Intro to Mixpanel

Intro to MixpanelOr, how can I understand what my users are doing?

Gilman Tolle CTO & Co-Founder of Boon+Gable

500 Startups Batch 9 [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Answer 3 Questions

• How many?

• How good?

• How often?

But first, some background…

How It Works

User

Your App or Site

Mixpanel Client

View or Tap or Click

Your Backend ServerDo Stuff

Mixpanel Server

Track EventYou!

Send Event

Admin

Analytics

Internet

Events

Viewed Home ScreenStarted Signup

Signed UpSent Message

Events

Read MessageSent Message

Viewed ContactsViewed Conversation

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Boon+Gable Project

Events and Devices



Events



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Boon+Gable Project

Events and People



Gilman Tolle

Events People



Diane Loviglio

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Boon+Gable Project

Basic Setup

Define Your Events

• You are responsible for defining and naming your own events.

• Name them wisely.

• Cause you can’t change them.

• Ever.

Naming Guidelines

• Use human-friendly names! (e.g. “Signed Up”, not “user_signup_192xq”)

• Think “what action did the user take that triggered this event?”. Name it that.

Naming Guidelines• Start with 5 core events:

• Acquisition: Viewed Home Screen

• Activation: Signed Up

• Retention: Sent a Message (or as appropriate)

• Revenue: Booked a Session (or as appropriate)

• Referral: Sent an Invite

Naming Guidelines• Then flesh out your funnels with more detailed events

over time, once you trust the data on the core events.

• (e.g. Viewed Invite Screen -> did they find the screen at all, then what % actually invited?)

• (or Signed Up then Added Profile Info then … what % dropped off in the signup flow?)

• Go slowly. Build it up. Don’t just dump in a bunch of crap events up front that you’ll see forever.

Implementation• Ask your developer to add code to send the

right events at the right time.

• It’s easy:

• mixpanel.track(“Signed Up”)

• [[Mixpanel sharedInstance] track:@“Signed Up”]

• I have more developer details afterwards.

Implementation• There’s one additional step to link your events to people.

• When a user first signs up, call “alias” to tell Mixpanel about your internal database ID number for that user.

• Then, send that user’s data (name, email, phone, etc) to Mixpanel.

• Every event sent after that will be linked to the person, and every event before the “alias” call (e.g. home page view) will be linked too.

• And, every page view or app launch after that, as long as the user is signed in, send your user’s data to Mixpanel again to keep it up to date.

Live View

• The way to test your Mixpanel setup

• Watch the real-time event stream

• Go through a user flow and watch the live view to make sure your app is sending the events you expect

Demo

Analytics

Answer 3 Questions

• How many?

• How good?

• How often?

How many?

• Use the Segmentation page

• See how many times each event happened

• Pick your time range

• Daily/Weekly/Monthly totals

• Total count vs unique count per user session

Demo

How good?• Use the Funnels page

• Create simple 2 or 3-step funnels to understand…

• What % of people who did event X then went on to do event Y in the future?

• E.g. what % of people who saw the homepage actually signed up?

• See your conversion rate improve or drop over time and judge how good your app is becoming

Demo

How often?• Use the Retention page

• Of the people who did event X on a certain day, what % came back and did it again a day later, two days later, three days later, etc?

• Can be tricky to understand (cohort analysis)

• Obviously more useful if your app is retention-driven (games, messaging, media)

Demo

Bonus Question: Who?

• Use the People tab

• See the full history of events done by a person

• Send them emails and pushes and SMS

• Ask them questions in-app with surveys

Events and People



Gilman Tolle

Events People



Diane Loviglio

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Demo

Next-Level Mixpanel: Group By Properties

Get More Detail

• How many? - but grouped by where they clicked through from initially, where in the country they are, what gender they are, etc.

• How good? - but see which groups have a higher % conversion rate

• How often? - but see which groups have a higher % retention rate

Group By



Events



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Group By

Viewed Home Screen8:05p

Viewed Home Screen8:14p

Events5/2/2015

Group By

Viewed Home Screen Initial Referring Domain = facebook.com

City = San Francisco utm_campaign=newsfeed_mar2015

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Viewed Home Screen Initial Referring Domain = mail.google.com

City = New York

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Events5/2/2015

http://facebook.com

http://mail.google.com

Group By



Events



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Viewed Home Screen1 from Facebook 1 from Google

Signup Funnel100% from Facebook 0% from Google

Demo

Group By• You can add your own custom properties to events as well.

