7 ms·

Amazon Mobile Analytics

155 points by stevewilhelm 12y ago

swanson 12y ago
"1st party" analytics on Android is a bit weird at the moment. Since Google Analytics for Mobile requires Google Play Services - you can't use it in for installations on Amazon Fire devices. Of course there are third party services (Crashlytics, Mixpanel, etc), but it's just interesting to see Amazon and Google essentially forced to build their own versions of each other's services to compete on Android.
- dublinben 12y ago
  Are Android devices without GPS a large enough market for you to worry about? I didn't think that anyone was actually distributing a significant amount of apps through the Amazon market.
  - JohnTHaller 12y ago
    Many of the devs I know aren't, but then they haven't put much effort into Amazon. Amazon App Store is basically Amazon Fire tablet users only. The Amazon Phone has barely sold so can be discounted for right now. Other than that, the folks who install the Amazon store... which requires manually enabling 3rd party apps on your Android phone and then installing it... are folks looking to get the free apps Amazon gives away to get people to use their store. So, not only is it a much smaller audience, it isn't necessarily the best quality audience. That's what I've heard anecdotally at least.
  - illumen 12y ago
    China
- sehugg 12y ago
  You can use the older version or the Measurement API
espitia 12y ago
Wow! Considering that Mixpanel charges $2000 for 20MM data points, this is awesome. Love how the cost of starting up just keeps getting lower and lower. :) Also, I understand that Amazon includes 'System Events' in their free tier. Even with this included, at an average of 15 custom events + 5 system events, you can have 5MM sessions a month for FREE. This is more than enough for bootstrapped companies/projects to start and grow with. I'm not sure who the customers for these analytics companies are (small projects that grow with them vs big projects that join them) but if it is the latter, well Amazon is def. the better choice. Although they do not offer any complex funnels/segmentation, I am sure this and other features will be added in the future. Thinking about Peter Thiel's monopoly vs competition eating profits (Zero to One, awesome book!), I wonder if and how players in this space will be able to differentiate themselves enough to really have a competitive advantage over one another.
skram 12y ago
This is great especially considering the REST API meaning this can be adapted to other environments other than mobile...
suhail 12y ago
Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Mixpanel This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is expensive! Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if I am wrong): - Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of this free tier and the paid tiers. Start and End events are going to put reasonably sized apps into the billions. - If you manage to get rid of said system events, big parts of the dashboard are likely to be rendered useless like DAU, MAU, retention, etc. - You cannot deeply segment any of this information so you will have a lot of questions remaining even just the next day - It will be difficult to offer funnel analysis (which doesn't exist) that is retroactive at that scale. That means you will get the same kind of funnel that people hate with Google Analytics' goals. - Generally speaking: complexity of analysis will mean higher prices While Mixpanel pricing may seem expensive by comparison, the products are not comparable. You get what you pay for in the level of sophisticated analysis. Given that, over time it is our plan to lower prices relative to the rate that hardware and infrastructure becomes less expensive. We think that's fair. And if we can improve our technology to become more efficient we most certainly want to make our software and products more accessible. We are very open to your thoughts so please be harsh and candid (as I know HN can be). We deeply care about our startup customers who made and pushed us into who we are today.
- michokest 12y ago
  As a second-time founder, I found Mixpanel to be the most expensive piece of SaaS we were using in our stack: at barely 30k users, it was already far more expensive than our whole hosting bill combined! Then I switched solutions for a while, looking for a good combination that'd give me Facebook attribution data plus user behavior. So far, I haven't found my ideas combination and in a way, Amazon doesn't change that. I find that solutions like segment.io are great in the way that you can install their SDK just once, and have that proxy the events to all other SDKs. For now that's what I chose to do, to avoid week-long delays for approval publishing our apps in the app store.
  - alooPotato 12y ago
siliconc0w 12y ago
This seems awesome but it could really use more real time metrics and more sophisticated reports/funneling/cohorting.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
prebrov 12y ago
Very basic dashboard and reporting made me think it must be all about APIs and reusing data in other AWS products. You know, Analytics + SNS + SES would make up a nice a little marketing automation solution and I wouldn't mind building my own reports in R or whatever. However, there's no way to retrieve and reuse any data through the API. Seems like a major opportunity loss with AWS users as target audience.
jakozaur 12y ago
