Step 1: Instrumentation Pre-Work – Amplitude

Table of Contents

Instrumentation Pre-Work

The following framework will help you decide what data must be sent to Amplitude to help you achieve your business and analytics goals.

Define business goals:
What are your business goals? What about your product do you want to better understand or improve? For example, your goals for this quarter might be improving the product's user acquisition, user retention, and paying user conversion. Once you've decided on your business goals, think about what data or events you require to help achieve those goals.

Do not track everything immediately:
Track the events that are essential to answering the business goals defined in the previous section. With just your key or high priority events to start, your team will have an easier time understanding and utilizing the data in different ways in Amplitude. A majority of our customers tell us that the most difficult thing to teach new users of an organization is not the Amplitude platform and is instead what the event data means and where in the product it is triggered. If necessary, you can always at any point add more events later.

Understand how users are identified and tracked in Amplitude:
Before you begin instrumenting your events, it is important that you are properly tracking your users. Read more about the forms of identification in Amplitude and how we determine unique users here.

Organize events and related properties in a document and keep the names simple:
We recommend having a spreadsheet that lists each event and its associated properties, which might look something like this:
We strongly recommend making event names clear and intuitive. If your team or company does not have a standard naming scheme, then we recommend naming events with the following syntax: verb + noun (e.g. 'clicked signup') or noun + verb (e.g. 'signup clicked'). Check out our Data Taxonomy Playbook for best practices on coming up with your event taxonomy. You can download the above template here:

Keep test and production data separate:
Make separate Test and Production data projects on Amplitude. Test everything out fully before moving to production.

Consider instrumenting a cross-platform project:
We recommend combining web and mobile data into the same project if your product is similar across all platforms and the taxonomy is consistent. This will allow you to analyze how users move between different platforms. Different products with distinct taxonomies should be instrumented in separate projects. Evaluate here the pros and cons of combining Android and iOS data or multiple apps to the same Amplitude project.

Limit event properties and user properties:
There is such a thing as too much information. We recommend that any event should not have more than 20 properties. The same applies for user properties as well. Beyond 20 properties, you are adding properties that you may never measure.

Find specific information on how to send data to Amplitude here: