6 ms·

Mixpanel introduces People Analytics

124 points by trefn 14y ago

dpritchett 14y ago
I feel that this is one of those "great for data miners, terrifying for consumers" moments.
henryl 14y ago
This is revolutionary and really closes the collect data -> analyze -> act feedback loop. Come to think of it, it really minds me of a DMP. If I were building a consumer app today, MP would be a big part of my growth strategy.
- zithtar 14y ago
  I've used MP for all my projects and they really are fantastic. Disclaimer: FWIW, I have no professional relationship with MP, nor personal relationship with any employee.
- chexton 14y ago
  Excuse my ignorance, what's the acronym DMP stand for?
  - brandnewlow 14y ago
    Data Management Platform: http://www.adopsinsider.com/online-ad-measurement-tracking/data-management-platforms/what-are-data-management-platforms/ http://www.adopsinsider.com/online-ad-measurement-tracking/d...
reustle 14y ago
Interesting, but the guys over at http://intercom.io http://intercom.io have been doing this for some time now.
dflock 14y ago
Has anyone has chance to try this yet? How is this different to what KISSMetrics does?
duiker101 14y ago
now i feel really stalked.
richardv 14y ago
I had some trouble setting this up. Already a MixPanel customer, incase you were not aware, you need to update your API include. (Follow the links from your dashboard for the snippet). If you want to see the power of how useful this really is, you should look at : https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript I think that the "Sales Page" doesn't do this new service justice. It's quite staggering how useful this is. It basically allows you to segment your users and keep in touch with users of whom you have identified might be power users, or users who might fall into your "danger cohort". For example, you might notice a trend that users who don't "do event X" within the last 7 days, are most likely not going to return. Tracking the events in your application and then identifying these events as originating from a particular user, allows you to then find these users. This is of course just one example. Look at the documentation on People Analytics for more ideas... https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript
digitalboss 14y ago
This is great to see, trying right now. Btw - We've avoided this in past using Google Analytics as in the TOS they mention (http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html). 7. PRIVACY . You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service to track or collect personally identifiable information of Internet users, nor will You (or will You allow any third party to) associate any data gathered from Your website(s) (or such third parties' website(s)) with any personally identifying information from any source as part of Your use (or such third parties' use) of the Service. You will have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy and will comply with all applicable laws relating to the collection of information from visitors to Your websites. You must post a privacy policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that collects anonymous traffic data. Hadn't heard of https://www.intercom.io/ https://www.intercom.io/ - thanks for sharing @reustle.
flatline3 14y ago
If this associates analytics with personal data, it is a tremendous invasion of privacy, especially in the mobile space where it is not expected that interacting with a local application would send your usage data to a remote server.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  Our experience in the mobile space with mixpanel was extremely disappointing. For anyone who wants to try it I strongly recommend you do a non-trivial trial run first, and verify everything. One example of something that bit us was that the mixpanel servers modify the time stamp from a client if it is in the future. It turns out this happens quite regularly with mobile devices (especially Android). Consequently a batch of data coming in would all have the same time stamp destroying the ability to see what happened over time. Another example is that Mixpanel will add country information to incoming data, but refuse to add to regional information so the only thing you know about US users is that they were in the US.
  - phil 14y ago
    What are you using now? Do you like it?
    - rogerbinns 14y ago
      We are still on mixpanel because it is hard to extricate ourselves, but obviously that isn't the long term plan. I can point to mistakes I made such as the higher posting. In our case some extra numbers are sent with each event and the values of those numbers are interesting. (One example is the volume level of the device.) With Google Analytics where they term this custom variables all you get to see is the average value which is spectacularly useless. Mixpanel would show us the distribution, but only for a particular event type. We have about 20 different events, so working it out across all 20 would be too tedious. Today we only use mixpanel as a receiver of events. We export the analytics data from them and then work on that locally. Unfortunately they only provide an export every 24 hours. We do not use any of their other functionality although we did try.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
justauser 14y ago
Thank you Ghostery and friends.
edhallen 14y ago
As stated, it's crucial that privacy be fully respected for users. The key thing may not necessarily be knowing exactly who someone is, but instead knowing what they've done (which features they use and how often, which marketing emails they open, which support tickets they file, etc) and using this to give users better experiences personalized around their history of interactions. Providing this type of experience from web companies is what we're working on at Klaviyo (http://www.klaviyo.com http://www.klaviyo.com). In most cases, companies are tracking all of this data, just in multiple different systems and not bothering to pull it together (i.e. why do I get emails about product features I already use?) to use to make my life better. On privacy, companies need to make sure they are being open with users. For most of these so-called "people analytics" companies can choose whether to include personally identifiable info. Companies need to be intentional, and should choose to anonymize customer data when they can (but should still treat people uniquely based on their past interactions, even if they can't put a name on someone).
kmfrk 14y ago
