Using Mixpanel for Product Analysis

In the fast-paced world of software development, data-driven decisions and insights are paramount to building successful products. At Canonic, we understand the significance of comprehensive product analytics. In this blog, we'll delve deeper into how we use Mixpanel to elevate our product analytics game and empower us to make informed decisions, optimize user experiences, and drive growth.

Why Mixpanel Excels Over Google Analytics

Google Analytics stands as a robust tool for website analytics, but when it comes to product analytics, Mixpanel takes the lead by offering distinct advantages. Mixpanel's core strength lies in its profound focus on user-centric data. This approach enables us to minutely track individual user interactions, actions, and behaviors. In contrast, Google Analytics predominantly centers around page-centric data.

While Google Analytics served us adeptly for tracking analytics data about our website, blog, and documentation pages, the unique demands of our core product called for a more intricate approach. Mixpanel's user-centric methodology granted us the ability to capture even the most nuanced user interactions. This facilitated a deeper comprehension of user behavior, aiding us in identifying trends, addressing pain points, and making data-driven decisions that elevate the overall user experience. This heightened level of granularity has equipped us with insights into user engagement, retention, and product performance, enabling us to iterate and optimize features with precision.

Integration with Segment - Streamlining Data Collection

One of the greatest strengths of Mixpanel is its seamless integration with Segment, a powerful customer data platform. After we decided to switch from GA to Mixpanel for our core product analytics, we just had to make another destination for all the analytics events coming from our App and route all the events to it instead of GA.

We kept both destinations running till the time we were sure that every analytics report we had on GA was now configured on Mixpanel as well.

What Are Funnels?

Funnels are a fundamental concept in the realm of analytics. In the context of product analytics, they provide a valuable framework for tracking and analyzing user interactions step by step. A funnel represents a sequence of specific actions that users take within a product or application. It's used to visualize the user journey through a series of events and assess how successful users are at progressing through these events.

Imagine a scenario where you want to understand how users move through a specific process within your product, such as signing up, completing onboarding, and finally creating a project. A funnel allows you to define these distinct stages and observe the conversion rates as users move from one stage to the next.

Here's a more detailed exploration of the concept of funnels:

1. Defining Stages: A funnel is comprised of a sequence of stages, each representing a specific action or interaction that a user performs. These stages are defined based on the user journey you want to analyze. In the context of a product, stages could be actions like signing up, logging in, adding items to a cart, or completing a purchase.
2. User Progression: Users naturally progress through these stages, and at each step, a portion of users may drop off. For instance, not all users who sign up might proceed to complete the onboarding process. The goal is to identify and understand these drop-offs, as they can indicate pain points or areas for improvement in the user experience.
3. Visual Representation: Funnels are often visually represented as a series of bars or steps, each corresponding to a stage in the sequence. The width of each bar represents the number of users at that stage, while the narrowing of the funnel illustrates the decreasing number of users as they advance through the stages.
4. Conversion Rates: The power of funnels lies in the ability to calculate conversion rates between each stage. This is done by dividing the number of users who completed a particular stage by the number of users who entered the funnel at the initial stage. Conversion rates provide insights into how efficiently users move through the funnel and where potential drop-offs occur.
5. Bottlenecks and Optimization: By analyzing the conversion rates at each stage, you can identify bottlenecks or stages where users are more likely to drop off. These insights are invaluable for optimizing the user experience. For instance, if a significant number of users drop off during onboarding, you can focus efforts on refining that process to improve retention.
6. A/B Testing and Iteration: Funnels are a powerful tool for conducting A/B testing. By making changes to a particular stage and comparing conversion rates, you can measure the impact of your optimizations. This iterative approach allows you to refine and enhance the user journey continuously.
7. Complex User Flows: Funnels are not limited to simple sequences; they can also represent more complex user flows involving multiple steps and interactions. For instance, in an e-commerce context, a funnel could track users from product browsing to cart addition to checkout completion.

Funnels: Tracking User Dropdown Interactions

One of the key challenges we faced at Canonic was tracking user interactions with a complex dropdown menu. With Mixpanel's Funnels feature, we were able to create custom funnels to track users' progression through specific actions step-by-step. This allowed us to identify drop-off points and optimize the dropdown's usability, leading to a significant improvement in user engagement.

Funnels provide a visual representation of user journeys, highlighting the conversion rates at each step. By analyzing these funnels, we can easily identify bottlenecks and areas that need improvement. Armed with this data, we fine-tuned the dropdown design, resulting in higher user engagement and increased completion rates.

Another example where we used funnels was to track the milestone completion for a new user. What we wanted to see was how many new users are going from the Signup → Onboarding → Project Creation → Deploy Stages.

Check out how it looks for our internal staging environment. If you have the events in place, it’s a few steps job to get it done.

Leveraging Cohorts to Analyse User Segments

Understanding user segments is crucial for tailoring our product to different user groups' needs and preferences. Mixpanel's Cohorts feature allows us to group users based on specific criteria, such as acquisition channel or behavior. This enables us to conduct in-depth analyses and compare user behaviors across different cohorts to make decisions that cater to specific user segments.

For example, we give access to our new features and releases to some of our power users before the actual release to collect feedback from them. Over time we did not want to reach out to the known users who interact with us regularly but also to others who we can see are using the platform well and automate the product feedback campaign of our new release and features. We set criteria to describe who the power users are. To give an example:

• X number of Components created
• Y number of Pages Created
• Deployed the Project Z several times
• etc

After finalizing the criteria, we took advantage of Cohorts in Mixpanel and jotted our logic. It gave us all the users that matched our expectations. We use MailChimp internally to send out emails to our users and it can connect with Mixpanel and get all the users that are in a specific cohort. It was the end game! We devised our campaign and it’s now running automatically.

Slack Integration - Real-time Reporting for Agile Teams

At Canonic, we value real-time insights that facilitate agile decision-making. With Mixpanel's Slack integration, we receive daily and weekly reports directly in our team's Slack channels. This helps our cross-functional teams stay informed and respond swiftly to any emerging trends or issues, fostering a data-driven and collaborative work culture.

The Slack integration allows us to set up automated reports, customizing the data and metrics we want to receive regularly. This feature keeps our entire team aligned and aware of the latest product analytics, facilitating quick action and streamlined decision-making. Our developers, designers, and marketing team can access relevant data in real time, enabling them to adjust strategies and prioritize tasks based on current insights.

Conclusion

Mixpanel has become an invaluable asset in our product development journey at Canonic. Its user-centric approach, seamless integration with Segment, powerful funnel analysis, cohort capabilities, and real-time reporting via Slack have transformed the way we harness data to drive our product's success. By leveraging Mixpanel's comprehensive product analytics, we continuously optimize user experiences, enhance feature performance, and stay ahead in an ever-evolving digital landscape.