How do you turn first time customers into loyal lifelong advocates? Tracking user activities has become a critical and integral part of any business, where the power of data plays a major role in making decisions that will revolutionize the way we think about our customers. This will help us identify hidden patterns, correlations and other insights about user activities, which will lead to better user experiences, cost reductions and gaining a competitive edge in the industry. There are two different ways we can analyze data, where one is to build our own analytical platform in house and do the processing, whereas the other is to use an online platform, which is available as a service, which provides powerful analytical tools and lots of other features for different levels of pricing strategies. Both approaches have their own pros and cons where, huge tech giants like Facebook and AirBnb, have their own, in house analytical platforms, where as smaller businesses can use the latter approach mentioned above.
This blog provides an introduction to Mix Panel, and how it works with our data, which is followed by a sample code and a step by step process, to start using Mix Panel, simply within 10 mins. The blog is structured as follows.
What is Mix Panel
Core features of Mix Panel
Why do we need Data Analytics
How does Mix Panel work
Google Analytics Vs. Mix Panel
Start using Mix Panel Now
1) What is Mix Panel
Mix panel is a platform that provides analytics which helps us learn from data. What kind of data are we talking about? It is mainly data collected from web applications and mobile applications. This data can be in various forms, which are collectively generated via user events in each of the analyzing applications. For example, let's assume that you are carrying out an online sales through a website, and you wish to see, how many users click on each of the advertisement banners displayed in your website. Each user click can be simply known as an event that the user does. Due to this event, we can simply trigger a call to a back-end server (Mix Panel), and do our relevant analytics. At the end of the day, we can see how many users, from which locations, in which times and many more information that will help us carry out and business and analytics aspects needed. This will help us achieve instant insights and fast iterations, throughout the development process.
Mix Panel is mainly applicable for Javascript, iOS, Android and Java, where they provide official libraries. But, they also have sample codes written for Python, PHP, Ruby and ActionScript. But this does not limit us from using other languages, where they provide REST APIs to send data to Mix Panels, simply by pinging into the REST API URLs.
Mix Panel can track user interactions happening in web and mobile applications. With the data collected off of our applications, we build custom reports and measure user engagement and retention.
2) Core features of Mix Panel
With product analytics with mix panel, learn about an influence every stop of the customer journey. These are the core features provided by Mix Panel.
Engagement
Engagement provides a feature named, "Insights" which helps the developer to get fast and powerful insights about the customer from acquisition to engagement and retention. Insights provides immediate answers to questions we face in any product, related to the customers. Could be from very simple questions to the most complex questions. Questions like:
Who is my ideal customer?
What features engage the customer the most?
What should I build next?
With insights, you can combine data sets together from web, mobile, tab and even from social media, and simple anything that comes in between the devices. When analyzing data, the traditional approach is to use SQL and query for the relevant data sets. But with Mix Panel, this is simply a matter of ticking off a few check boxes and hitting go. This is lightning fast and helps users visualize and see analytics the way they want.
Funnels
With funnels, you can easily pinpoint where and when you might lose customers in your application. With this knowledge, you can increase conversion rates, and retain losing customers. Funnels can track users through multiple steps as we have defined. Think of it as a pipeline where each step in the funnel is like a checkpoint the user must pass through in order to get counted. An Example is given below.
Step one - Click Log in button
Step two - Access settings menu
Step three - Download PDF file
Step four - Log out of the system
We can also specify different properties within the funnel. For example, the user must pass through Step one, via a Chrome Browser. You can also analyze the conversion rates of users between each of the steps separately. Conversion rate is the number of users that go from a specific step to the next immediate one. This let's us know that the customer is actually going forward in our funnel.
An example usage of funnels in the business industry is the customer retention and engagement. You can use a funnel to monitor the number of users going from viewing an item, to checking it out from the basket in a step by step process. With this you can monitor the number of users dropping out in between from the funnel.
Machine Learning
This feature provides automatic answers to our toughest questions. Imagine that you have been using Mix Panel for over 3 months now, and that you have collected a huge amount of data. It would be a really hectic task to filter out and study all this data according to your need. This is where Machine Learning comes into play, to answer you questions automatically, without interrupting the user. The three machine learning features in Mix Panel are:
Stop Data Mining: Mix Panel will do the data mining for you, automatically
Goodbye, human errors: The Mix Panel calculations will outperform the human brain, by learning tough conditions on huge data sets, in real time
Answers for anyone: Complex analysis is not restricted to data analysts. Even the general users can start using the tools at ease.
