Build charts in Amplitude: Add events

This article will help you:

• Add events to your charts
• Understand how event properties shape your analyses
• Use conditions to fine-tune your analyses

Amplitude charts are built using three information cards. These cards, located along the left-hand side of your chart, are called modules, and while their specific function can change from chart to chart, they follow some general guidelines:

1. At the top is the Events module. This is where you’ll select the Amplitude events and metrics you want to include in your analysis.
2. In the middle is the Measured As module. The appearance and features of the Measured As module varies widely from chart to chart; for that reason, this article will focus solely on the Events module and the Segment By module instead. You can find out about the Measured As module for a specific chart type by reading the documentation for that chart.
3. At the bottom is the Segment By module, which is where you’ll define and identify the specific subsets of users you’re interested in learning about.

This article will explain how to use the Events module. Once you're done here, check out our article on adding user segments to your Amplitude charts.

NOTE: Because they are designed for different types of analyses, Amplitude’s User Composition, User Sessions, Personas, and Compass charts do not have an Events module. For more information on how to build analyses using these charts, click through the links above to view the documentation.

Events module

Events are the heart of any Amplitude analysis. An event is an action a user takes in your product. This could be anything from pushing a button, completing a level, or making a payment. You should aim to track between 15 and 200 events to develop a full understanding of how users are engaging with your app.

Amplitude can also track inactive events, or actions that are not taken by the end user, but still occur within the app or website. One example might be a push notification sent by the app.

NOTE: To learn about configuring inactive events, see our Help Center articles on Amplitude’s Govern feature.

Add events to your analysis

To add an event to an analysis, navigate to the Events module and click Add Event or Metric. This will bring up a list of all available events. You can add up to 10 events to an analysis. An event must first be instrumented before it will appear in this list. To learn more, see our articles on managing events.

In addition to the product-specific events your team will instrument, there are five default Amplitude events:

• Top Global Events: Queries on the top ten active events by volume with the highest counts, over the time period selected, for all users in your project.
• Top Events for Segment: Queries on the top ten active events by volume with the highest counts, over the time period selected, for a particular user segment defined in the Segment By module.
• Any Active Event: Queries on any active event over the time period selected. For example, if you want to view your daily active users, select Any Active Event and change the measurement in the Measured As module to Uniques.
• Any Event: Queries on any event over the time period selected. This includes non-active events.
• New User: Queries on new users over the time period selected. For example, if you want to view daily new users, select New User and change the measurement in the Measured As module to Uniques. A user is considered to be "new" the moment they send their first event to Amplitude.

When '[Amplitude] New User' is used in a chart, the chart will consider all events that were performed by the New User during the interval (day/week/month) that they are new. For example, in an Event Segmentation chart, if you compare "Uniques" vs "Event Totals", you may see a higher count of events than the number of new users. 

Use wildcards to search for events

You can search for events you'd like to add to your chart within the search bar. If you don't know the exact name or spelling of an event, use a wildcard or combination of wildcards to find what you're looking for. The following wildcards are available in dropdown searches: 

• * (asterisk) - an asterisk is used to search for an unknown number of characters. It can be placed at the start or at the end of a search term. 
• ? (question mark) - a question mark is used to search for a single alpha character. It can be placed in any position of a search term.
• [ ] (brackets) - the brackets are used to search for the character(s) within the brackets in any order. 

Some example wildcard searches are:

• *save - returns results that end with "save"
• chart* - returns results that start with "chart"
• *chart* - returns results that include "chart" anywhere in the string
• c???t* - returns results that start with “c” + any three alpha characters + “t” (i.e., strings that start with "chart" or "create")
• dat[ae]* - returns all results that start with “dat” + “e” or “a” (i.e., strings that start with "date" or "data")

Add conditions to your events

You can refine your events using the Filter by or Group-by specifications. Both use event properties or user properties to affect your analysis, but they do so in different ways.

The Filter by specification conditions your event on an event property or user property that you select. Amplitude will limit the results to those with properties that matched the condition(s) you specified at the time the event was triggered.

For example: let’s say you wanted to limit the scope of an event to those that were triggered from an iPhone. You’d use the Filter by specification to tell Amplitude that, for this particular event, you only want to count those that came from an iPhone.

The properties you have available will depend on the nature of your product, and on the specific information you think is necessary for understanding a particular event. Some common event properties among Amplitude customers include cause, description, category, type, duration, level, % completed, count, source, status, from, number, lives, authenticated, error, rank, action, and mode. Common examples of user properties include locale, referral source, plan type, number of photos uploaded, number of units of in-game currency, and current level in a game. 

If you have more than one event in your Events module, using the Filter by specification on one event will not affect any of the others. You’ll have to add conditions to each event individually.

The Group-by specification also uses these properties. However, instead of limiting your results to those that match your conditions, Group-by will break out your results based on the property you selected. For example, if you were to tell Amplitude to group by country, the chart would show you results for each individual country (or, to be more technical, for each instrumented value of that property for which there were any results).

Some things to be aware of:

• You can only group each event by a maximum of two properties, and the graph displays the top ten property value counts by default.
• Amplitude records event and user properties at the time an event is triggered. This can lead to situations where the returned value for the property is no longer the current value.

Next step: Add user segments

Now that you understand how the Event module works in Amplitude, you're ready to read about adding user segments to your charts.