A comprehensive guide to user behavioral analytics

Copyright © 2019 ONE BCG. All rights reserved.
Mixpanel - User Behavior Analytics

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• Mixpanel - Introduction
• Key Features
• How Mixpanel works
• Competition Analysis
• Real-life Examples and Demo
• Pricing
Table of Contents

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• Mixpanel is a business analytics service company. Mixpanel is used to track user
interactions with web and mobile applications, along with providing tools for targeted
communication with them.
• Founded in 2009 by Suhail Joshi and Tim Trefren, based in San Francisco, California.
• Current CEO: Amir Movafaghi.
About Mixpanel

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• Events
• Event Properties
• People Profiles
• Behavioral Analytics
Essential Terms to be Familiar With:

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1. Events: are the actions that users take in your app or website. Common actions
that could be translated into events are: signing up for your product,
downloading a PDF and becoming a paid customer, or even tracing mouse click
and cursor through heat maps - which can be done through integration with
ClickTale.
2. Properties: go along with events (or actions) to provide more information about
any event. For example, our sign up event could include the following properties:
first name, last name, email, time and date of the action and location like
country, city, and region. You can create your own properties plus Mixpanel also
tracks several properties by default.

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3. Profiles: These are also called “users”. Profiles are how you can attach events to a
specific user and then view their activity instead of looking at only the anonymous
activity (such as Google Analytics).
4. Behavioral Analytics: Behavioral analytics is an advancement in business
analytics that reveals new insights into the behavior of consumers on eCommerce
platforms, online games, web and mobile applications, and Internet of things.

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Key Features
● Segment and Visualize
Data -
Compare data with
previous years and break
down information by
week, browser, device or
any other segment.

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Key features (contd.)
Alexa
alexa123@gmail.com
● Get the complete picture of
every user -
People use your product
anonymously, from different
platforms, and sign in and out
of their account, which makes
tracking very complicated -
but Mixpanel helps against it.

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Key Features (contd.)
● Predict who can be a more likely
conversion -
With Mixpanel’s predictive
analytics model, a surface in
which users are likely (or unlikely)
to act based on past behaviors.

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● Detect anomalies and
React Quickly -
Get notified immediately
when important metrics
and KPIs alter
unexpectedly, along with
the users causing the
change, so you can take
action right away.

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• Mobile A/B Testing - Improve your apps by quickly testing new experiments side by
side and identify which UI gives the best results: other substantial aspects can also
be tests, eg speed of the animation.

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• User Analytics Infrastructure
● Embed Mixpanel into any Tech Stack -
Mixpanel allows to take advantage of 30+ integrations to get full value out of
user analytics. You can bring data into Mixpanel for deeper analysis, or send it
elsewhere to share the power of Mixpanel across your organization.

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Other Major Features Include:
• Granular Behavioral Targeting
• Message Engagement Analytics
• Flows: Visualize how users explore your products and website.
• Funnels: Monitor and improve conversion rates.

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• Flexible Delivery Options: Apart from all discussed features you can even measure
how messages influenced your metrics (through funnels and flows) see exactly what
happens after sending a message or running a test, to clearly understand the impact.

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Key Features (contd. - Messages)
• Web In-App Message
• iOS Push Notifications & In-App Message
• Android Push Notifications & In-App Message
• Email
• SMS
• Webhooks

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1. Web In-App Message- send messages to users browsing your website.
2. iOS Push Notifications-send iOS push notifications through the Apple Push Notification service.
3. Android Push Notifications- enable to configure an Android app to send and receive push notifications.
4. Mixpanel has also built hybrid apps for both the interfaces
a. Email-Mixpanel allows you to tie data to a specific user, creating a profile. This is where you store
things like their email address, location or their age.
b. SMS-Mixpanel allows you to send up to 1,000 SMS/month at no additional cost and save phone
numbers
5. Webhooks- provide other applications real-time information.
● A webhook delivers data to other applications as it happens, meaning you get data immediately.
● eg: Webhooks allow you to notify yourself whenever a user first matches your campaign criteria.

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Mixpanel is an event-centric program where tracking is not automated and is based on
events. Mixpanel is used to track events, create sales funnels and see trends.
How Mixpanel Works

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User Interface Design
• User interface- Graphical layout of the
application
• Buttons, images, text, sliders, text entry
fields
• Visual elements
• Ensure attractive and visually stimulating
interface

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UX Design
• User experience - interaction with the application
• Working of the interface
• Ensures easy navigation, proper functionality, and
structure of the interface

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API Integration (Application programming interface)
• JavaScript- tracking, deleting existing data,
tracking website links, sending events, managing
user identity, storing user profiles, etc.
• Python, Ruby & PHP- used for scripting, direct
interaction of the user with a web application or a
mobile device.

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• iOS Swift & Android Java: Easiest way to get Mixpanel into
your iOS and Android apps.
• Mixpanel also has hybrid apps for both interfaces.
• Java -used in deep back-end and embedded applications.
Libraries offer platform-specific features and make
implementations simpler, and can scale naturally to an
unlimited number of clients.