I will reserve any judgement of the service, until I see it in action. I think an example dashboard - that doesn't require registration - would do more good than harm in alleviating users' privacy concerns. Even so, all analytics services are basically privacy atrocities, and as such I don't think Mixpanel should receive a disproportionate amount of resentment. User information utility and privacy are mutually exclusive.
jhuckestein 14y ago
I'm curious if these people properties can be used on the segmentation screen? We're were doing something similar with mixpanel, except (in mixpanel client-side parlance this is called super properties) we have to send all attributes such as "number of pages viewed", "amount of money paid" with all our events in order to segment by that data. And sending emails based on analytics is incredible! I've always wanted to build that for my app but didn't have the resources to. Is it horrible to gloss over the privacy concerns?
- chexton 14y ago
  I will also be curious to see this. It seems logical to think you'll be able to use this people data to segment in the future, I think it's a huge part of the value of this new feature. Also, if you're interested in automating emails based on analytics you should checkout http://getvero.com http://getvero.com (disclaimer: I'm a founder). We're working on a Mixpanel integration as I type so we should pick up right where Mixpanel leaves off :).
- petenixey 14y ago
  I'm pretty certain that sending emails based on analytics has been a part of setups like Omniture for a long time. I think it's their test and target product that allows for all of this sort of thing.
physcab 14y ago
User privacy concerns aside (yes, I realize that is a big aside), I feel like there are only a handful of use cases where knowing this user data is actually helpful in analytics scenarios, and anything beyond just feels creepy to know. 1) More intelligent marketing spend. If you know you have a higher LTV for females for your app between the ages of 18-34 and you do a portion of your advertising on Facebook, it would be good to target just those users. 2) Insights into broad customer engagement. Let's say your 18-34 female users return to your application more often than male users in the same demographic, it'd be helpful to know what friction points cause these users to drop off. 3) Insights into spending users. Being able to segment all your user actions by those who are free and those who spend money would help you optimize your paying funnel. 4) Bug reporting. Knowing where your users are located can help illuminate whether you have server and localization problems. I can't think of any reasons why you'd use this information to voluntarily contact users other than support-related issues. If Netflix sent me an email that said "We think you'd like these movies because other males liked these movies" I'd probably de-activate immediately.
- petenixey 14y ago
  I'm often surprised when people ask "what's the point in knowing these metrics". The point is simply that anything gives a better insight into use behaviour and user needs is immensely valuable. If we were physically interacting with our users (i.e. we ran a shop or a community centre) we'd be using thousands of signals to determine who needed help, who was afraid, who was ready to purchase more and who was making trouble. As developers we try to cultivate online social environments, socially-engaged shops, games which envelop the user and collaborative business tools but with absolutely none of these emotional cues. That's hard. Imagine trying to design an amusement park if all you had was an anonymous ping each time someone went on a ride. The value to all of us (and to the users) in these new wave of analytics is to take us closer to the user and let us feel what they feel and service them where they need to be serviced. Asking why one should do that is about the same as asking why you'd need to watch people queuing for the rides in an amusement park in order to improve the queues. Because if you don't you won't know what the user feels, wants or needs. (Side note: what mixpanel is doing is incredible and they really are a pleasure to use. There is a Zen quality to their product and the way it gives you great power from great simplicity (although a custom dash would be great, ty! ))
tlrobinson 14y ago
Is there anything stopping someone from using the JavaScript library to mess with your analytics by typing a little JavaScript in their console? It seems like at the very least it should support server-side validation of user ids based on their cookie or something, so a user can only screw with their own stats.
karlwirth 14y ago
Apptegic, http://www.apptegic.com http://www.apptegic.com, has also been offering this for a while. We let mobile and web companies understand what each user is doing in their app on a per user and per account basis, and then respond directly to that user in Salesforce, by email, or real-time in-app. On privacy, we designed in an inability to correlate user data across our customers. So, for example, we cannot know that an end user of Apptegic Customer A is also the same end user of Apptegic Customer B. With this in place, the data is used only for our customers to understand and better serve their customers.
khangtoh 14y ago
This is amazing. This is pretty much what we have seen lacking as far as using Mixpanel. Thanks to the awesome work. That said, as a customer, I felt that Mixpanel could have been a little more transparent with their roadmap. It would have been _A LOT_ much better for customers like us to know that was in the pipeline for rolling out and would have saved us a lot of unnecessary headaches and pains.
- chexton 14y ago
  100% agree, this was my only real complaint when it came to recommending Mixpanel, great to see full user history elegantly laid out!
jasonwilk 14y ago
Interesting stuff. I know PipeWise has been innovating in this space as well which we're currently testing out.
schammy 14y ago
The privacy concerns are overblown. Mixpanel doesn't magically "know" stuff about your users - they only know what you tell them. And you only know what your users tell you. You won't know someone's email address or (maybe) real name unless they have registered an account. You won't know someone's gender unless that's part of the profile creation process on your site. Etc. Mixpanel is just making it easy to analyze this data in their interface by giving you the ability to send this data to them.
hammerdr 14y ago
Something that many B2C developers may not be aware of, but for businesses that interact with a small number of users (most of B2B), it can be incredibly important to track a specific user. The expectations of privacy are definitely altered and many customers would be delighted to have direct contact with a customer experience team that knows their exact behaviors.

