Useful but flawed product
February 28, 2017
Useful but flawed product
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Growth
Overall Satisfaction with Mixpanel
We use Mixpanel data across the entire organization, although the primary users are the product management team and our CEO. Making data-based decisions is a core concept of the company, so every data point is of vital importance to the company. We use Mixpanel to determine if and when users are engaging with our products, as well as optimizing conversion funnels and seeing essential drop-off points.
- Tracking all events that happen on your website on a personal level. The closest analogy that people tend to make is with Google Analytics, but while GA lets you see how users behave in aggregate, Mixpanel lets you track how individuals behave.
- Easy funnel and A/B testing tracking - again, much easier than with Google. Must faster to integrate new events and change tracking funnels.
- Segmentation - it's easy to segment out and see how subsegments of users behave (e.g. users which came from our website from a specific traffic source).
- Mixpanel has issues differentiating between 'real' and 'spam' clicks sometimes, registering bot behavior as if it were the behavior of real users.
- You can't clone funnels to make minor changes.
- It's not easy to compare two different funnels to one another.
- It's sometimes slow and unpredictable.
- There are occasional bugs where the date ranges selected show one thing, but the data you're looking at is for a different date range.
- We've been able to increase the funnel conversions of one of our new product funnels from a 1% conversion rate to a 5% conversion rate.
- We've been able to increase the CTR on another of our main product pages from ~3% to ~10% (so far)
- We've been able to segment out how users from different traffic sources behave, allowing us to eliminate thousands of dollars of wasteful spending on advertising campaigns that weren't working.
- Full Story and Google Analytics
Haven't used any direct competitors at the moment as they didn't exist when we first started using MP. That said, it looks like there are a lot of new up-and-coming tools which will be able to do certain things better than mixpanel - if not all of them. Examples include Hotjar, FullStory, and potentially some home-built tools which will funnel data into a centralized data warehouse we can query with SQL. Not being able to use SQL in Mixpanel is a HUGE detriment and could serve as a key reason for dropping the product as soon as a viable alternative appears.