Looking to use Mixpanel Analytics for tracking product growth insights?

Mixpanel Analytics helps you collect and analyze data to gain valuable insights into your product’s growth. With its advanced analytics and intuitive interface, Mixpanel has become a popular choice among SaaS companies.

However, with so many analytics tools available in the market, is Mixpanel the best option for your business?

In this in-depth review, we’ll explore the features, benefits, and limitations of Mixpanel Analytics and try to find a better alternative for you.

TL;DR

• Mixpanel is an event analytics service company that tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications.
• While Mixpanel helps track user behavior and interaction with products, Google Analytics is great for tracking website traffic and conversions.
• Mixpanel Analytics helps product managers track and analyze customer behavior and product usage with its powerful features.
• User segmentation allows unlimited segmentation capabilities.
• User cohorts in Mixpanel help you analyze user behavior and its impact.
• Mixapanel’s group analytics enables you to analyze behavioral data as a group and calculate account or company-level metrics.
• Drop-off analysis in Mixpanel shows where users get stuck and how to reduce friction.
• Interactive reports let you quickly query data and visualize product usage.
• A/B testing in Mixpanel helps you track user interactions to determine which version of a feature or product works best.
• Mixpanel has pros and cons, like powerful and customizable features, but enterprise-grade features can be expensive and take time to set up.
• It has integration options for many software and data sources.
• Mixpanel has free and two premium plans starting at $25/month.
• Userpilot can be a perfect alternative to Mixpanel, offering a code-free solution for marketing, product analytics, and customer feedback.
• Its analytics functionality includes advanced segmentation, feature tagging, creating and tracking custom events, product experimentation, sending in-app messages, and analyzing user sentiment.
• Userpilot offers three premium plans – Traction, Growth, and Enterprise. Start free or get a demo!

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What is Mixpanel?

Mixpanel is a powerful real-time analytics platform that helps companies measure and optimize user engagement.

Mixpanel is an app used for tracking customer behavior. It provides insights into your product usage and user behavior to help you make data-driven decisions and improve your products.

Mixpanel Analytics vs Google Analytics

Both Mixpanel Analytics and Google Analytics are popular analytics tools available for SaaS companies. While Mixpanel is a product analytics tool, Google Analytics is more of a traffic attribution tool.

Mixpanel is great for understanding user behavior and interaction with your product. It helps you keep track of button clicks, scrolling, and navigation within your product. You get better insights into the health of each account, product usage, and churn possibility.

Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking website traffic and conversions. With it, you can better track your website visitors’ arrival, navigation, and page duration. Its easy integrations with other marketing tools allow you to track marketing data more efficiently. You can also learn about relevant keywords and strategies for better SEO results using it.

This comparison chart between Google Analytics and Mixpanel can give you more details about the differences.

Why do product managers need Mixpanel Analytics?

Every product manager needs to track and understand user behavior and product usage in today’s data-driven business world. Let’s see how Mixpanel Analytics can help you do that in just a few clicks.

Track user behavior in just a few clicks

Mixpanel Analytics helps you easily track users’ interactions and see how your users engage with the product. With it, you can gain valuable insights into the most popular features and identify the ones that improve customer satisfaction.

Tracking user behavior can also offer you customer experience analytics to determine where the user experience may be suffering.

You can then identify the points where customers are facing problems or getting confused. After identifying them, you can work on eliminating these pain points. As a result, you can streamline the processes in your product and enhance the overall customer experience.

Collect product usage data and make data-driven decisions

Mixpanel Analytics helps product managers like you collect and analyze product usage data. With it, you can track user behavior across different cohorts, like trial users and paying customers, and identify patterns in your product engagement.

This product engagement data can help you make more informed decisions about your product. Suppose you notice that your customers stop using your product after a certain period. You can investigate the possible reasons and decide how to deal with them.

In the same way, you can test new features and product experiences using Mixpanel Analytics. You can then make data-driven decisions to improve the new features and product experiences.

Mixpanel analytics functionality in-depth

Now, let’s dive deep into Mixpanel Analytics’s features to help you better understand what it can do.

User segmentation

One of the most powerful features of Mixpanel Analytics is its user segmentation capabilities. It offers unlimited segmentation capabilities on attributes, user properties, cohorts, or any other action you choose. This level of segmentation gives you a more detailed view of your consumers and their engagement drivers.