124 points by trefn 14y ago

I feel that this is one of those "great for data miners, terrifying for consumers" moments.

This is revolutionary and really closes the collect data -> analyze -> act feedback loop. Come to think of it, it really minds me of a DMP. If I were building a consumer app today, MP would be a big part of my growth strategy.

zithtar 14y ago
I've used MP for all my projects and they really are fantastic. Disclaimer: FWIW, I have no professional relationship with MP, nor personal relationship with any employee.
chexton 14y ago
Excuse my ignorance, what's the acronym DMP stand for?
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  Data Management Platform: http://www.adopsinsider.com/online-ad-measurement-tracking/data-management-platforms/what-are-data-management-platforms/ http://www.adopsinsider.com/online-ad-measurement-tracking/d...

reustle 14y ago

Interesting, but the guys over at http://intercom.io http://intercom.io have been doing this for some time now.

dflock 14y ago

Has anyone has chance to try this yet? How is this different to what KISSMetrics does?

duiker101 14y ago

now i feel really stalked.

richardv 14y ago

I had some trouble setting this up. Already a MixPanel customer, incase you were not aware, you need to update your API include. (Follow the links from your dashboard for the snippet). If you want to see the power of how useful this really is, you should look at : https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript I think that the "Sales Page" doesn't do this new service justice. It's quite staggering how useful this is. It basically allows you to segment your users and keep in touch with users of whom you have identified might be power users, or users who might fall into your "danger cohort". For example, you might notice a trend that users who don't "do event X" within the last 7 days, are most likely not going to return. Tracking the events in your application and then identifying these events as originating from a particular user, allows you to then find these users. This is of course just one example. Look at the documentation on People Analytics for more ideas... https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript

digitalboss 14y ago

This is great to see, trying right now. Btw - We've avoided this in past using Google Analytics as in the TOS they mention (http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html). 7. PRIVACY . You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service to track or collect personally identifiable information of Internet users, nor will You (or will You allow any third party to) associate any data gathered from Your website(s) (or such third parties' website(s)) with any personally identifying information from any source as part of Your use (or such third parties' use) of the Service. You will have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy and will comply with all applicable laws relating to the collection of information from visitors to Your websites. You must post a privacy policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that collects anonymous traffic data. Hadn't heard of https://www.intercom.io/ https://www.intercom.io/ - thanks for sharing @reustle.