Auto-track for Web
Auto-track allows us to add mix panel event tracking to any website without writing code. We simply have to add our website into the Mix Panel event editor, and it allows us to click on different components of the website and specify events to each of them. We can specify the event name and the relevant properties we need to send through the event. A video explaining the auto-tracking feature is given below.
3) Why do we need Data Analytics
Big data analytics analyze huge data sets to reveal hidden patterns, insights and other correlations, relevant for our business needs. The world we live in today is filled with data where millions of data are collected every second, even as you read through this sentence. You may not directly realize the value of it, but many companies earn the real money only through the data they collect within their applications. If you are a website developer, you would want to know, how many users are visiting your web page. But further more, don't you want to know, whether an user clicked on your image, or logged in to the system, or even pressed a small button located at the bottom of the page? These kinds of interactions is what data analysts call "Gold", where the concept of data mining is also known as "gold mining".
But do users really like this? Not really... Would you like some creepy person following you every step of the way, taking notes of all the activities you do in your day to day life? General users actually want a safe and private life, when they try and use applications online, but they also prefer a convenient lifestyle which makes their web application usage, pretty easy and convenient. Data collection and analytics is used primarily for the purpose of enhancing user experience and providing a well tailored service to each of the customers. With this data, the application owners can leverage the power of learning about the user and providing them with a unique and customized service, to cater to their likes and needs. Shopping online for customers, is meant to be easy. But what really happens is we have to go through a lot of web pages, searching filters, to find out exactly what we need. This is why analyzing data can make the life of a customer easy.
To analyze this much of data at the same time, it need a lot of processing, storage units and good platforms to do so. This is what limits many companies and startups from going forward with data collection and analytics, where these limitations become major bottlenecks and additional expenses, over their daily activities. But, what people don't realize is the value of that data, which can be further used within that company, or even sold to external advertisers and related dealers.
This is where online analytical platforms can be of greater assistance to all, where they do all the data collection, data storing and data analyzing, where we only need to review the reports and provide necessary access permissions to our online content. Kissmetrics, Google analytics and Mixpanel are some good examples that people use mostly in the industry. We will be addressing Mix panel in this blog, where this list provides a set of online analytical platforms available for this purpose. Mix panel is a platform that tracks events happening in the web applications, allowing us to understand and analyze as different events happen within our application.
4) How does Mix Panel work?
Mix panel offers different libraries for different programming languages, to start using the Mix Panel services. The following flow diagram shows the process of Mix Panel integration to your application.
The first step is to integrate the mix panel libraries to your application code, where Mix Panel provides different libraries for different programming languages. Sometimes, this is as simple as inserting a code snippet into your code. After that, you need to specify which user actions need to be tracked. For example, this can simply be a button click, or a page change. As long as you insert the relevant Mix Panel server call to the relevant application event, the relevant event will be extracted when the user interacts with the system.
5) Google Analytics Vs. Mix Panel
Google analytics provides analytics on page views, but Mix Panel is capable of providing analytics for each of the components and user events on a web application. It is true that, the number of views on a page is important, but what if we want to track internal components and other interactions of users, besides page views...
Mix Panel provides the perfect solution. Mix panel is also different from Google Analytics on the following points.
Mix Panel provides a better event tracking model
Instant & real-time data analysis
Retroactive funnel analysis
Comprehensive cohort or retention analysis
Customer support
Improved data accuracy
Mobile A/B testing
Your data is your data
6) Start using Mix Panel Now
In this section, I will explain a step by step process on how to get started on using Mix Panel for your application, within 10 mins.
Step 1:
Visit www.mixpanel.com and register with a new account, if you already don't have one.
Step 2:
Click on the top-left corner, and create a new project, as shown in the below image. In this example, I have created a new project as "blog-example".
Step 3:
Next, you will see a screen as given below. Click on "SET UP NOW", which will lead to a new window.
And copy the code snippet, which is uniquely being allocated for your project. This code snippet, is shown in the image given below.
Step 4:
Now, lets create dummy web page to see this functionality. This project is also available on Github, on this link. Clone this project and change the code snippet, in the <head> html tag, and replace it with the code snippet you copied in Step 3. This file is named as "blog-project.html".
This is a very simple code, where one button, will trigger "myFunction1( )" and it will track the button click event, without any parameters.
The next button will trigger "myFunction2( )" and it will track down the button click, plus the parameters we have specified, with the relevant values.
Step 5:
Now, let's go back to our browser, and check the Mix-Panel page. Under each tab given, you will see that our events have been logged appropriately in the platform. With more experience and data, you can do very powerful analytics, that will help you power up your applications insights, simply by a few button clicks on mix panel.
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