Mixpanel Analytics’ user segmentation has the ability to understand your individual users, based on their overall behavior, not only average behavior. This approach helps you learn how your different users use the app.

You can also break down any analysis by event or user property and add or modify the breakdowns. And the best part is that you can do all of this in real-time without computing anything beforehand.

User cohorts

With Mixpanel’s user cohorts, you can group your users based on specific actions they take or don’t take within your product. It allows businesses to analyze how different user segments behave and the impact of these behaviors on conversion, engagement, and retention.

You can define user cohorts for customers based on actions like the number of times a user logs in, the frequency of purchases, etc.

Then you can create different cohorts for different types of users, such as core, casual, and power users. After defining the cohorts, it gets easier to analyze behavioral data on your own terms and visualize differences in cohort behaviors.

Cohort analysis in Mixpanel also helps you analyze user funnels. Zooming in on cohort users in any report shows how results vary by user segment. You can then find low-engagement user funnel sections and optimize them.

Group analytics

Group analytics in Mixpanel enables you to analyze behavioral event data as a group. It complements the other features, like user segmentation and cohort analysis, and is a great fit for companies serving multiple users within the same organization.

With group analytics, you can calculate account or company-level metrics and get a holistic view of user events. It includes metrics like product adoption and retention rate. Analyzing these metrics at the account level can help you gain insights into customer interaction and behavioral data, and drive sales by taking proactive measures.

Flow analysis

Drop-off occurs when a user stops engaging with your product or website before completing a desired action, like signing up for a service or making a purchase. Analyzing drop-offs helps you understand why users leave and identify ways to reduce friction.

Flow analysis lets you identify the user flows throughout your product to see where people get stuck. Then you can fix any problems that might be stopping users from performing your desired actions.

You can see what users do before dropping off by changing the filter in Mixpanel to “Did not Convert.” It will show you a funnel of user actions leading up to the point where they dropped off. This information can help you identify users’ most common paths before dropping off and act accordingly.

Flow analysis can also help you understand how your power users behave differently than others. You can use it to identify your best practices and create a more engaging user experience.

Funnel analytics

Mixpanel’s Funnels feature enables you to analyze the sequential performance of custom events used by end-users. Funnels provide insights by quantifying and presenting the number of users who transition from one event to the next within a specified time frame.

This functionality empowers you to pinpoint points of user attrition, identify segments with the highest conversion rates, track user interactions and gain valuable insights into various aspects of the user journey.

For a B2B messaging app, Funnels can help answer questions like:

• What percentage of users completed signup within 7 days?
• Where’s the primary drop-off point in the signup process?
• Did an A/B test impact signup conversions?
• How’s the conversion rate changing for the US payment funnel over time?
• What’s the average time users take to complete the payment process?

Interactive reports

Another key feature that Mixpanel Analytics has is its interactive reports. It allows you to query and visualize your data in a few seconds.

You will have the advantage of analyzing product usage in detail with interactive reports. It can help you easily analyze your usage data to see how often your users take desired actions and how engagement differs among user groups.

Mixpanel Analytics allows you to slice and dice user behavior trends to explore them from all angles. You can monitor the growth of key user cohorts, like power users, and understand how current trends compare to previous results.

Then it gets easier to answer many questions about your product usage, user retention, etc.

A/B testing

A/B testing is another crucial offering of Mixpanel Analytics. It can help you figure out which versions of your product or feature will help you reach your goals better.

With A/B testing, you can create two or more variants of your product, each with a unique set of features or design elements. Mixpanel can then track how users interact with each variant, providing detailed data on which variant performs best.

Another key advantage of A/B testing in Mixpanel is that it lets you find experiments with the greatest user impact. You can determine which variants impact user engagement, retention, and conversion by tracking their effects over time. It can help you allocate development resources to the most impactful changes.

Mixpanel marketing analytics

Mixpanel is now taking its marketing event analytics and capabilities to the next level, making it easier for marketing teams to harness the power of event-based data analytics.

With Mixpanel Marketing Analytics, teams can seamlessly gain insights across various acquisition channels and collaborate with product teams to understand the complete user journey funnel.

This transition comes as the industry recognizes the event-based model as the future of marketing analytics, bridging the gap between top-of-funnel acquisition metrics and conversion, engagement, retention, and app performance and aiming for marketing wins.

