Creating Exceptional Customer Experiences at Snoonu—Qatar’s Fastest-Growing Ultra App

Delivery apps were critical during the pandemic, which was a boon for Qatar-based Snoonu. They’re a pioneer in the region, so the Snoonu team didn’t have a well-worn path to follow—but they had to scale up quickly.

Snoonu Senior Product Manager Osama Ali worked alongside Product Marketing Manager Andrew Edward to create sound product practices and get things running, but they struggled to determine the impact of their efforts. “We're working on features, but we have no clue how they're doing other than just looking at the business metrics and seeing if things are moving up or down,” Ali says. "We were growing very rapidly, and it was difficult to tell if we saw changes because of our organic growth or a feature we implemented.”

At the same time, Snoonu was moving toward an analytics-heavy approach, which would establish a good foundation for product analytics and properly created events. However, with only one analyst, they needed to find a way to help people get the data they needed without suffering through a bottleneck. Amplitude Analytics emerged as the best way for Snoonu to do that.

“Instead of having to go through a list of 100 tasks, I can just create a template and change things in the team’s filters on Amplitude,” says Product Marketing Manager Andrew Edward. “Then they can find the answers to their questions and it helps everyone get what they want.”

The team saw how Amplitude enabled them to scale faster and make meaningful product changes, and saw a payback on their initial investment within the first six months.

Understanding conversion rates is a top priority for Snoonu, but before Amplitude, figuring out how to accurately calculate conversion rates was “a huge nightmare,” Ali says. But “Amplitude enables us to do conversion and funnel analysis better than any other product analytics tool that I have reviewed in the market.” Now, they can easily track everything from conversions to revenue generation.

They’ve also been able to dig deeper into their product to see what’s working and what’s not to help boost conversions. One of these areas was the app search function, which they knew was critical to the app’s success.

The team wanted to try to improve conversions from a customer search, and they started to examine the pages customers opened after performing a search. They discovered that the app displayed a significant portion of products and merchants that weren’t open at that particular time. Because of this, users couldn’t order from those businesses listed in the search results and were dropping out of the app. Once they had this visibility from Amplitude, the team decided to hide the closed merchants from the results. By making this change, Snoonu’s monthly revenue increased by around $100,000.

“I was the one who was trying to push this hypothesis forward, and even I was shocked by the results,” Ali says. “$100,000 increase month on month was a wild increase for the company at that stage of growth.” Search is the highest converting funnel in the app, and using Amplitude enables them to continually make improvements.

Using Amplitude also paves the way for better communication of these insights and other changes to executive leadership. The product team can quickly and easily pull different sets of information based on the questions that they ask, and they can also highlight trends that impact high-level decisions, such as:

• Items people are most likely to add to carts
• Peak ordering hours
• Opportunities for grocery and other partners

Trends can change hourly, and 70–80% of the analysis is done in Amplitude, with results funneling throughout the organization. “For example, if our operations teams know our peak hours, they can determine whether they need to allocate more drivers during those hours,” Edward says. “Or when our grocery sales spike during a particular month, our teams work with our grocery partners to understand the opportunities that exist.”

Another example is during the month of Ramadan when charity increases. The team can analyze data during that period and work with the marketing team to determine what campaigns they should work on that are related to charity and how they can offer more visibility to those brands.

"There's a lot of value coming out of Amplitude," Edward adds. "People have started asking more questions, which shows that we’re getting more business stakeholders involved in the process. We’re democratizing how people are using data and expanding what they can do with it".

Everyone has seen the impact and value of Amplitude on the product, and because they can better connect their activities to the app’s success, Snoonu is realizing its vision of an analytics-driven operation.

For a while, Snoonu used Google Analytics running in parallel with Amplitude, but “Amplitude was the winner over Google Analytics in almost every scenario where we wanted to pull up a chart or conduct an assessment, just because of how simple, easy, and quick it is to set up a chart,” Ali says.

Today, Snoonu uses Amplitude alongside Braze, which offers a seamless integration that helps save the marketing team a lot of hours in terms of retargeting. “We can retarget customers very easily based on behavior, and our communications are a lot more accurate,” Edward says. This action will hopefully lead to more conversions. The team used data in Amplitude to analyze a successful Braze campaign launched during the World Cup that drove a 40% increase in revenue. They also added Amplitude Audiences to their stack.

Snoonu's work with Amplitude has helped them prioritize product improvements and gain confidence in their analysis and decision-making. They can move faster and get answers quicker than anyone expected, and that means Snoonu can continue to lead the way in Qatar.