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Amazon Analytics Service

developer.amazon.com

202 pointsalariccole95 comments

I wonder if these big brands (Amazon, Google) can be stretched infinitely with more and more offerings without confusing users.

Amazon is a retailer and cloud computing provider and a video streaming service and a TV producer and a device manufacturer and a grocery store and a bank for small business loans and a hundred other things... At what point does the umbrella brand start to confuse people?

Bezos must have a brain the size of Texas to keep all these moving parts in mind.

Great question -- when I ask my mom what she thinks of first about Amazon she says "buying Christmas gifts"

The first thing in my mind is almost always one of their technical services, most specifically AWS

I wonder how far down the list "jungle" is on average.

It took me a while to figure out which Amazon service is called Jungle...

It's not anything new, conglomerates have existed for a long time before the internet age.

For example consider Sony: Sony Computer Entertainment (gaming), Sony Mobile (phones), Sony Pictures (movies), Sony Music (music), Sony Life (insurance), Sony Bank (banking), Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Visual (imaging), Sony Medical (medtech)

That's kind of my point. Sony became unfocused and muddled.

Fun fact: Twitter is worth more than Sony. Billions more.

You should see what Samsung is like in South Korea. It's not unusual to get in your Samsung car and drive down a road built and serviced by Samsung construction to the Samsung mall where you arrive at the Samsung grocery store and fill your cart with Samsung products. It works really well for them and has for years.

Or you could say that Sony has remained relevant for 67 years. Will Twitter manage to match that?

Probably not, but no one could have predicted this of Sony when they started out making tape recorders. The initial product does not seem to matter much on this time scale compared to capital and investment prowess. Twitter looks like it is making a pretty strong start on one of those, but we will see what the future holds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony#History

Is your definition of 'worth' based on market cap? I'd imagine the enterprise value of the two companies tell a different story (though I've heard some dark news about Sony in recent years, aren't they still posting billion-dollar profits?)

Checked really quickly, Sony's electronics (from computers to cameras) division market cap is a 34.8bn, I have a number of 34.7bn for twitter.

And Sony as a brand is split in different groups depending on the activities (e.g. finance, music production, content licensing, network provider and who know what else). Twitter's not in the same league.

Then there's Samsung, I think they're the largest conglomerate in the world.

My mom would affiliate Samsung with TVs. I'd probably put them with computer monitors and phones.

They also build skyscrapers and power plants (Samsung C&T Corporation), and ships (Samsung Heavy Industries). They also sell Life Insurance in South Korea.

Indeed. Their revenues account for 22% of South Korea's GDP.

Yamaha: musical instruments, motorcycles, outboard motorboat engines…

Westinghouse: TVs and nuclear reactors.

(Really, that's two separate companies which license the brand from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Licensing_Corporat...)

I am not from India, so someone can confirm or deny this, but I hear one can pass a whole day on India just consuming Tata products: from your car, to your food, to your clothes, etc.

Close. As in it's possible, but they don't have dominant market share in many of the industries they have a presence in. Another conglomerate - Reliance - is also in that conversation.

By market cap, I think it's GE. Depends on how you define conglomerate, but they're pretty diverse - financial services, plastics, aircraft engines, consumer goods...

This is correct. GE has been considered a conglomerate for nearly a century now. GE sports a $276 billion market cap, Samsung is at $194 billion.

I'll say however, that Samsung appears vastly undervalued. GE is trading at about 20 times earnings, Samsung is trading at 20 times just its last quarter alone (and around 5 or 6 times trailing four quarters).

Also worth noting, that despite being more profitable than Apple, Samsung trades at a 60% discount to AAPL.

In Hong Kong, Asia's richest billionaire, Mr Li Ka-Shing of Cheung Kong Holdings, owns nearly everything. Anything you do or touch in a day makes Mr Li even richer. His wealth is opaque so he is probably right up there with Bill Gates and Carlos Slim for the #1 spot.

Bloomberg puts him at $28.8B. Not necessarily opaque.