Mixpanel’s Marketing Analytics offers features like multi-touch attribution, identity resolution, and streamlined tracking, allowing teams to measure the impact of marketing campaigns, make data-driven decisions, and optimize their marketing investments effectively.

Pros and cons of Mixpanel

Like any other tool, using Mixpanel also comes with both advantages and drawbacks. Let’s have a look at them.

Mixpanel pros

• Has a lot of features and can analyze data in great detail by breaking it down into smaller parts.
• Lets you quickly make informed decisions thanks to its powerful and clear visuals.
• Highly customizable, allowing you to build exactly what you need.

Mixpanel cons

• The free plan works well for small SaaS businesses, but enterprise-grade features can be expensive depending on your needs.
• Your engineering team will need to set up and configure the tool.
• It can take some time to decide which user actions are the most important.

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Mixpanel integrations

One of the key features of Mixpanel is its ability to integrate with other software platforms and data sources. Its integrations with leading software make connecting your existing tools to the platform easy.

Mixpanel can also read directly from your data warehouses and data lakes. It means for example that you can stream events directly from your apps and servers using a customer data platform (CDP) or Mixpanel SDKs.

It does not charge for integrations with official messaging partners. You can see the list of its official messaging partners here.

Mixpanel pricing

Mixpanel offers transparent pricing with the flexibility to build your plan according to your needs. They provide three pricing tiers:

• STARTER – Free
• GROWTH – Starting at $20/month
• ENTERPRISE – Starting at $833/month

Userpilot: A better alternative to Mixpanel analytics

We have gone through Mixpanel Analytics and what you can achieve with it. But if you are looking for something better, Userpilot can offer you better value for money than Mixpanel.

Userpilot is a versatile, code-free marketing, product analytics, and customer feedback tool for SaaS businesses. It helps you analyze product usage and collect user sentiment to create personalized in-app experiences that enhance user interaction.

Userpilot analytics functionality

One of the best parts about Userpilot is that it offers comprehensive analytics functionality with a wide range of features. Let’s go through its key features to understand what value it can add to your product’s improvement

• Advanced segmentation: You can create targeted user segments based on specific parameters such as pricing plans, company, location, required actions, NPS score, and more. By segmenting users, you can analyze data more efficiently and understand user behavior trends in each segment.

• Feature tagging: It allows you to track how different user segments engage with different parts of your product. You can tag specific UI elements to gain insights into feature usage and take action to optimize your product.

• Custom events: You can create and track custom events to monitor specific user actions and better understand user behavior. It can be particularly useful to see if your users are completing desired actions within your app or website.

• Product experimentation: The built-in A/B testing and multivariate testing for flows let you test different versions of your feature and product. You can then decide on the better version by checking their performance data.

• Funnel analysis: With funnel analysis, you can easily pinpoint friction points and drop-offs in the user journey. If you notice a significant number of users failing to progress from one stage to the next, this signals an area that requires optimization. Userpilot’s funnel analysis feature allows for in-depth data breakdown, enabling detailed analysis of conversion rates.

• Flow analysis: Flow analytics empowers product teams to derive detailed insights into user interactions within in-app experiences, down to the individual step level.

• Retention analysis: With retention analysis, you can effortlessly track and analyze user retention trends over time. You will be able to view the retention rate for the last 7 days, 30 days, and 180 days, as well as custom data ranges via cohort analysis.

• Trends analysis: Trend analysis in Userpilot Analytics allows you to visualize event data at both user and company levels. You can track various metrics like how many users completed specific events, unique users, and active users (DAUs, WAUs, MAUs), along with user-specific counts. You can visualize multiple trends simultaneously, making it ideal for monitoring key activation events and feature usage.

• AI analytics: With AI analytics insights, you will be able to answer questions such as: Which user segments have higher/lower rates of retention over a time period? Are there any large changes in retention behavior over the time period?
  

  Coming to Userpilot in Q1 2024

• User sentiment analysis: Collecting user feedback can help you understand how users feel about your product. You can also customize in-app surveys and integrate NPS surveys with analytics and response tagging. It will provide in-depth insights into user sentiment and areas for improvement.

Userpilot survey analytics

Userpilot pricing

Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.

Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.

Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:

• Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
• Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).

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Conclusion

Choosing the right tool for your business is critical to driving growth. Mixpanel Analytics can be one of the best tools for your business to track and drive product growth, but it has some drawbacks.

Want to build product experiences code-free? Book a demo call with our team and get started!