flatline3 14y ago

If this associates analytics with personal data, it is a tremendous invasion of privacy, especially in the mobile space where it is not expected that interacting with a local application would send your usage data to a remote server.

rogerbinns 14y ago
Our experience in the mobile space with mixpanel was extremely disappointing. For anyone who wants to try it I strongly recommend you do a non-trivial trial run first, and verify everything. One example of something that bit us was that the mixpanel servers modify the time stamp from a client if it is in the future. It turns out this happens quite regularly with mobile devices (especially Android). Consequently a batch of data coming in would all have the same time stamp destroying the ability to see what happened over time. Another example is that Mixpanel will add country information to incoming data, but refuse to add to regional information so the only thing you know about US users is that they were in the US.
- phil 14y ago
  What are you using now? Do you like it?
  - rogerbinns 14y ago
    We are still on mixpanel because it is hard to extricate ourselves, but obviously that isn't the long term plan. I can point to mistakes I made such as the higher posting. In our case some extra numbers are sent with each event and the values of those numbers are interesting. (One example is the volume level of the device.) With Google Analytics where they term this custom variables all you get to see is the average value which is spectacularly useless. Mixpanel would show us the distribution, but only for a particular event type. We have about 20 different events, so working it out across all 20 would be too tedious. Today we only use mixpanel as a receiver of events. We export the analytics data from them and then work on that locally. Unfortunately they only provide an export every 24 hours. We do not use any of their other functionality although we did try.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

justauser 14y ago

Thank you Ghostery and friends.

edhallen 14y ago

As stated, it's crucial that privacy be fully respected for users. The key thing may not necessarily be knowing exactly who someone is, but instead knowing what they've done (which features they use and how often, which marketing emails they open, which support tickets they file, etc) and using this to give users better experiences personalized around their history of interactions. Providing this type of experience from web companies is what we're working on at Klaviyo (http://www.klaviyo.com http://www.klaviyo.com). In most cases, companies are tracking all of this data, just in multiple different systems and not bothering to pull it together (i.e. why do I get emails about product features I already use?) to use to make my life better. On privacy, companies need to make sure they are being open with users. For most of these so-called "people analytics" companies can choose whether to include personally identifiable info. Companies need to be intentional, and should choose to anonymize customer data when they can (but should still treat people uniquely based on their past interactions, even if they can't put a name on someone).

kmfrk 14y ago

I will reserve any judgement of the service, until I see it in action. I think an example dashboard - that doesn't require registration - would do more good than harm in alleviating users' privacy concerns. Even so, all analytics services are basically privacy atrocities, and as such I don't think Mixpanel should receive a disproportionate amount of resentment. User information utility and privacy are mutually exclusive.

jhuckestein 14y ago

I'm curious if these people properties can be used on the segmentation screen? We're were doing something similar with mixpanel, except (in mixpanel client-side parlance this is called super properties) we have to send all attributes such as "number of pages viewed", "amount of money paid" with all our events in order to segment by that data. And sending emails based on analytics is incredible! I've always wanted to build that for my app but didn't have the resources to. Is it horrible to gloss over the privacy concerns?

chexton 14y ago
I will also be curious to see this. It seems logical to think you'll be able to use this people data to segment in the future, I think it's a huge part of the value of this new feature. Also, if you're interested in automating emails based on analytics you should checkout http://getvero.com http://getvero.com (disclaimer: I'm a founder). We're working on a Mixpanel integration as I type so we should pick up right where Mixpanel leaves off :).
petenixey 14y ago
I'm pretty certain that sending emails based on analytics has been a part of setups like Omniture for a long time. I think it's their test and target product that allows for all of this sort of thing.

