’re interested in. You can also break out your results by property values, by clicking + Group-by and selecting the properties and values you're interested in.
   These options are not available for any of the default Amplitude event groups, however.
3. In the Segment By Module, identify the user segment you want to include in this analysis. You can import a previously-saved segment by clicking Saved and selecting the one you want from the list. Otherwise, Amplitude begins from the assumption that your analysis will target all users.
   
   NOTE: You can only include one user segment in an Engagement Matrix.
   
   
4. If you do not want to import a previously-saved user segment, you can start building your own by adding properties. To do so, click + Filter by, choose the property you want to include, and specify the property value you’re interested in.
5. You can narrow your focus even further by telling Amplitude you only want to include users who have already performed certain actions. To do so, click + Performed, then choose the event you’re interested in.
   
   NOTE: You can use account-level reporting with this chart type, which you can enable from the ...performed by dropdown if you have instrumented groups.
6. In the Measured As Module, set the metrics you'll use from the drop-down menus (described below).
7. Finally, use the date picker in the chart area to set the timezone, interval, and timeframe of your analysis.

Choose your metrics

In the Measured As Module, you'll find a range of options to customize your Engagement Matrix analysis: 

• % of active users and Average Times Performed per day: First, decide whether you'd like to view your results by %DAU (percentage of your daily active users), %WAU (percentage of your weekly active users), or %MAU (percentage of your monthly active users).
  To change this option, you'll have to change your interval to match—for example, if your interval is set to "Monthly," you'll only be able to see your monthly active users.

NOTE: For some inactive events, you may see a %DAU / %WAU / %MAU value greater than 100%. This happens because the data point includes users who are only firing those inactive events, and may not necessarily be active in the time interval selected. 

Next, you can choose between Average Days Performed or Average Times Performed:

• • Average Days Performed will display on the Y axis the average number of days an event was fired per unit of your interval (i.e., day, week, or month). Keep in mind that if your interval is set to "Daily," you may see events clustered at the very top of the Y-axis.
  • Average Times Performed will display on the Y axis the average number of times an event was fired per interval unit. It is computed within the product as “number of times performed within a time unit of users that performed at least one event in the time unit”. So a value computed for each time unit then averaged for each time unit that had users - you can think of it as average of the averages. 

• Sectioned by: This option determines how the quadrants of the Engagement Matrix are defined.

If you select Median, the vertical line shows the median percentage of daily, weekly, or monthly active users (depending on your interval) that fired each event during the timeframe of your analysis. The horizontal line will show you the median frequency with which each event was fired, and it is calculated by taking the median of all the individual frequencies of each event.

If you select Average, the vertical line shows the average percentage of daily, weekly, or monthly active users (depending on your interval) that fired each event during the timeframe of your analysis. The horizontal line will show you the average frequency with which each event was fired, and is calculated by taking the average of all the individual frequencies of each event.

NOTE: Both of these options will stay consistent when switching between a linear and a log scale.

• Log or Linear Scale: Finally, you can specify if you would like to see the chart on a log or a linear scale, depending on which method better suits your Engagement Matrix analysis. 

Interpret your Engagement Matrix

The light blue lines on your chart offer a handy way of categorizing your features and events, based on their performance relative to each other. Use it to prioritize which events or features you wish to focus on:

• Top right corner: These are events performed with high frequency by a high number of users. These are likely core features or events in your product, and are representative of what a lot of people are doing in your product much of the time.
• Top left corner: These are events fired with high frequency by a low number of users. These could represent power features that a small subset of your users find a lot of value in. Consider ways to improve this feature and make it more accessible to the rest of your users., so you can shift these data points to the more desirable top-right corner of the matrix.
• Bottom right corner: These are events performed with low frequency by a high number of users. These could be features many users think are useful, but only use once or twice. They could also be one-time events all your users fire at least once (for example, creating an account or finishing an onboarding tutorial).
• Bottom left corner: These are events performed with low frequency by a low number of users. These are events or features that you may want to either improve or deprecate.

For example, in the following matrix it seems like the 'Select Song or Video' event is a core event in our product, while the 'Upgrade Plan' event is in the bottom left. This could mean that your product team should focus on moving the 'Upgrade Plan' event to the right, perhaps by enticing users to upgrade their plans. 

Zoom

To zoom in on a cluster of data points, drag your mouse diagonally across the data points you would like more detail on.

In the chart below, we can see a cluster of data points we'd like to dig deeper into, so we can see exactly which events are falling into which section of the matrix. 

Breakdown table

The table below the chart provides a convenient tabular summary of the data displayed in your matrix. 

You can perform operations on the columns: The column average or median will be the same as the values the cross-sectional gray lines denote. Once you've selected your events, you can deselect in the table any events you may not wish to see in your Engagement Matrix chart. You also have the option to export this data as a CSV file and display either the average number of times performed or the average number of days for each event. 

To export the table as a .CSV file, click Export CSV.