And he recently admitted that only half of his wealth are in stocks. Which actually puts him near the top spot.

Don't forget Mitsubishi.

I don't see how/why the multitude of offerings should confuse users. If I'm looking for mobile analytics and I find Amazon's, what difference does it make to me that they're hand is in a million other things? The only confusion will be if their documentation sucks :)

They made the leap from books to other items seamlessly. I think that their branding as Amazon rather than something else was behind this. They mildly redirected their brand with AWS, but still pulled it off. I think the analytic offering doesn't change much of the branding.

My assumption on Bezos is that half is he's an obsessive genius, and half is he hires very well. You need the right people to keep the parts moving without detailed guidance.

You can tell that Google is aware of this challenge by the simplicity of their Search screen. They keep a lot of their offerings hived away from the top screen.

This is one of the so called 22 immutable of laws of branding, i.e. the law of expansion: the power of a brand is inversely proportional to it's scope.

Vis-à-vis Amazon, I'm not sure it's a problem yet, I think of them as a retailer, AWS and Kindle, etc as separate brands. I don't see the problem at this juncture.

Yea, I just got a email from Amazon asking "Why I didn't use the video service." Why--because I already watch the boob tube too much. Jobs summed it up--stick with three things and do them well.

For the record: Apple, off the top of my head, is in the business of consumer hardware, professional hardware, accessories, consumer software, productivity software, consumption software, cloud storage, communications, and eCommerce platforms.

Let's set the crazy point right now, when Amazon University offers Masters in Law we'll know it is a virtual Costco from Idiocracy.

On a serious side, it stops when Bezos can't make it work and there aren't many things that fit in that category. I'll see you at Amazon U.

Good point, but I don't think it muddles any messages, at least when the audiences are clearly defined. Marketing to devs using Amazon APIs or consumers shopping and watching movies isn't going to overlap.

Conglomerates peaked in the US in the 1960s; since then, it's been believed that too much de-focus is bad. That said, it's certainly OK for a company to have multiple businesses. Berkshire-Hathaway is like an old-style conglomerate. GE is regarded as being very well run. Etc.

The danger of a conglomerate is that a culture or decision-making paradigm suitable for the dominant business(es) might not be good for others. E.g., smaller businesses might get ignored because they don't matter enough. Or they might not be allowed to move quickly and take risks. E.g., Xerox found that selling LISP machines and copier paper mixed badly, as reorders of the latter were held hostage to the immaturity of the former.

Mitsubishi corporation. Pretty much anything and everything from toasters to trains.

Mitsubishi is one of the major "Keiretsu" in Japan, the descendants of the pre-WW2 Zaibatsu.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu

This was my first time going to the Amazon SDK site and I am blown away by the difference in site design between it and Amazon's AWS site.

The SDK site is cleanly designed, has less clutter, and so on. The services link to other services and I feel like I'm being sold a value proposition - sign up and reap rewards.

The AWS site is amazon.com turned into place a storefront for cloud services. And that storefront is cluttered and seems eager to have me buy things without selling me on the value.

Analytics: What everyone is doing now to get first class data on which new apps are exploding to acquire at a knock down price before anyone else catches on. Facebook with Parse (http://swaggadocio.com/post/60416244109/why-facebook-really-...), and now Amazon.

Yeah, it really is some extremely valuable data. I've always imagined what a goldmine the data Alexa/Compete gather is on up-and-coming websites.

Can anyone see any terms and conditions that apply to Amazon's use of the data returned? The "Program Materials License Agreement" doesn't seem to cover the service as such but the software you a licensing to include in your app to talk to it.

Most of the existing services (Mixpanel, Flurry etc.) give them the right to use aggregate data for their purposes which has put me off using them so I initially sort of rolled my own but never got round to doing the analysis side. I would love to use this if the TOS are OK.

They do (unsurprisingly but annoyingly) have the right to use, access, retain and disclose your data "... and to collect, use, and share aggregated information about Amazon Insights."