Mobile analytics is relatively new Amazon offering. Seems follow their typical approach, start with low prices with small number of features and build new ones. Amazon unlikely will be the best solution (e.g. I bet Mixpanel will be significantly better for at least next few years), but they may cover a lot of typical use cases. That will commoditize the user event analytics and put pressure on the other companies.
raquo 12y ago
That free tier is quite generous – worth about $140/mo if you were to exceed it by the amount of free allowance. Need to be careful if you rely on it being free, and then grow.
matm 12y ago
(Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Heap. We build mobile analytics, so I'm far from impartial.) Amazon's main purpose in building an analytics tool is to drive spend to the Amazon App Store. If you can't measure the ROI of their app store, you can't devote more resources to it. This applies to just about all the big tech companies and their respective distribution platforms: Google with AdWords, Facebook with mobile ads, and Apple with the iOS app store. Lots of dollars flow through these platforms, and Amazon/Facebook/Apple don't want their developers measuring those dollars with a hostile competitor's analytics offering. (Often, the hostile competitor they have in mind is Google.) You'll notice this in the screenshots for Amazon's mobile analytics. On the Overview page, note the breakdown of "Lifetime Value Per User". There are separate figures for iOS users, Android users, and...Fire OS users. A line item for "Fire iOS users" would never be so prominent in Google or Apple's analytics (or even present). Thus, Amazon et al. focus on making their own analytics tools good at measuring acquisition (prioritizing their own channels) and some high-level metrics. Digging into the data is much less of a priority. Even basic questions - "what's the conversion rate for my signup flow?", "what are the email addresses of my active users?", "what percent of my revenue comes from repeat visits?" - require you to use a different tool. Bigger companies are aware of this feature gap and happy to pay the price premium. But startups are (appropriately) more price-sensitive, even though a solid investment in growth/analytics is arguably more important for startups. I'd love to hear HN's feedback on how Heap (and other analytics companies) can structure their pricing to better accommodate small companies.
- anix 12y ago
  Only web and iOS? why no love for android?
gorkemcetin 12y ago
You may also want try an open source (self-hosted) solution like Countly (https://count.ly https://count.ly). It may well meet expectations if free-to-use Community Edition (https://count.ly/products/editions/community https://count.ly/products/editions/community) is what you'd need. If not, you can go with Enteprise Edition (https://count.ly/products/editions/enterprise https://count.ly/products/editions/enterprise) which is also open source, self hosted, but with a lot more features like drill-down events, funnels and retention (cohorts).
dengjh 12y ago
i try mixpanel, it has best solution for startup, also have highest price.
johnathanson 12y ago
If only this could be cheaper :(
hoopscity 12y ago
+1 for http://keen.io http://keen.io
louo 12y ago
Disclosure: I work for Localytics. Overall I agree with Suhail’s points regarding GA being the closest proxy for this service. You do get what you pay for when it comes to advanced analytics. If anything Amazon’s move shows that simple data collection around analytics is becoming commoditized. We tend to price based on MAU’s rather than events to help customers with predictability, but given that event data points are the basis of our (and pretty much all analytics company’s) cost model, that can present challenges. The problem being highlighted in this thread is that the value derived from advanced analytics doesn’t justify the cost in the minds of a lot of startups. There are a variety of reasons for this: not enough users, deeper insights are “interesting” but not game-changing, complex to set up, hard to understand, requires lots of event tagging, etc. Here’s one way to think about the value of more advanced analytics: they are primarily valuable for startups when they power the ability to take action on them (i.e. In the form of marketing campaigns). For example, if creating intricate and specific funnels and flows seems like overkill for your startup e-commerce app, would the value increase if you could send a push or in-app message to users who have dropped at a specific point in a funnel but have purchased before? I suspect that it would, but clearly the value fluctuates depending on the stage and context of your app.
bosky101 12y ago
lot of saas companies offer metadata & other common metrics, as an addon to their main offering. such as crittercism, testflight, bugsense, crashlytics and helpshift. i've headed analytics/targeting at a yc company in the past before mixpanel, flurry were in the market, and saw first-hand how portability/dumps of the data made a big difference as you grow - something that not all analytics saas companies provide. disclosure: i work @helpshift and we have several customers who may have 100M+ data points/week but we dont price based on data points. we give the basic active, engagement and session metrics like amazon, and search/faq metrics within our sdk. slice-n-dice reports based on custom events are coming soon. but our pricing is aligned around in-app customer support & active users. we dont track/charge for metadata, breadcrumbs and you can tie as much data to an issue/user (much like Parse out-of-box). most of our users have several sdk's and we're fine with that too. that said, i see a lot of value in heap/keen/segment that make it less important where/how the data is and let you focus on what insight to surface

