"Product analytics" wasn't a category when Amplitude launched in 2012. The analytics market was crowded with tools built for marketers to measure traffic, funnels, and acquisition. Product teams had no shared language or frameworks for improvement. "At the time, most people were talking about user acquisition and not much about retention," said Aditya Vempaty, Amplitude's former Head of Marketing.
To define the new category and educate the market, Amplitude leaned heavily into content. And as the small San Francisco startup grew — eventually going public in 2021 — content became one of its most powerful levers to scale acquisition and influence complex, multi-stakeholder buying decisions at the enterprise level.
From 2015 to 2025, Animalz served as Amplitude's partner on its content program. Over that decade, organic traffic grew from roughly 7,000 to 150,000 monthly visits. Revenue climbed from $167.3M in FY2021 to $299.3M in FY2024. As the company and market evolved, no single strategy was enough to drive continuous growth. Together, Amplitude and Animalz had to constantly learn, adapt, and innovate.
Over the decade, the content program moved through five stages, each demanding a different kind of content: inventing the language of a new category, earning an audience beyond search, defending the compounding asset of organic rankings, speaking as a peer to enterprise buyers, and finally becoming part of the team.
Chapter 1: Invent the Language
When Amplitude started working with Animalz in 2015, it was building a platform for product teams, but those teams were far from ready to buy. Category creation is one of the hardest marketing challenges a startup can face. You have to introduce your target market to a new way of thinking about and working on a problem they may not yet know they have. At the time, "analytics" meant traffic reports, conversion funnels, and acquisition metrics, not retention, which was tracked at a high level but not deeply understood. Nobody was googling "best platform for product analytics."
So Animalz built SEO content around the questions product teams were already asking: Why do users churn? How do cohorts behave? What does month-over-month growth actually tell you?
Each piece was built to create urgency by giving product teams the vocabulary to articulate a problem they hadn't been able to name, and the financial argument to justify fixing it. For example, we framed retention in financial terms: lose 80% of your daily active users within the first three days and you've thrown away $8,000 of every $10,000 you spent acquiring them. That piece "got everyone's attention on how retention matters and thinking about how to solve for it," Aditya said.
Amplitude went from no content to publishing three posts a week, each one crafted for the specific way product managers thought about their work. "That really made the difference in accelerating our ranking and growth and getting inbound leads," said Aditya.
That pace only worked because the content was right, not just frequent — and getting it right meant understanding product analytics as well as the people Amplitude was selling to. "With any vendor in the SEO content space, you need to get them on board and educate them on what your industry needs," said Aditya. "And that's what Animalz did a phenomenal job on."
Chapter 2: Earn the Audience
Amplitude built domain authority through SEO content targeting existing search demand. In the first couple of years of the relationship, we also looked for alternative distribution methods to get new ideas out that people weren't yet searching for.
Animalz created timely, culturally relevant pieces that could spread through social sharing. A post tied to Beyoncé's surprise album drop helped Amplitude reach audiences far outside its immediate market. As Aditya put it, these were "more like snack pieces, but that helped build credibility of Amplitude and get distribution going."
Animalz didn't rely solely on owned channels either. In 2016, Animalz founder Walter Chen included a link to an Amplitude blog post in a column he wrote for Inc. about how small businesses were using Pokémon GO. When the column went viral, it drove traffic to the post.
In parallel, the SEO foundation launched in chapter one started to pay off. Animalz-crafted articles on cohort analysis, month-over-month growth, and product analytics climbed to the top of Google and stayed there. A deep dive into mobile analytics put Amplitude above legacy players who were moving into the nascent product analytics space.
Content also helped land deals. Retention frameworks and research reports gave sales teams something credible to put in front of skeptical buyers. In the 16 months between May 2020 and September 2021, Amplitude's revenue grew by 400%.
Chapter 3: Defend the Compounding Asset
Content decays as information ages and search intent shifts, and the traffic stakes are steep: slipping from position 1 to 2 can cost half a page's traffic, and falling to 6 can wipe out 90% of it. Defending a ranking is often worth as much as winning a new one.
Over the years, Animalz worked to maintain earlier SEO gains. We consistently refreshed and expanded high-performing pieces that had gone out of date or were losing ground to fresher competing content, and re-angled those that had never quite found the right search intent.
An article on causation vs. correlation drew between 7,000 and 14,000 monthly visits across a four-year window, steadily expanding the number of keywords where it ranked in the top three. An article on leading and lagging indicators now ranks at position 1 or 2 across more than 20 keyword variants.
Organic traffic to amplitude.com grew from ~7,000 monthly visits in 2015 to over 150,000 by the end of 2024.
Chapter 4: Speak as a Peer
By the time Amplitude went public in 2021, the content problem had changed entirely. More companies were publishing similar content. SEO alone was no longer a reliable differentiator.
The foundational posts had done their job. Buyers had read them, absorbed the category, and understood what product analytics was and why it mattered. The category was established, budget existed for it. As Amplitude pushed into enterprise, sales teams needed content built for longer cycles and larger buying committees: pieces that could move deals involving five stakeholders over six months, not a single champion in a week.
Animalz worked with subject matter experts across Amplitude to ghostwrite pieces that turned internal thinking into opinionated content that positioned Amplitude leaders as experts and differentiated the company from competitors.
That content put Amplitude's leaders into the conversations enterprises were already having internally. As Amplitude built its reputation as an authoritative voice on PLG strategy, data maturity, and organizational decision-making, it became a more compelling platform for evaluating larger, broader investments.
Deals that might once have been scoped around a single use case could now expand across an organization. A post we worked on with Elena Verna, then Amplitude's VP of Growth, on product-led growth, "Not All B2B Companies Should Be Doing Product-Led Growth," even made it onto the recommended reading list at Harvard Business School.
Chapter 5: Become Part of the Team
As output scaled, so did operational complexity. More stakeholders meant more competing priorities, more contributors, more pieces in flight.
Animalz responded by embedding one team member, Victoria, in Amplitude's marketing organization. She managed day-to-day production, connected teams, and cleared the bottlenecks that a larger org inevitably creates. It worked so well that Amplitude eventually hired her full-time (with Animalz's blessing!).
As Amplitude built out their own internal content team, the systems and practices developed through the partnership with Animalz gave them the foundation to sustain the program themselves.
Today, Amplitude is a recognized name in product and digital analytics, with a reputation built around product-led growth, experimentation, and data strategy. At the time of writing, the once non-existent content engine averages 200k organic visits a month.
The Right Way for a Partnership to End
There's an unusual detail at the end of this story: it ends. Amplitude hired the Animalz team member we embedded in their marketing org. They built an internal content function on the systems the partnership developed. Today, they run the engine themselves.
On an agency P&L, that reads as a lost account. We'd argue it's the strongest proof in this case study. A decade of work left behind a category Amplitude leads, a content engine drawing 200,000 organic visits a month, and a team that knows exactly how to run it. Partnerships that end this way also leave their mark on the agency: ten years inside Amplitude's growth is a big part of how Animalz learned to operate inside the stakeholder complexity of an enterprise.
We'd happily start that arc over with you. If you're inventing a category, scaling past your first content playbook, or somewhere stuck in between, let's talk.
Want to hear more from Aditya? He's a guest on our enterprise content podcast season, Breaking Down the Walls of Enterprise Content Marketing, in the episode Borrowed Authority: Partnerships That Multiply Reach.