I emailed Amazon and they said this:

"The Amazon Insights Schedule in the Distribution and Services Agreement addresses what you are looking for, and can be found here:

https://developer.amazon.com/help/da.html"

Amazon Insights Schedule

The terms of this Schedule apply if you use any of the Program Materials we make available to perform A/B testing and collect and analyze data from your Content (such materials, collectively, the "Amazon Insights API").

1) Amazon Insights. “Amazon Insights” is a collection of services that we make available for you to enable you to perform A/B testing and collect and analyze data from your Apps. You may only use Amazon Insights through the documented interfaces and other features we make available, and you will comply with any velocity, capacity, or other limits we establish for the use of Amazon Insights.

2) Your Data. You are solely responsible for all information and data collected or stored from your Apps using Amazon Insights (“Your Data”). We may use, access, retain, and disclose Your Data in order to provide the Amazon Insights service to you, to enforce the terms of the Agreement, to comply with any request of a governmental or regulatory body (including subpoenas or court orders), and to collect, use, and share aggregated information about Amazon Insights. You give us all permissions we need to exercise these rights.

3) Privacy and Compliance with Laws. Without limiting your obligations under Section 4 of the Agreement, you must (a) ensure Your Data does not include any name, password, other login information, or personally identifiable information or personal data of any end user, (b) provide any necessary notice to, and obtain any necessary consent from, end users for the collection, use, transfer, and storage of Your Data (including by us under this Agreement), and (c) collect, use, transfer, and store Your Data in accordance with any privacy notice you provide and all applicable Laws.

4) Survival. Sections 1 through 3 of this Schedule will survive any termination of the Agreement.

I started looking into it for iOS and making a test app to see what it looked like.

Then I read in the integration instructions: You will also need to add the SystemConfiguration and CoreTelephony frameworks, and libz.dylib library...

From: https://developer.amazon.com/sdk/analytics/documentation/ios...

Why would they need the CoreTelephony framework? No other analytics providers I've used (Flurry, Localytics) require this framework.

More information about the CoreTelephony framework: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Networ...

I'd guess it's to report Carriers, I've seen analytics products do that in the past.

While I'm sure many of us didn't see this coming, it makes perfect sense for someone like Amazon -- with their massive server farms and data structures -- to do something like this.

I wonder if they'll push for more developers to move to Android and their Kindle system somehow.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/08/new-amazon-appstore-incenti...

This had my hopes up for a web analytics competitor to Google. Has anyone found a free service (or relatively cheap) that outperforms Google's offering for web?

http://piwik.org/

Looking at their mobile offering, I would love for Amazon to move into the space. I am curious to know what are you lacking right now in GA that you're looking for another free solution?

http://newrelic.com/ has analytics for web client, mobile client and server side.

https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow <disclaimer: co-founder>

I second SnowPlow; the difference between them and other offerings (like Piwik) is that they don't attempt to be a Google Analytics knockoff, but have a distinct philosophy about how analytics should function.

And there is a library for Arduino!

SnowPlow is the best.

SnowPlow + Looker is a really powerful and flexible combination. [Disclaimer: I work at Looker.]

While this would not work for many people... I log most stuff to a database. I have an admin panel where admin people can perform simple extracts. The extracts can then be crunched by analysts in any way they want. We don't have millions of users, as we are B2B, but it lets the sales guys load the data into an excel template that does what they want. Then they can focus on what people are using and what they should pitch towards. This would probably be a terrible solution for high user apps, but it has worked great for high value low user stuff that I usually deal with.

I'm sure this has been said a million times elsewhere, but boy do I feel like Amazon would benefit from better designers like Google has.

Just tried it out on iOS, and happy with it so far. I'd done extensive research on tools, and one thing that bothered me was lack of updates. For instance, it was tough finding a package that was updated for 64 bit (iphone 5s). Open source is great of course, but not all the tools I needed were available. Will continue with this and see how it goes.

