Stickiness: Identify the features that drive users back to your product

The practice of product analytics often revolves around driving engagement and retention. To do this, you need to know what it is about your product that makes it so appealing to your most engaged users. What are your power users doing that your other users aren't?

Amplitude's Stickiness chart helps you answer this question by showing you how often users fire specific events over a given period of time. If you know who your power users are, add them to a user segment and include it in a stickiness analysis. Amplitude will help you uncover what they're doing differently, information you can use to effectively redirect the product interactions of your regular users.

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.

Create a Stickiness chart

To open a new Stickiness chart, click Create New > Reports, then select Stickiness from the list of available charts.

Set up a stickiness analysis

As described above, a Stickiness chart shows how often your users are firing specific events. You’ll need to tell Amplitude what event you're interested in, and which users it should include in the analysis.

To build a Stickiness chart, follow these steps:

1. In the Events Module, select the event you're interested in. You can choose a specific event that is instrumented in Amplitude, or you can tell Amplitude to consider any event for this analysis, by selecting Any Event from the list of available events.
2. If desired, add properties to your starting event by clicking on + where, selecting the property name, and specifying the property value you’re interested in.
   
   NOTE: Unlike many other Amplitude charts, you are limited to analyzing a single event in a Stickiness chart.
   
   
3. In the Segmentation Module, identify the user segment you want to include in this analysis. You can import a previously-saved segment by clicking Saved Segments and selecting the one you want from the list. Otherwise, Amplitude begins from the assumption that your analysis will target all users.
   
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 + where, 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 + perform, then choose the event you’re interested in.
6. If desired, add another user segment by clicking + Add Segment, and repeating steps 5 and 6.
   
   
   
7. Finally, choose the time zone, frequency (weekly or monthly), and the time frame your analysis will cover. The date picker can be found in the top-right corner of the Metrics Module.

NOTE: You can break out your starting event by user properties by clicking … grouped by in the Segmentation Module, if desired. For example, if you wanted to group users by the cities they were in when they fired the starting event, you would select City from the property list. Amplitude will then break out the segmentation analysis on a city-by-city basis. However, you will only be able to include one user segment in your analysis. 

In the Metrics Module, you should now see your Stickiness chart, along with a tabular view of your results. To learn how to interpret your stickiness analysis, check out this Help Center article.