If you’re a business that wants to gain deeper insight into how users engage across web, mobile, and app, Mixpanel could be just the tool you’re looking for.
With more than 6,000 paying clients including Uber, GoDaddy, and Buzzfeed, the platform focuses on product analytics, providing data that can be layered on top of other analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics, for a better understanding of user interactions.
What is Mixpanel?
When people talk about analytics tools the conversation usually starts with Google Analytics. Mixpanel is not a replacement for Google Analytics, but instead, an additional tool for your analytics arsenal. While platforms like Google Analytics or Kissmetrics show you aggregate information about your users, Mixpanel gives you much more data about website visitors and customers.
Mixpanel is primarily a product analytics platform, designed to give marketers and product teams insights into how to best acquire, convert, and retain customers, with real-time data across devices and channels.
Mixpanel has inbuilt features which allow for tracking of users through the product to understand what users do at specific points in their user journey, which page or feature they drop off on, and whether specific features perform better than others, across any type of digital channel or device.
Mixpanel provides a free version of its platform, has a startup programme, and also offers access to demo reports and dashboards, so there is plenty of scope to explore whether it’s a good fit for your brand without any upfront commitment.
It also integrates with a number of other platforms via its Technology Partners.
How does Mixpanel work?
Mixpanel works by reporting on data points triggered by users performing specific tasks across web, mobile, and app.
While the reports and dashboards are fairly straightforward, setting up Mixpanel does require some technical knowledge. You’ll most likely need an engineering or development team to help implement the tracking code and assist with setting up events. The event-based model is built on three key concepts: Events, Users, and Properties.
Event: A data point that represents an interaction, for example, a sign up or purchase (think about the sort of goals you already track).
Users: Unlike Google Analytics, Mixpanel can identify specific individuals and pair this with Event data for each unique ID.
Properties: There are two types of Properties – Event Property, which is used for Event descriptors (i.e. an item type and item price), and User Property, which can be used to provide details about a user, such as age, user name, or their most frequently purchased item.
What can Mixpanel do?
The metrics that businesses want to track vary from industry to industry, and even by department. Mixpanel is highly flexible, and allows for multiple dashboards to be created, so different teams can access the KPIs that are most important to them at a glance.
With Mixpanel, it is possible to measure every step users take towards conversion, and how they engage with your product.
This includes user events like filling out a form, viewing content related to a specific topic, or installing an app, as well as in-app behaviours, such as likes, sending messages, applying discount codes, or adding items to a basket.
The Insights Report can tell marketers how a product is being used. This includes seeing data on things like how popular certain features are, how many users are signing up, how many of them are monthly active users, how they are finding your product, where they are based geographically, how long it takes to complete a desired action, how much they are spending, and total revenue.
The Funnels Report and the Flows Report enable marketers to analyse user actions at each step of the funnel, and the paths they take, to identify when and why users may be dropping out. This can help inform design and UX decisions by zeroing in on these pain points, and testing ways to reduce friction.
Finally, the Retention Report can show how many users come back (for example, after signing up or making a purchase), what percentage of users are lost, whether users who perform certain actions are more likely to return, and which channels promote the best retention.
How can I start using Mixpanel?
You can sign up for a free account here, which will provide access to basic features, and if you’re a startup that is less than 5 years old with up to $8M in total funding, you can receive $50,000 in credits towards the Mixpanel Growth plan to get you started.