Just checked it out. It's missing funnel tracking, which is a glaring hole for any analytics service.

I'm confused where this can be used. Reading the website it looks like your app needs to be in the amazon marketplate? Or can their analytics engine be used on apps distributed through google play?

The analytics also work on iOS so I presume you can use the Android one on Google Play. It wouldn't make sense to restrict it to Amazon if they also offer an iOS version.

ftfa: A single destination to track your iOS, Amazon and Android apps.

Keep in mind, there are many android app stores out there, not just Google and Amazon. I'm sure you could push any kind of metrics your heart desires, not just Apps.

What someone really needs to launch is an ad network which can target by desktop os, like MacOS, Windows etc. People would use it to sell desktop apps! Sadly I have never found one.

this can already be done.

https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/1211190?hl=...

Note also that most A/B testing networks can be used as defacto Ad Serving/Dynamic content serving because you can target operating systems as well.

Um are you sure we can target MACS specifically and not simply "desktops"? How can we do it exactly?

I'm glad you asked, this was a nuance of the enhanced tracking rollout I hadn't explored yet and thought they had finally changed. :( (I haven't bought ads since the enhanced tracking rollout) I had read about the mobile side but didn't realize they hadn't expanded the desktop side. My bad.

To atone for my error, I did some poking around and found a good summary hack of the display ads network (AdSense) that gives you some options.

http://www.makeitbloom.com/blog/advanced-mobile-targeting-in...

You can also use the retargeting feature in GA to help convert people once they find you. http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2012/07/30/adwords-remarketi...

You can use "device" as a proxy for OS though quite substandard.

A slightly more elegant way to do this is to do a device specific landing page. http://searchengineland.com/new-valuetrack-features-for-enha...

Given Apple's poking at Android, my sense is that Google doesn't have a real interest in helping Mac People find each other. Sorry for leading anyone astray.

It's also really got me wondering why they persist. I'm assuming it's because they'd make more money this way. You pay for "BS" windows clicks, given Apple's 7% OS market share (non mobile). The same way they closed the tablet arbitrage (you now have to pay desktop PPC prices for tablet.I bet if Mac users gained share over windows desktops that would change, like they had to in mobile.

One way to thwart them would seem to be to focus on paying per conversion, and using retargeting. But I'll let others with deeper mac marketing experience than me, add value here.

Hope this helped.

i wonder is it normal practice on mobile to include private key (from the Analytics SDK docs for Android):

InsightsCredentials credentials = AmazonInsights.newCredentials(YOUR_APP_KEY, YOUR_PRIVATE_KEY);

Looks strange. I'd expect that either each app installation to have its own permanent key (most probably some derivative of your key generated at install/download) or, by analogy with the well known system, something like the app/device coming to you for temporary ticket and using it to initialize SDK.

Hey guys, can someone tell me what exactly is an SDK, or rather how do you design one?

Case in point:

Does the Amazon SDK include their source code?

So, let's say if Amazon offers me an SDK that I can install on my servers to capture analytics on my site. So does that mean, that the SDK they provide me with actually contains their whole source code of their analytics platform?

The way I understand SDK's are a local piece of software that runs on your machine to provide you with an API that you can use. Can someone please straighten this poor soul?

Thanks :)

I haven't looked at their SDK yet but it would either come in the form of a compiled library, or uncompiled source code, that (like you said) would give you access to their API within your own project. You do not get the entire source code for their analytics platform, just the part that would let you use it.

It's too bad Amazon doesn't have any analytics for publishers of books on Kindle. The only information you get is the # of copies sold and how much people paid for them on a monthly basis. (You can get daily sales, but those are only available for "month-to-date" so you have to go in every single day to record those value).

It would be nice to know how people found the book, demographics of who's reading them, etc.

Have you looked at AppAnnie? They launched an e-book tracking service recently...

https://www.appannie.com/dashboard/?demo=1&vertical=books

I have a product on Amazon currently. What sellers really want IMO is conversion tracking on Amazon's platform. Even the ability to add your own Google Analytics tracking code would be amazing. This way you can know how many visitors your pages are getting, where they are coming from, and if you buy paid traffic, how that is converting and whether it is worth it. Without this, you're shooting in the dark with marketing spend.

