Fixing Amplitude implementation frees up BI team for more complex analytics

Course Hero is an online learning platform offering students over 40 million course-specific study resources and 24/7 homework help.  Founded in 2006, Course Hero has built a network of over 37,000 faculty members who share their resources and collaborate on new strategies for instruction. Their achievements in the EdTech space have landed them a valuation of over $2B.

With a large network of users interacting with an impressive library of materials, Course Hero knows the importance of understanding behavioral analytics at a user level. The team had made considerable investments in both a strong team of BI analysts and behavioral analytics tools like Amplitude. However, over time the Course Hero teams had come to rely more and more heavily on their BI analysts for measuring key performance metrics, as the Amplitude reports never seemed to align with insights from their BI team.  

Course Hero’s product team recognized the need for a reliable self-serve tool for behavioral analytics, since their overreliance on BI analysts was an obvious bottleneck in their workflow. They wanted Amplitude to fill that gap and free up their BI analysts for more complex analytics, but they quickly realized that poor implementation of Amplitude had led to its underutilization. When they reached out for help, Amplitude connected Course Hero to Mammoth Growth for a solution.

Mammoth Growth determined that Amplitude lacked clear ownership by Course Hero stakeholders, which meant that its implementation did not adhere to industry best practices. Too many individual team members had been building their own events, which often resulted in inconsistent or duplicative tracking. This was one of the main factors preventing Course Hero from getting meaningful reporting on user-level analytics. For example, while both Mammoth Growth and Amplitude recommend that a behavioral analytics taxonomy never track more than 100 events, Course Hero’s taxonomy was tracking 2,700 unique events.  

Mammoth Growth consulted Course Hero’s team on best practices for a new Amplitude implementation process that included clear ownership.  They created a new behavioral analytics schema and event tracking plan that could be future-proofed and applied against multiple products with a taxonomy of only 88 total events.  Mammoth Growth redesigned Course Hero’s Amplitude instance to unlock insights in the following areas:

• Event segmentation
• Funnels
• Retention
• A/B testing
• User cohorts
• Lifecycle reporting

With this new approach to Amplitude, Course Hero’s non-technical team members can build accurate visualizations within seconds, freeing up their BI analysts for more complex reporting needs. Mammoth Growth was able to increase adoption of Amplitude across Course Hero’s entire product team. This gave them the flexibility they needed to get instant insights from self-serve reporting of behavioral analytics.