Welcome to Amplitude! We are invested in your success and wrote this guide to help you set up Amplitude in the quickest and most optimal manner. This Quick Start Guide will walk through the data structure and what data you should send to Amplitude. Specifically, it will cover:
- Introduction & Getting Started
- Instrumentation Pre-Work: what you should think about before deciding what data to send
- Identifying Users: what is required to properly track unique users for your product
- Event Data: what events or user actions you should track
- User Properties & Event Properties: what attributes you should send to upscale your analytics
- Cross Platform Instrumentation vs. Separate Platform Instrumentation: when you should do either way of instrumentation
- Using the Amplitude Platform: helpful definitions
As you prepare to implement Amplitude, it's important to assign a Project Lead, a Data Governor and an Instrumentation Lead to your implementation team. If you are a Developer or Product Manager who will be responsible for instrumenting Amplitude, then you should also read our Getting Started Guide for Developers as well.
Creating Your Organization and First Project
1. Create an Amplitude Account. Go to https://amplitude.com/get-started and sign up for an account. You will be directed to explore our Demo environment where we've set up dashboards and charts that allow you to see some of the capabilities of our tool.
2. Verify your email. You will receive an email from Amplitude to verify your email address. Click the link in the email to set a password and finish creating your account. Once completed, you will be redirected back to the Demo environment again where you can click Set up on the Free Plan at the top of the page to set up your own Amplitude implementation.
If you have not received a verification email, click on Set up on the Free Plan at the top of the Demo environment to resend the email.
3. Create an Organization. This will allow you to create a new organization and within each organization, you will be able to create multiple projects. Your company should have one organization in Amplitude but can have multiple projects within that organization, so the name of your organization should be the name of your company.
4. Create a Project. Once you have created an organization, you will be directed to your newly setup organization. After answering a few questions, you will land on your organizations general settings where you can see your organization's name, Org ID, Org URL, Plan Type, and other metrics.
From here, navigate to the Projects page to create your first project. Each project in Amplitude will have its own separate API Key that you use to send data. For example, you can have one iOS project and one Android project within your organization and have your iOS app and your Android app send data to the respective API Key.
Important: We highly recommend creating a test project or a dev environment for each production project in order to test your instrumentation. Once data has been recorded to a project, it cannot be modified or deleted.
Click the "Create Project" button to create your first project. You will immediately receive an API Key, which you can find directly on the new project's setup page.
To create multiple projects, you can navigate back to the "Projects" page in the left-hand navigation panel.
5. Send Data to Project. Now, you are ready to begin sending data to Amplitude. Data can be sent to Amplitude in different ways - SDKs, HTTP API v2, Batch API, our integration with Segment, or our integration with mParticle:
- Getting Started for developers: This article is meant to complement the Quick Start Guide and is specifically meant for developers who will be instrumenting Amplitude. It outlines technical best practices on how to get up and running with Amplitude.
- Amplitude SDKs: Find our list of SDKs here.
- Amplitude HTTP API v2: Use our HTTP API v2 to send server-side event data; limit is 10 events per device/user per second.
- Batch API: Batch API can also be used to send server-side data; limit is 1000 events per device/user per second.
- Segment.io: See Segment / Amplitude Integration for more information.
- mParticle: See mParticle / Amplitude Integration for more information.
After instrumenting Amplitude successfully, you should see data show up immediately in the platform once events have been sent. Note that you have to instrument and log events in order for data to be sent to Amplitude. Here are some resources you may find useful during this step:
- Data Taxonomy Playbook: Check out our Data Taxonomy Playbook for detailed documentation on how to approach your event taxonomy.
6. Create More Projects, not Organizations. Creating a new project and sending data to a new API Key does not require creating a new organization. For example, if you now wanted to instrument your Android app in Amplitude after instrumenting your iOS app, then you should go to the Settings page and create a new project from there. You should not create an entirely separate organization for your Android app.
Clicking on any of your projects from this view will take you to the Settings page for that project, where you can review the API and Secret Key, set Session Property, apply Data Filters, Export Data and Delete your project:
7. Continue learning! Now you are ready to go data crunching. For documentation on all of our features, check out our Learning Center.
Next we'll cover best practices on what to do prior to instrumenting Amplitude.