App Annie is great, and I've used it for general analysis, but I think what most sellers want is deeper analytics so that they can track marketing spend with conversions. This is something no third party can do. It'd need to come from Amazon.

Have you tried out Kobo Writing Life? It's for self-published authors that offers much more in the way of analytics than Amazon KDP does.

http://www.kobo.com/writinglife

Another one to make my /etc/hosts along with: www.google-analytics.com google-analytics.com ssl.google-analytics.com statcounter.com www.statcounter.com

Let me know if I missed anything important. :)

Does anyone know how this compares with other offerings?

Are they using anything different from cookies? If so, the results won't be any different from what you get in Google Analytics.

really, I was voted down for this?

For not reading the article before commenting.

Please elaborate. nothing on the article mentions cookies or the technology used to collect this information. Or I am expected to have read the entire set of documentation?

Google Analytics is for websites viewed in browsers. This is distinctly for apps. The tracking is by means of an SDK compiled into your mobile app. They serve entirely different audiences.

Google Analytics is also for mobile apps and has been for a few years. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

I came to the comments looking for a comparison. No such luck.

Well my bad there! Didn't know they had even launched that future. That being said, the Amazon offering seems to be exclusively designed for mobile, instead of an add on to a web property.

How is it better than Google Analytics?

I thought this is something that competes with Google Analytics. Apparently it's for mobile apps and games only.

Feels like an artificial beta restriction to me. Also, it's branded "Amazon Analytics Service", not "Mobile Analytics".

I suspect it's only a matter of time before they branch out and take on GA.

how does this compare to mixpanel or kissmetrics?

This service is free at any usage level according to their faq.

Jesus christ. That sure is a source of mixed feelings.

What are the chances of this being primarily spyware? I am seriously concerned. Is there a Chinese wall mentioned anywhere.

I'm surprised I got downvoted so heavily and that nobody else is concerned about this. Facebook was known for using fb platform data in its app development. Amazon could easily too. I'd rather trust a specialized analytics company rather than a company that's been known to aggressively move into adjacent industries.

Why would it be free? No AWS service started out totally free as this is.

I think this is mostly targeting people already using Amazon apps and services. I doubt we will see widespread adoption - there are so many analytics apps already, and practically all of them enable mobile tracking. Enterprises like to use the same analytics platform across everything so they don't need to maintain staff and contracts with multiple vendors.

With that said, a reason Google Analytics is free is because it let's Google track users once they leave Google and enter web-sites. Or at least Google could, by using co-relating users to search clicks. They aren't involved in the space out of the pure kindness of their hearts, and Google Analytics doubtlessly loses lots of money every quarter for Google.

"I'd rather trust a specialized analytics company" - don't. If you can, own your own data on your own server. Otherwise you will need to rent your data from your vendor constantly, or pay for a data migration process later, or pay for a data warehouse and a means to explore it.

I'm paying $150/month for mixpanel and that's their lowest paid plan. The switch is a no brainer if Amazon can feature match funnels, retention, and activity.

I saw a presentation by a company that seems to have a similar focus at recent meetup in new york: http://www.indicative.com

Their website claims (cutting out the marketing) ... to empower all web and mobile businesses to make smarter, data-driven decisions. ... tools that help startups and small businesses learn from their data and improve their performance.

That's your idea of "cutting out the marketing"?

Javascript required for the information light webpage.

"FEES

At any time, Indicative retains the right, upon any notice required by applicable law, to impose or alter the fees for the Service. Such changes will be effective immediately upon posting on our Website."

This is the killer for me at the moment, don't want to integrate with something and then find out the price and have to stop without warning or have to test client behaviour if the server goes away.

Free for startups is stated but I can't see anything visible explaining who qualifies or what paid might look like.

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