A little work early on goes a LONG way with Mixpanel.
July 09, 2019
A little work early on goes a LONG way with Mixpanel.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Modules Used
- Engagement Plans
- People Plans
Overall Satisfaction with Mixpanel
Mixpanel is primarily used by the product team to improve our funnel conversions and discover different user flows/paths. Furthermore, Mixpanel gives us the ability to run more sophisticated cohort analyses to determine the impact of features depending on when users interacted with our site. Their retention graphs naturally flow into these analyses.
Pros
- Mixpanel's ease of use is easily their best feature, allowing you to quickly create graphs with a few point and clicks. Their UI is also fairly snappy and well-designed.
- Tying together events with user attributes allows you to properly segment users into cohorts which can then be tracked individually. Proper segmentation is where most analytics solutions earn their keep.
- Live view is a nice perk that gives you a good feel for who's on your site and what they're doing at any single point in time. This can be further filtered to focus on particular events of interest.
- Mixpanel has flexible plans that work for smaller startups as well.
- Their documentation is top notch.
Cons
- Mixpanel requires an explicit setting of events from your app. This means you need to be very thoughtful in the design of your events because missing one means you aren't collecting any data from it. Inserting it into the process later on then brings challenges in tracking when certain events came online.
- A tool like Mixpanel comes packed with features that sometimes are harder to discover. It's very easy to get sucked into one part of its toolset and not be aware of other tools which may be very useful.
- Mixpanel has forced us to be more deliberate with how we record events and integrate metrics into the development process, speeding up our user feedback loop.
- We're now just getting started with more targeted messaging that allows us to reach customers at inflection points. For example, Mixpanel allows you to target users that are having issues moving through a funnel.
- Heap, FullStory and Google Analytics
Mixpanel does what it does very well. We sometimes don't see it as the only tool in the arsenal. When combined with other solutions, we get a more complete picture. It also allows us to validate data across different tools.
While Heap isn't as simple as Mixpanel, its major advantage is that it allows for the retroactive setting of events through either a graphical tool or through HTML/CSS attributes. This can be very handy!
FullStory comes at it from the recorded user sessions angle, which is very powerful. While FullStory has basic funnel functionality, it doesn't approach Mixpanel yet in terms of cohort analyses.
Google Analytics is the more general purpose tool for analytics, but it doesn't have the ease of use that Mixpanel has, nor its robust messaging capabilities.
While Heap isn't as simple as Mixpanel, its major advantage is that it allows for the retroactive setting of events through either a graphical tool or through HTML/CSS attributes. This can be very handy!
FullStory comes at it from the recorded user sessions angle, which is very powerful. While FullStory has basic funnel functionality, it doesn't approach Mixpanel yet in terms of cohort analyses.
Google Analytics is the more general purpose tool for analytics, but it doesn't have the ease of use that Mixpanel has, nor its robust messaging capabilities.
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