155 points by stevewilhelm 12y ago

"1st party" analytics on Android is a bit weird at the moment. Since Google Analytics for Mobile requires Google Play Services - you can't use it in for installations on Amazon Fire devices. Of course there are third party services (Crashlytics, Mixpanel, etc), but it's just interesting to see Amazon and Google essentially forced to build their own versions of each other's services to compete on Android.

dublinben 12y ago
Are Android devices without GPS a large enough market for you to worry about? I didn't think that anyone was actually distributing a significant amount of apps through the Amazon market.
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  Many of the devs I know aren't, but then they haven't put much effort into Amazon. Amazon App Store is basically Amazon Fire tablet users only. The Amazon Phone has barely sold so can be discounted for right now. Other than that, the folks who install the Amazon store... which requires manually enabling 3rd party apps on your Android phone and then installing it... are folks looking to get the free apps Amazon gives away to get people to use their store. So, not only is it a much smaller audience, it isn't necessarily the best quality audience. That's what I've heard anecdotally at least.
- illumen 12y ago
  China
sehugg 12y ago
You can use the older version or the Measurement API

espitia 12y ago

Wow! Considering that Mixpanel charges $2000 for 20MM data points, this is awesome. Love how the cost of starting up just keeps getting lower and lower. :) Also, I understand that Amazon includes 'System Events' in their free tier. Even with this included, at an average of 15 custom events + 5 system events, you can have 5MM sessions a month for FREE. This is more than enough for bootstrapped companies/projects to start and grow with. I'm not sure who the customers for these analytics companies are (small projects that grow with them vs big projects that join them) but if it is the latter, well Amazon is def. the better choice. Although they do not offer any complex funnels/segmentation, I am sure this and other features will be added in the future. Thinking about Peter Thiel's monopoly vs competition eating profits (Zero to One, awesome book!), I wonder if and how players in this space will be able to differentiate themselves enough to really have a competitive advantage over one another.

skram 12y ago

This is great especially considering the REST API meaning this can be adapted to other environments other than mobile...

suhail 12y ago

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Mixpanel This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is expensive! Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if I am wrong): - Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of this free tier and the paid tiers. Start and End events are going to put reasonably sized apps into the billions. - If you manage to get rid of said system events, big parts of the dashboard are likely to be rendered useless like DAU, MAU, retention, etc. - You cannot deeply segment any of this information so you will have a lot of questions remaining even just the next day - It will be difficult to offer funnel analysis (which doesn't exist) that is retroactive at that scale. That means you will get the same kind of funnel that people hate with Google Analytics' goals. - Generally speaking: complexity of analysis will mean higher prices While Mixpanel pricing may seem expensive by comparison, the products are not comparable. You get what you pay for in the level of sophisticated analysis. Given that, over time it is our plan to lower prices relative to the rate that hardware and infrastructure becomes less expensive. We think that's fair. And if we can improve our technology to become more efficient we most certainly want to make our software and products more accessible. We are very open to your thoughts so please be harsh and candid (as I know HN can be). We deeply care about our startup customers who made and pushed us into who we are today.

michokest 12y ago
As a second-time founder, I found Mixpanel to be the most expensive piece of SaaS we were using in our stack: at barely 30k users, it was already far more expensive than our whole hosting bill combined! Then I switched solutions for a while, looking for a good combination that'd give me Facebook attribution data plus user behavior. So far, I haven't found my ideas combination and in a way, Amazon doesn't change that. I find that solutions like segment.io are great in the way that you can install their SDK just once, and have that proxy the events to all other SDKs. For now that's what I chose to do, to avoid week-long delays for approval publishing our apps in the app store.
- alooPotato 12y ago

siliconc0w 12y ago

This seems awesome but it could really use more real time metrics and more sophisticated reports/funneling/cohorting.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

prebrov 12y ago

Very basic dashboard and reporting made me think it must be all about APIs and reusing data in other AWS products. You know, Analytics + SNS + SES would make up a nice a little marketing automation solution and I wouldn't mind building my own reports in R or whatever. However, there's no way to retrieve and reuse any data through the API. Seems like a major opportunity loss with AWS users as target audience.

jakozaur 12y ago

Mobile analytics is relatively new Amazon offering. Seems follow their typical approach, start with low prices with small number of features and build new ones. Amazon unlikely will be the best solution (e.g. I bet Mixpanel will be significantly better for at least next few years), but they may cover a lot of typical use cases. That will commoditize the user event analytics and put pressure on the other companies.

