As businesses grow, customer education serves as a crucial strategy for driving product adoption. However, measuring the success of education programs in terms of product usage and customer retention can be challenging.
In a recent webinar, Lisa Rothrauff, Senior Director of Customer and Partner Education at Amplitude, shared practical approaches to assess education’s impact on adoption, renewals, and retention. Here’s what we learned:
Product Adoption Matters
Product adoption is more than just a metric—it’s a leading indicator of customer success, retention, and long-term growth. When customers engage deeply with your product, they extract more value and strengthen their commitment, increasing the likelihood of future renewals, expansions, and long-term loyalty. Adoption is about empowering your customers to realize the true value of your product, and unlock growth opportunities for them and your business.
Customer education plays a pivotal role in accelerating adoption by teaching users how to use the product effectively and reducing time-to-value. Well-designed education programs help customers address challenges, engage with critical features, and explore advanced functionalities—bridging the gap between product purchase and sustained usage. The more customers know and experience the value of your product, the more likely they are to stay, grow, and advocate for it.
Know Which Metrics to Track
When setting goals for your education program, start by aligning with the top-line metrics that your leaders care most about. Lisa encourages taking a backward approach: identify the end goal—increased product usage—and work backward to determine how education can support those objectives.
Having a big-picture goal is only the first step. Success lies in knowing how to achieve it and identifying the right metrics to track along the way. Your education program has the potential to influence user behavior, but tracking the right data is essential to demonstrate its value and impact.
But what exactly should we be tracking? Lisa outlined the metrics we should care about:
- Weekly Active Users (WAUs) and Monthly Active Users (MAUs): Track who is actively using the product and how frequently they engage.some text
- In addition: Who are they? What segment are they coming from? What juncture are they at in the customer journey? What’s their frequency?
- Academy Engagement: Identify customers who are engaging with the education platform—how many are new vs. returning users?some text
- In addition: Start to track the difference in behavior of trained vs. untrained users. Notice the frequency in which your trained users are connected to healthy, renewing accounts. A bigger story can be told when you connect your education data to your CRM data, which we’ll get to next.
- Course Enrollment vs. Product Usage: What percentage of customers are completing key courses? Are those who completed key courses using the product more effectively?some text
- In addition: Start to understand which courses are the least and most popular and how the engagement rates differ.
Connect Education Data with Business Systems
Looking at the raw, standalone data is great, but to better understand the correlation between education and product adoption as a path to account renewal, it’s essential to integrate data across systems.
Lisa shared a few tips for how to do this:
1. Ask if your learning management system (LMS) integrates with your CRM.
The ability to map your education data set to your to account health and retention metrics can guide your impact analysis and tell a greater story.
Explore further: Start to examine trend data. Notice if there’s a correlation between ARR and logo retention between a trained customer and the renewal number. Generally, people who are trained are invested in their own growth and understanding of your product. If they’re spending the time doing that, they’re spending time learning how to use your product well.
2. Use data analytics tools.
This will allow you to track granular behaviors, such as how quickly customers use specific features after completing courses.
Explore further: A business intelligence (BI) tool (such as Tableau or Power BI) can help you visualize data across systems to reveal trends between training activity and business metrics—the things your leadership cares about.
3. Collaborate with product and customer success teams.
Partnering with these teams can help you identify the personas and usage patterns most impacted by education programs.
Explore further: Using a customer success or health platform, you can highlight customers at risk of churn, which informs where and when you can provide targeted education to help them find value in the product earlier in their journey. By focusing on specific personas and usage moments, you can deliver the right content at the right time.
Data Leading to Action
Once you have the right data in place, you have to ask yourself, “What questions can I ask and how can I act on it?”
For Lisa, the two most important questions that lead to action are:
- How can education be used to encourage earlier and more frequent product usage?
- Which channels are most effective at bringing customers into the academy and driving course engagement?
The answers to these questions can drive deeper analysis to assess your program's impact. Lisa emphasizes the importance of experimenting with new content formats based on what the data reveals and using initial findings as a baseline to refine and iterate on your strategy.
For example, if only a small percentage of customers are engaging with a particular toolkit, explore whether the timing, format, or messaging can be improved, or if a different channel (e.g., YouTube, Help Center) should be used. Your goal should be to determine where people are coming from and how to get them into your academy and consume your courses.
Education is a Lever for Growth
It’s no question that customer education is a powerful tool for fostering product adoption, retention, and account growth. By tracking key engagement metrics, connecting data across platforms, and working closely with product and success teams, you can measure the impact of your efforts and continuously improve your programs.
Remember: the key is not just collecting data, but acting on it. Use insights to adjust your strategy, experiment with new approaches, and build programs that drive meaningful outcomes for both your customers and your business.
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