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• Node.js - for server-side based tracking
• HTTP - for event-based tracking
• JQL- Data analytics

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JQL comes with a console so you can easily write, run, save, and edit queries at
your company.
Instead of seeing a stream of data in a terminal window, you can easily export the
data to a CSV file to visualize the data quickly in a spreadsheet.

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Tracking First-Time Users
• External Database: List of each distinct ID
• Check if the ID exists already in the list of users
appeared previously
• Setting a property value
• In Funnels, view how first-time users convert through
a specified set of actions on your site or app.

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1. In Funnels, view how
first-time users
convert through a
specified set of
actions on your site or
app.
2. How many people
visited the - landing
page, clickout page
etc.

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● A cohort is a group of users
who share a certain set of
properties or have performed
a particular combination or
frequency of events.
● Once a cohort is created in a
project, it can be used to
group and filter data for
granular analysis.

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Segmentation
1. Mixpanel's Segmentation
report, which allows you
to filter and segment
your events based on
their properties.
2. This is useful for
understanding how
different user segments
behave, and what trends
look like over time.

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Quickly make changes to fix what’s causing the drop (or adjust your ad budget to capture
the spike in interest).

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Retention
1. The Mixpanel Retention report
allows you to understand how often
your customers return and engage
with your application.
2. Retention report - How many users
are returning over time to perform
actions within a product.
3. How loyal is the user base?

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Distinct ID Creation
• It is a random, unique, 54-60 character hash, and is stored in a cookie.
• Distinct_id is sent with each event to determine which customer sent the event.
• JavaScript: The JS library will automatically issue a distinct_id to each user that
loads the library.
• The cookie is specific to the domain, browser, computer and instance of Mixpanel
(project).

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Alias And Identify On Existing Users
• New user signs up, call
mixpanel.alias
("YOUR_USER_ID") once.
• A user logs in, call
mixpanel.identify
("YOUR_USER_ID").

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1. Use mixpanel.alias() and mixpanel.identify() methods to keep the identity of your
users consistent throughout their interactions in your site or app.
2. The primary purpose of calling mixpanel.alias() is to connect a user’s anonymous
events from before a signup event with his post-signup activity on your site or in
your app (i.e., linking the user’s previous identifier to a new identifier)
3. Since there is no concept of a previous identifier or anonymous events for already
registered users, you do not need to alias existing users. You can simply identify
them with the Mixpanel identify method
4. For example, aliasing by email address means that the end-user’s distinct_id will be
connected to the end user’s email address.
5. Alias method maps a new ID from your end like username email or internal ID to the
distinct ID .

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User Profiles
• Identify users with Mixpanel’s identify call:
mixpanel.identify();
• Set People profiles with Mixpanel’s people
set call: mixpanel.people.set();
• Mixpanel adds the user name and address
to the user’s profile.

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Music finder/spotify
Eg of a demo application - music finder, developed by Mixpanel, for better understanding of its features and how
mixpanel works.
Demo: https://mixpanel.com/report/1969317/predict#learn

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Competititor Analysis
Flurry Analytics specializes
in mobile analytics,
monetization and
advertising...
Kissmetrics is a customer
engagement automation
platform...
An online marketing and
web analytics unit in Orem,
Utah; acquired by Adobe in
2009...

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• Events
• Real-time Tracking
• Funnels
• Retention
• Segmentation and Reporting
Comparing Mixpanel with Google Analytics

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• Events: Mixpanel events are easier to understand, are more flexible, and simpler to report on. GA’s
segmentation and analysis are very strong.
• Real-time tracking: Mixpanel offers real-time data collection and reporting. Google Analytics reporting
tends to lag by about an hour.
• Funnels: Mixpanel includes funnel analysis: It allows you to analyze visitor (not visit) flows retroactively,
specify the details of each step and then segment the report, complete with trends and the time between
each step.
• Retention: Mixpanel offers built-in retention analysis. They provide a readily accessible, easy to
understand retention tracking screen with several options. To get this information from Google Analytics
requires more work but rewards you with significantly more segmentation and analysis flexibility.
• Segmentation and reporting: One would choose Mixpanel if he/she wants to do basic segmentation
analysis. In Mixpanel you can click an event, select an associated property or condition and instantly
graph the results. On the other hand, if one needs fine grained segmentation analysis and isn’t using their
respective APIs then Google Analytics reporting is the better choice.

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B2B Companies using Mixpanel
● 15% increase in account
creation due to A/B
testing
● 10% increase in Signer-
to-Sender Conversions
● 100+ instances of
Mixpanel across
Engineering, Product
and Marketing

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B2B Companies (contd.)
● ½ the cost of building
an in-house analytics
solution.
● 0 lines of server-side
code written for
collecting and
examining data.
● 10,000+ guidebook
apps with Mixpanel-
powered dashboards.

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Pricing

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