physcab 14y ago

User privacy concerns aside (yes, I realize that is a big aside), I feel like there are only a handful of use cases where knowing this user data is actually helpful in analytics scenarios, and anything beyond just feels creepy to know. 1) More intelligent marketing spend. If you know you have a higher LTV for females for your app between the ages of 18-34 and you do a portion of your advertising on Facebook, it would be good to target just those users. 2) Insights into broad customer engagement. Let's say your 18-34 female users return to your application more often than male users in the same demographic, it'd be helpful to know what friction points cause these users to drop off. 3) Insights into spending users. Being able to segment all your user actions by those who are free and those who spend money would help you optimize your paying funnel. 4) Bug reporting. Knowing where your users are located can help illuminate whether you have server and localization problems. I can't think of any reasons why you'd use this information to voluntarily contact users other than support-related issues. If Netflix sent me an email that said "We think you'd like these movies because other males liked these movies" I'd probably de-activate immediately.

petenixey 14y ago
I'm often surprised when people ask "what's the point in knowing these metrics". The point is simply that anything gives a better insight into use behaviour and user needs is immensely valuable. If we were physically interacting with our users (i.e. we ran a shop or a community centre) we'd be using thousands of signals to determine who needed help, who was afraid, who was ready to purchase more and who was making trouble. As developers we try to cultivate online social environments, socially-engaged shops, games which envelop the user and collaborative business tools but with absolutely none of these emotional cues. That's hard. Imagine trying to design an amusement park if all you had was an anonymous ping each time someone went on a ride. The value to all of us (and to the users) in these new wave of analytics is to take us closer to the user and let us feel what they feel and service them where they need to be serviced. Asking why one should do that is about the same as asking why you'd need to watch people queuing for the rides in an amusement park in order to improve the queues. Because if you don't you won't know what the user feels, wants or needs. (Side note: what mixpanel is doing is incredible and they really are a pleasure to use. There is a Zen quality to their product and the way it gives you great power from great simplicity (although a custom dash would be great, ty! ))

tlrobinson 14y ago

Is there anything stopping someone from using the JavaScript library to mess with your analytics by typing a little JavaScript in their console? It seems like at the very least it should support server-side validation of user ids based on their cookie or something, so a user can only screw with their own stats.

karlwirth 14y ago

Apptegic, http://www.apptegic.com http://www.apptegic.com, has also been offering this for a while. We let mobile and web companies understand what each user is doing in their app on a per user and per account basis, and then respond directly to that user in Salesforce, by email, or real-time in-app. On privacy, we designed in an inability to correlate user data across our customers. So, for example, we cannot know that an end user of Apptegic Customer A is also the same end user of Apptegic Customer B. With this in place, the data is used only for our customers to understand and better serve their customers.

khangtoh 14y ago

This is amazing. This is pretty much what we have seen lacking as far as using Mixpanel. Thanks to the awesome work. That said, as a customer, I felt that Mixpanel could have been a little more transparent with their roadmap. It would have been _A LOT_ much better for customers like us to know that was in the pipeline for rolling out and would have saved us a lot of unnecessary headaches and pains.

chexton 14y ago
100% agree, this was my only real complaint when it came to recommending Mixpanel, great to see full user history elegantly laid out!

jasonwilk 14y ago

Interesting stuff. I know PipeWise has been innovating in this space as well which we're currently testing out.

schammy 14y ago

The privacy concerns are overblown. Mixpanel doesn't magically "know" stuff about your users - they only know what you tell them. And you only know what your users tell you. You won't know someone's email address or (maybe) real name unless they have registered an account. You won't know someone's gender unless that's part of the profile creation process on your site. Etc. Mixpanel is just making it easy to analyze this data in their interface by giving you the ability to send this data to them.

hammerdr 14y ago

Something that many B2C developers may not be aware of, but for businesses that interact with a small number of users (most of B2B), it can be incredibly important to track a specific user. The expectations of privacy are definitely altered and many customers would be delighted to have direct contact with a customer experience team that knows their exact behaviors.