How NBC Increased Retention by 2x Using Product Intelligence

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How NBC Increased Retention by 2x Using Product Intelligence

National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is a paid advertising television and radio network based in the United States. It is a well-known division of NBC Entertainment by Comcast based in New York.

NBC services are exclusively available to watch within the US, however, to unblock and stream NBC outside the US, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service will be required to bypass geo-restrictions.

The media giant is making useful decisions based on data, which are resulting in big increases in viewership. The company’s strategic choices across a variety of industries, notably those pertaining to streaming media, have been significantly influenced by the data that has played a significant role in this change.

The expansion of NBC’s investment in user insights has been accompanied by an increase in the company’s demand for increasingly complex analytics, which has resulted in the data science team being reduced in size.

The company chose Amplitude because it was looking for a product intelligence solution that might enable more individuals across teams to provide meaningful insights and relieve some of the load that was being placed on its already-busy data scientists. Amplitude was successful in pleasing NBC.

Let’s explore the approaches that NBC used to increase retention with product intelligence:

Efforts Made to Ease a Data Bottleneck

Before employing Amplitude, NBC relied on a product analytics solution that frequently fell short of meeting the company’s requirements in terms of providing the necessary information for making important product choices.

Because of this, the company relied heavily on its data science team for the results of its experiments, the analysis of its cohorts, and the flow of its users.

Their response time was frequently several days or even a week because they had to support a number of different divisions and organizations.

These wait times have been reduced to a matter of just a few hours thanks to Amplitude, which makes it possible for product teams to conduct anything from building cohorts to analyzing retention.

According to estimates provided by Jay Khavani, Director of Product Analytics, Amplitude has enabled data analysts to reclaim 25% of their workday, QA engineers to reclaim 10%, and data engineers to reclaim 5% of their time.

By doing so they can concentrate on solving more complex problems, developing more personalized discovery algorithms, and optimizing their work, which is work that can serve as a competitive differentiator for NBC.

Developing a Plan of Action for Research and Development

Amplitude has enabled NBC to develop a scalable framework for experimentation because it provides quick access to real-time data about user behavior.

It enables the organization to rapidly evaluate test performance and find opportunities for more testing utilizing Cohorts, Conversion Drivers, and Engagement Matrix. Amplitude also enables the company to monitor test results in real-time.

An experiment about a divided homepage experience for Vizio televisions. The company made the adjustments available to all of its users after the Funnels and AB Test View features of Amplitude demonstrated that they increased viewership by 10%.

NBC was also successful with its experiments when it tailored the homepage of its app to the user’s previous activity.

What is the result? On day 7, retention rose by a factor of two. (Amplitude’s sophisticated Cohorts tool, which makes it easier to define and target user segments, was utilized in both of these studies.) In a similar vein, testing led to the development of a video preview feature that increased conversions of video starts by 36%.

Naturally, testing that is both fast and accurate means that there is less risk involved in attempting new things, even if those new things don’t work out. NBC decided not to adopt a video-rating function on a wider scale after discovering that it did not affect any crucial metrics, which allowed them to save both time and money.

Data-Driven Stories

Amplitude has facilitated the accessibility and applicability of a variety of results. According to what Josh had to say, “it has gotten easier for product managers to exchange data and insights with other persons, whether that means engineers or a design team.”

He pointed out that this method is assisting the corporation in realizing its aim of leveraging data as the primary driver of its decision-making processes.

Even greater, NBC has been able to develop compelling narratives around this data by utilizing Amplitude’s Notebooks product.

This tool enables users to place data in context and makes it easy to share those narratives with other stakeholders. According to Josh, “the Notebooks function has allowed us to very rapidly consolidate findings and then show them to executives,” which helps promote buy-in at the top levels of the organization.

Maintaining One Step ahead of the Competition

According to NBC, the most appealing aspect of Amplitude was not its existing advantages but rather its promise. It was abundantly evident that the platform was evolving at a rate that was sufficiently quick to keep up with the organization as its requirements changed.

This result was sufficient to convince the organization to switch from the product analytics tool it had been using previously.