For example, when you track the ‘Sent Invite’ event, define a property called ‘Invite Channel’ that can be ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’, ‘Text’, or ‘Email’. Then you can group by it.

• If you want to automatically add the same property to every event you send, you can set them as “super properties” instead.

• This is good for storing user-level data like gender or name or role, so you can group events by it and see it in the live view.

Group People By

• People have their own separate properties too (e.g. gender, role, how many times the user sent an invite, etc).

Group People By



Gilman Tolle Gender=male

Events People



Diane Loviglio Gender=female

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Group People By

• Can group by those properties as well when sending out notifications, emails, etc. to subsets of your user list.

Demo

Group People By• Event properties and people properties are

different.

• If it’s just a people property, you can’t segment events by it on Segmentation, Funnels, and Retention.

• So, consider setting your people properties as event super properties too, so they’re available both places.

Answer 3 Questions

• How many?

• How good?

• How often?

Thanks! Any questions?

Gilman Tolle CTO & Co-Founder of Boon+Gable

500 Startups Batch 9 [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Developer’s Corner

Identifying Your Users• Properly linking your Events to People is easy to

mess up.

• It all comes back to the fact that Mixpanel built Events first, then glued People on later.

• You need to correctly associate their pre-sign-up activities (Viewed Home Page) to their post-sign-up activities (Signed Up, Booked a Session) or else your funnels will be broken.

Why?• Mixpanel starts by assigning a random “distinct id” to each

session using a browser cookie on the web or a uuid in app storage. It’s device-specific.

• But once a user signs up, you now have a real unique ID from your database that is the same no matter what device they use.

• You need to use the database ID going forward so you don’t get duplicate users just by using 2 devices.

• But first you need to alias the database ID to the original random “distinct id” so Mixpanel knows the events go together.

iOS• When the user signs up, alias then identify:

• Mixpanel *mixpanel = [Mixpanel sharedInstance];User *currentUser = [UserStore sharedStore].currentUser;[mixpanel createAlias:currentUser.id forDistinctID:mixpanel.distinctId];[mixpanel identify:currentUser.id]; [mixpanel.people set:@{@"$name": currentUser.name, …}];[mixpanel registerSuperProperties:@{@"Name": currentUser.name, …}];

• Whenever the app checks credentials with the server and downloads the user data (after launch, after login, etc), just identify:

• Mixpanel *mixpanel = [Mixpanel sharedInstance];User *currentUser = [UserStore sharedStore].currentUser;[mixpanel identify:currentUser.id]; [mixpanel.people set:@{@"$name": currentUser.name, …}];[mixpanel registerSuperProperties:@{@"Name": currentUser.name, …}];

Javascript• When the user signs up, alias then identify.

• On every page view (or at least every login), just identify.

• <% if flash[:just_created] %> <%= content_for :ready do %> mixpanel.alias("<%= current_user.id %>"); <% end %> <% end %> <%= content_for :ready do %> mixpanel.identify("<%= current_user.id %>"); mixpanel.people.set({ $name: '<%= current_user.name %>', ... })mixpanel.register({ name: '<%= current_user.name %>', ... })<% end %>

Other Useful Tricks• Create 2 projects: a production project and a dev

project

• Use the production project token in production, and the dev token project token in development or on the iOS simulator.

• #if TARGET_IPHONE_SIMULATOR

• That way you don’t pollute your real analytics with all your development and testing.

Other Useful Tricks

• On iOS, events flush every 60 seconds by default. That makes testing and setup slow.

• In the simulator:

• [Mixpanel sharedInstance].flushInterval = 1;

Other Useful Tricks• On the web, use the Mixpanel Javascript library.

• On iOS or Android, use the native library.

• Think hard before you decide to use the Ruby/Python/etc backend library.

• The client-side libraries capture a bunch of useful data for you automatically (location, referrer, device type, etc). The backend libraries don’t.

Technology

Intro to Mixpanel