Insight/Action/Outcome: Looking at data in Amplitude Analytics, the product team realized there were several opportunities to optimize and bring consistency to user flows. The team ran dozens of experiments, analyzing the results in Analytics. They used this data to identify the most impactful elements of various journeys to create a single customer journey so iOS, Android, and web users followed the same path. The result was a more consistent user experience and an increase in average LTV (lifetime total value), which they expect to add $10M in revenue annually.
At Rocket Money, we love to run experiments. We have 25 going at any given time and typically run north of 100 experiments yearly. They’re a huge contributor to our success and create accountability for our teams because we can understand where we have an impact.
Understanding areas of impact is critical in the competitive personal finance space. Rocket Money is a personal finance app for people who want to optimize their financial health. I joined the company in 2021. I jumped around various product teams and managed our rebrand after our acquisition. I then shifted focus to our premium offering. I now lead our premium and monetization teams and oversee everything from customers moving between the free and premium tiers to billing, collections, and affiliate marketing.
Optimization and experimentation go hand in hand. We developed an internal tool to manage our experiments, allowing us to test customer journey scenarios and marketing hypotheses. However, it lacked the functionalities required to parse and analyze customer data. For that, we needed a specialized analytics platform, and we saw Amplitude Analytics as the best option for us to generate insights and drive product growth.
We build trust by understanding our users
Our users come to us for help. They might be struggling with or overwhelmed by their finances. We want to make sure that we are not adding to that problem. For example, we check users’ account balances before billing them to prevent overdrafts and provide discounted pricing options for cost-conscious consumers. We even have a choose-your-own price option for users of our premium tier.
In some cases, making a change would benefit the business but wouldn’t necessarily be good for the user. We don’t make those changes. We want to build relationships with our users, and that means earning their trust.
Amplitude Analytics allows us to analyze statistically significant variations in conversion rates, uncovering insights that drive business decisions.
You can’t gain trust without understanding, and we pay a lot of attention to funnels to better understand member lifecycles and monitor changes over time, especially the upgrade and downgrade processes. We use Analytics to optimize those funnels. Our teams also use Analytics to:
- Track high-level metrics like engagement or retention over extended periods.
- Understand how those metrics change for any given experiment.
- Identify bugs and diagnose problems at the app, website, and user ID levels by following individual users along their journey and discovering where issues occur.
Analytics allows us to analyze statistically significant variations in conversion rates, uncovering insights that drive business decisions.
The aha moment that led to a $10 million increase in revenue
We slice and dice our high-level metrics in our “vitals” Analytics dashboard, breaking down indicators by platform. For example, we track iOS, Android, and web conversions and hypothesize about the differences between these user segments. One such analysis led to an aha moment about our average lifetime value (LTV).
As Rocket Money grew, we’d carefully curated the user experience, but Amplitude showed us that there were still several opportunities to optimize and bring consistency to user flows and improve our revenue. The team ran dozens of experiments, analyzing the results in Analytics and using this data to create a single customer journey so iOS, Android, and web users followed the same path. Uncovering these formerly-overlooked opportunities is forecasted to drive almost $10M a year in unrealized revenue.
Tons of our users go down the road less traveled, and it is rocky and steep and not the experience that we want for our users. Amplitude was really helpful in diagnosing that problem, understanding how big of a problem it is, and seeing what percent of our population is going left instead of right. That helped us prioritize it accordingly and say, "Hey, this is a really big problem, let's work to solve it."
Without a tool like Analytics to see user journeys, we wouldn’t be able to see how many people are going down the wrong path. Amplitude helped us understand and size every issue we encountered, allowing us to enhance the robustness and user-centredness of our platform. It helped us eliminate inconsistencies and forgotten experiences so we could focus on our premium offering and build better customer journeys for our free and paid subscribers.
Prioritizing product changes that lead to cost savings
As a product manager, it’s great when data can inform our priorities for new features or changes to existing ones. But leadership teams love to see how data leads to changes that impact our bottom line—like how using Analytics led to a double-digit increase in LTV mentioned above.
In another example, we discovered a segment of users that were not able to upgrade to premium. So, we added functionality that removed that constraint, and that simple change will generate an additional $1 million in annual sales.
We also used Analytics to reduce the cost of billing our customers. We would hate it if we were involved in overdrafting someone’s account, so before withdrawing monthly user fees, we run balance checks on customers’ accounts. But every check costs money, so the fewer balance checks we run, the lower our costs. We ran an experiment to determine the ideal frequency and timing of these balance checks and analyzed the results in Amplitude. We created dashboards to monitor changes in our high-level metrics and checked them religiously.
Based on the data collected, we reduced our checks by 50% without seeing a decrease in collections or an increase in overdrafts. We save nearly $600,000 a year while maintaining our top-line revenues without adversely affecting the customer experience.
Speaking the same language and duplicating success
Amplitude’s self-service tools have improved our velocity. Everyone in the company has the tools to access and analyze user data without asking a data scientist what’s happening in our funnels. I can perform complex customer data analyses and create easy-to-understand live dashboards to share with my colleagues. We can look at high-level metrics, diagnose issues collaboratively, solve problems, and deep dive into data in real time without asking data scientists for help. That’s the power of self-service analytics. We all own Amplitude and can make decisions that move the company forward.
We can look at high-level metrics, diagnose issues collaboratively, solve problems, and deep dive into data in real time without asking data scientists for help. That’s the power of self-service analytics.
I now know Amplitude inside-out, but I’d never used it before starting at Rocket Money. Even though there was a learning curve, it soon became second nature. Its value is so clear to our premium and monetization teams that we no longer perform ROI calculations. It is tightly integrated into our workflows and has helped us analyze and monetize our experiments.
Our PMs all speak the same language and can provide valuable feedback to anyone in the company. They can look at a colleague’s dashboard and quickly understand what they see. They can manipulate charts, adjust timeframes, and add new screens and events, easily surfacing bugs and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. We are now promoting the use of Analytics across the entire group of Rocket companies. My teams have become evangelists, urging various business units across the organization to leverage the platform to bolster intercompany collaboration and duplicate our success elsewhere in the organization.
Analytics empowers our people and drives our growth. It helps our premium and monetization teams optimize funnels and build powerful user experiences across our platforms, ensuring seamless transactions and customer journeys. We are big believers in the platform, and it is so ingrained into our culture that it’s hard to say where we’d be without it.
