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We deal with this every day at Mixpanel. Education is a tough problem to solve. Here's how we think about it with respect to your questions: "First: how do you
by suhail 14y ago
We deal with this every day at Mixpanel. Education is a tough problem to solve. Here's how we think about it with respect to your questions:
"First: how do you decide what data to send into the package?"
My recommendation is you think about this gradually. Don't instrument everything. Start by picking 5 metrics you really, really care about. One of them should be your One Key Metric (OKM) - a metric that you would be the company on if you could only pick one thing to measure. I think the pressure of picking 5 helps you decide what to measure.
"Second: once you are collecting the data, how do you know what metrics to actively track?"
When you start gradually, there isn't much to pay attention to. Stay focused only on a set of metrics. Add more metrics when you want to understand those specific metrics more deeply. Add more data to split those metrics into groups to dig even deeper. Keep driving your OKM up as much as possible--sometimes you have to do it with something that correlates to it.
"Third: do I really have to dig around trying to find something useful?"
Today, the answer is yes. Businesses are fundamentally very different. Analytics is a lot like science experiments in high school: You start with a hypothesis, you test to see if you were right, and if you were then you came up with a conclusion or answer to your experiment. It's hard work to build a good business. I think the first step is for companies like us to help you understand your data. The next step that I think is more important than simply pulling "insights" out automatically is to help you take action on it so you grow.
- bryanh 14y agoThanks for the response. I just signed up fresh to Mixpanel to play around and you guys have solid technical on-boarding around just installing and collecting any data, but not a lot of details on what to collect. I'm sure that getting someone to collect just anything is a better first step than some sort of high level tutorial, which is why you do it that way. I like the OKM idea a lot. Perhaps that could be a pretty solid center stone for on-boarding a new user. I just remember being overwhelmed by the blank slate every time I signed up for any analytics package.
- suhail 14y agoWe generally reach out on the support side proactively to help. Anyone on our team is happy to think it through for you. If you want to learn more in the abstract we recently came out with an education series: http://mixpanel.com/education http://mixpanel.com/education
- smalter 14y agoAs a fan and free user of Mixpanel (so take my comment with a grain of salt), I really wish you guys would do more with education. A simple library of use cases with how to implement them in Mixpanel would be an awesome start. No coding required, just need a someone to write these. For instance, I had a question about how to track the effectiveness of different blog posts. When a user signed up, I wanted to know which blog posts (if any) that user had read. This is useful because content is the biggest driver of signups for us. I couldn't find any info anywhere on how to do this with Mixpanel or any other analytics tool. I emailed Mixpanel support and got an immediate & thoughtful response from Woody (which was awesome), but I would've much preferred if there were a self-serve library.