raquo 12y ago

That free tier is quite generous – worth about $140/mo if you were to exceed it by the amount of free allowance. Need to be careful if you rely on it being free, and then grow.

matm 12y ago

(Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Heap. We build mobile analytics, so I'm far from impartial.) Amazon's main purpose in building an analytics tool is to drive spend to the Amazon App Store. If you can't measure the ROI of their app store, you can't devote more resources to it. This applies to just about all the big tech companies and their respective distribution platforms: Google with AdWords, Facebook with mobile ads, and Apple with the iOS app store. Lots of dollars flow through these platforms, and Amazon/Facebook/Apple don't want their developers measuring those dollars with a hostile competitor's analytics offering. (Often, the hostile competitor they have in mind is Google.) You'll notice this in the screenshots for Amazon's mobile analytics. On the Overview page, note the breakdown of "Lifetime Value Per User". There are separate figures for iOS users, Android users, and...Fire OS users. A line item for "Fire iOS users" would never be so prominent in Google or Apple's analytics (or even present). Thus, Amazon et al. focus on making their own analytics tools good at measuring acquisition (prioritizing their own channels) and some high-level metrics. Digging into the data is much less of a priority. Even basic questions - "what's the conversion rate for my signup flow?", "what are the email addresses of my active users?", "what percent of my revenue comes from repeat visits?" - require you to use a different tool. Bigger companies are aware of this feature gap and happy to pay the price premium. But startups are (appropriately) more price-sensitive, even though a solid investment in growth/analytics is arguably more important for startups. I'd love to hear HN's feedback on how Heap (and other analytics companies) can structure their pricing to better accommodate small companies.

anix 12y ago
Only web and iOS? why no love for android?

gorkemcetin 12y ago

You may also want try an open source (self-hosted) solution like Countly (https://count.ly https://count.ly). It may well meet expectations if free-to-use Community Edition (https://count.ly/products/editions/community https://count.ly/products/editions/community) is what you'd need. If not, you can go with Enteprise Edition (https://count.ly/products/editions/enterprise https://count.ly/products/editions/enterprise) which is also open source, self hosted, but with a lot more features like drill-down events, funnels and retention (cohorts).

dengjh 12y ago

i try mixpanel, it has best solution for startup, also have highest price.

johnathanson 12y ago

If only this could be cheaper :(

hoopscity 12y ago

+1 for http://keen.io http://keen.io

louo 12y ago

Disclosure: I work for Localytics. Overall I agree with Suhail’s points regarding GA being the closest proxy for this service. You do get what you pay for when it comes to advanced analytics. If anything Amazon’s move shows that simple data collection around analytics is becoming commoditized. We tend to price based on MAU’s rather than events to help customers with predictability, but given that event data points are the basis of our (and pretty much all analytics company’s) cost model, that can present challenges. The problem being highlighted in this thread is that the value derived from advanced analytics doesn’t justify the cost in the minds of a lot of startups. There are a variety of reasons for this: not enough users, deeper insights are “interesting” but not game-changing, complex to set up, hard to understand, requires lots of event tagging, etc. Here’s one way to think about the value of more advanced analytics: they are primarily valuable for startups when they power the ability to take action on them (i.e. In the form of marketing campaigns). For example, if creating intricate and specific funnels and flows seems like overkill for your startup e-commerce app, would the value increase if you could send a push or in-app message to users who have dropped at a specific point in a funnel but have purchased before? I suspect that it would, but clearly the value fluctuates depending on the stage and context of your app.

bosky101 12y ago

lot of saas companies offer metadata & other common metrics, as an addon to their main offering. such as crittercism, testflight, bugsense, crashlytics and helpshift. i've headed analytics/targeting at a yc company in the past before mixpanel, flurry were in the market, and saw first-hand how portability/dumps of the data made a big difference as you grow - something that not all analytics saas companies provide. disclosure: i work @helpshift and we have several customers who may have 100M+ data points/week but we dont price based on data points. we give the basic active, engagement and session metrics like amazon, and search/faq metrics within our sdk. slice-n-dice reports based on custom events are coming soon. but our pricing is aligned around in-app customer support & active users. we dont track/charge for metadata, breadcrumbs and you can tie as much data to an issue/user (much like Parse out-of-box). most of our users have several sdk's and we're fine with that too. that said, i see a lot of value in heap/keen/segment that make it less important where/how the data is and let you focus on what insight to surface