Driving traffic, freeing up engineers, and unleashing content teams

Story Highlights

• Turning the website into a growth engine by empowering marketers to self-serve and engineers to focus on high-impact projects that drive top-line metrics
• How Amplitude uses Sanity
  • Dev-free publishing and A/B-testing: Marketers ship on demand, and kick off experiments from Sanity Studio, using integration with Amplitude Experiment—leading to data-driven decisions and faster learning
  • 10 teams on Sanity: Increased CMS usage by 266% with 70 active users: events, content and campaigns, product marketing, customer advocacy, legal, and PR
  • Building and automating with Sanity: From powering interactive tools to building custom experiments integration to programmatic content creation

Thanks to Sanity my engineering team no longer spends time on customer requests that don’t drive top-line metrics. Engineers now focus on high-impact buying tools that directly support our PLG motion - we recently shipped an interactive product metrics benchmarking guide and will soon be shipping several ROI calculators.

The Vision

Fueling growth with frictionless content creation and A/B testing

Amplitude was founded in 2012 with a thesis that building the best products requires deep, cross-functional understanding of customer behavior. In 2014 Amplitude came out of stealth with its first product: a real-time mobile analytics application for product teams that develop mobile apps.

Today Amplitude is a robust platform that offers analytics, experiments, CDP, and session replay to product, data, engineering, and marketing teams. Over 2,300 companies, including 28 of the Fortune 100 use Amplitude to answer strategic questions about how customers use their products and to inform what actions they can take to maximize business outcomes.

The Challenge

Moving to a modern content platform to meet growth targets

Legacy CMS couldn’t keep up—and created engineering bottlenecks

With the previous CMS it was impossible to publish more than 4 or 5 pieces of content per month. Amplitude was using an old, highly customized iteration of WordPress which had been built by a series of contractors over 10+ years. No one knew exactly how it worked, the code was brittle, website outages were all too common, and site performance was extremely slow.

Only 3 people at the company (all of them engineers) could make changes to the website, and each change required a lot of time and effort. Simple updates to titles and product descriptions would take weeks while strategic work like UX changes or page redesigns took months to complete. While the content team could update the blog independently, even routine tasks like publishing a new post required them to write quite a bit of code.

The Solution

Priority 1: Self-service content creation across teams

With the new content platform, it was crucial to empower 70+ content creators to independently publish and update content without developer support. Among Amplitude's various web properties (developer docs, community, uptime status, and some others), the core marketing website amplitude.com, was the top priority.

Rather than trying to modernize their existing WordPress implementation, the team decided to look for a new CMS and ultimately chose Sanity to equip various teams to be able to autonomously:

• Publish core content like landing pages, blog posts, product pages, SEO pages, and customer stories.
• Stand up event registration pages for several events per week all over the world, capture RSVPs and pass them into Marketo.
• Create and promote assets such as eBooks and white papers.
• Publish and update legal documents and press releases.

To achieve all of this, the new CMS needed to give engineering the flexibility and building blocks to create a best-in-class editorial experience and to meet demanding SLAs for site uptime and performance.

While the web team braced for a protracted and difficult migration, they were able to migrate and redesign thousands of pages with zero downtime and without grappling with technical workarounds.

I have worked on CMS migrations before, and expected the biggest headache, but the migration onto Sanity was much, much smoother.

The Results

Empowering marketers while freeing up engineers

Empowering content teams with intuitive editing UI

Among the 70+ teammates who create, publish, and manage content on amplitude.com, the content goals and CMS expertise run the gamut. Some teammates just need basic editing capabilities and prefer the simple workflows they know from Wordpress. For these teammates, the web team built a familiar, streamlined editing UI with standard, reusable components that provide a familiar editing experience.

On the other end of the spectrum are teammates who need to create bespoke digital experiences. For them, the web team built custom components and workflows, including an integration with Amplitude Experiment, that allows them to independently test, learn, and rollout differentiated content and features.

Built into the workflows for all users are many custom safeguards to avoid potential mishaps. Granular permissions ensure everyone only has the access and editing functionality that’s required for their job.

Sanity offers version history, so when someone makes a mistake, it’s really easy to revert, which significantly lowers barriers to adoption. Thanks to Sanity, the Amplitude team was able to give the right autonomy to both power users and those with basic needs—while protecting everyone from mistakes.

Winning at SEO, boosting traffic and conversions

To meet their aggressive growth targets, the Amplitude’s Growth Marketing marketing team prioritized SEO content as the most cost-effective strategy.

“If someone is asking Google a question and we aren't showing up to answer it, we have to spend so much more money to meet that person and to show them that we can answer their question. It makes so much more sense and creates so much more trust to answer their questions and be seen as the authority. What is product led growth? What is data management? We want to be the ones showing up and answering those questions.”

After migrating to Sanity, the Amplitude team is able to publish 20+ SEO and educational pages per month. YoY traffic is up 19% during the first full quarter of running on Sanity. Thanks to self-service A/B testing functionality conversions also went up.

When it comes to SEO, the number of new pages produced is usually a leading indicator of the traffic that will be generated. Thanks to Sanity we created 60+ SEO pages within the first 3 months and we are continuing to churn out high volumes of pages and to fill the top of the funnel.

Marketers are free to uncover new growth drivers with A/B testing

One of the first custom components that Amplitude team built is an integration with Amplitude Experiment, which allows marketers to run A/B tests on any web page without any coding or engineering effort required. When amplitude.com ran on the previous CMS, the marketing team hardly ran any A/B tests on the website due to the extensive development and engineering effort required. The team found it quite ironic that a company that makes experimentation tools couldn’t run experiments on their own website.

I ran my first test and saw a 25% increase, 99% confidence in signup clicks. I was able to run It without any developer work and we've been iterating and improving ever since.

Engineering delivering more impact

Now that routine content creation and updates no longer take up engineering capacity, the web team has become a more strategic part of the Amplitude marketing group. They’re no longer in the uncomfortable position of being a bottleneck to content velocity.

Instead they're partnering with growth and marketing teams to prioritize new features and functionality that support Amplitude’s product-led-growth motion. As one such example, the team rolled out a product benchmarking tool and will soon launch a series of ROI calculators.

Thanks to intuitive UI and self-serve editing experience I don't have to spend hours every week training people on how to use the CMS, and my team can now spend this time building engineering-led and product-integrated tools that are more sophisticated and much more complex, rather than content publishing and updates.

Democratizing growth

While Sanity made it much faster for content creators to publish and edit website content as well as freed developers and engineers from a lot of menial work, the biggest impact is that with Sanity, the entire Amplitude team is now innovating a lot more.

Marketers are experimenting to find more impactful ways to tell the Amplitude story Growth teams are optimizing every stage of the funnel Engineers and developers are delivering new features and products that would have been impossible with the previous CMS.

With Sanity the Amplitude team now has a modern tech stack that allows every team member to take ownership of driving the company forward.

Sanity is democratizing growth, it gives our marketers the ability to learn and test and play with things without needing to go through engineers.