Behavior-tracking software firm Amplitude Inc. is announcing new features in its digital analytics platform today that improve upon user behavior analysis, simplify website A/B testing and introduce a tag editor for companies just getting started with data collection and instrumentation.

The company’s platform is used to analyze online behavior to help companies build more engaging and effective digital experiences. The highlight of today’s announcement is the addition of a session replay feature that enables analysts to visualize a user’s journey through a website or mobile app and identify factors that cause them to leave or abandon a shopping cart.

The feature is integrated with Amplitude Analytics to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative analysis, said Katie Barnett, principal product manager. “This helps customers watching a replay visualize the sessions based on the events that actually matter to them and cue to those exact moments they want to know more about,” she said. “This is unique relative to competitors that are using auto tracking with CSS selectors.”

CSS selectors are patterns used in cascading style sheets to select and style HTML elements based on their attributes and relationships with other elements within the HTML document. They allow developers to apply specific styles to elements without altering the HTML structure, but they can be complex to understand.

“It’s basically using code that engineers have written to guide the way that someone looks at user activity,” Barnett said. “Our session replay makes it much easier for someone to understand what someone is doing with the product and connecting defined events with visual recreations.” Session replays can also be connected to Amplitude’s customer data platform for audience segmentation.

A new web experimentation feature is intended to simplify the task of testing multiple landing pages to test effectiveness. It’s paired with Amplitude Analytics to provide a deeper understanding of what impacts customer behavior. The feature will be generally available in the first half of this year.

The visual tag editor automates the data collection and instrumentation process to help design and engineering teams track website or app activity more easily. “It’s about helping teams automate more of the data collection process,” Barnett said. “It makes it easier to get up and running.” The feature will be generally available in the first half of this year.

Photo: Amplitude