

Mixpanel introduces People Analytics - trefn
http://mixpanel.com/people

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flatline3
If this associates analytics with personal data, it is a tremendous invasion
of privacy, _especially_ in the mobile space where it is not expected that
interacting with a local application would send your usage data to a remote
server.

~~~
rogerbinns
Our experience in the mobile space with mixpanel was extremely disappointing.
For anyone who wants to try it I strongly recommend you do a non-trivial trial
run first, and verify everything.

One example of something that bit us was that the mixpanel servers modify the
time stamp from a client if it is in the future. It turns out this happens
quite regularly with mobile devices (especially Android). Consequently a batch
of data coming in would all have the same time stamp destroying the ability to
see what happened over time.

Another example is that Mixpanel will add country information to incoming
data, but refuse to add to regional information so the only thing you know
about US users is that they were in the US.

~~~
JanezStupar
Another dissatisfied Mixpanel lead here (who didn't get past the evaluation
phase).

I also got bitten by their handling of timestamp.

e.g. - scenario:

Your users create bookings (which are normally done in the future).

How do you approach this? Well you submit a date field in the document you
send to Mixpanel. But then you figure out that ONLY time axis supported by
Mixpanel is their timestamp. Which could make sense for an off the shelf
service, since you probably really don't want to build indexes against random
user data.

Ok, take 2 - so I only have one X axis available (the Mixpanel Timestamp),
however you soon figure out that Mixpanel just silently prunes your future
timestamp to @now.

The worst part for me was Mixpanel teams total bewilderment as to why anybody
would want either additional time axes OR future timestamps.

Guys your service really shows promise for building a fast and simple to use
analytics. I really don't want to roll my own analytics service just to show
simple activity timelines to my customers. I also don't want to maintain and
support the infrastructure necesary - at least not at this time. Please
realize that there are other cases for real time analytics besides funneling
users towards "Buy now!" or "Signup now!" pages.

Are there any similar alternatives (I searched quite a bit but found nothing)
or on the other hand if there are not - would there be anybody interested in
joining up with me to build a service.

~~~
suhail
People's UI actually supports changing the x-axis so this problem is handled.
We plan on bringing the same UI to other parts of Mixpanel soon. This problem
will be fixed - sorry!

~~~
JanezStupar
Really nice.

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richardv
I had some trouble setting this up. Already a MixPanel customer, incase you
were not aware, you need to update your API include. (Follow the links from
your dashboard for the snippet).

If you want to see the power of how useful this really is, you should look at
:

<https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript>

I think that the "Sales Page" doesn't do this new service justice. It's quite
staggering how useful this is. It basically allows you to segment your users
and keep in touch with users of whom you have identified might be power users,
or users who might fall into your "danger cohort". For example, you might
notice a trend that users who don't "do event X" within the last 7 days, are
most likely not going to return.

Tracking the events in your application and then identifying these events as
originating from a particular user, allows you to then find these users.

This is of course just one example.

Look at the documentation on People Analytics for more ideas...

<https://mixpanel.com/docs/people-analytics/javascript>

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digitalboss
This is great to see, trying right now.

Btw - We've avoided this in past using Google Analytics as in the TOS they
mention (<http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html>).

7\. PRIVACY . You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the
Service to track or collect personally identifiable information of Internet
users, nor will You (or will You allow any third party to) associate any data
gathered from Your website(s) (or such third parties' website(s)) with any
personally identifying information from any source as part of Your use (or
such third parties' use) of the Service. You will have and abide by an
appropriate privacy policy and will comply with all applicable laws relating
to the collection of information from visitors to Your websites. You must post
a privacy policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie
that collects anonymous traffic data.

Hadn't heard of <https://www.intercom.io/> \- thanks for sharing @reustle.

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edhallen
As stated, it's crucial that privacy be fully respected for users. The key
thing may not necessarily be knowing exactly who someone is, but instead
knowing what they've done (which features they use and how often, which
marketing emails they open, which support tickets they file, etc) and using
this to give users better experiences personalized around their history of
interactions. Providing this type of experience from web companies is what
we're working on at Klaviyo (<http://www.klaviyo.com>).

In most cases, companies are tracking all of this data, just in multiple
different systems and not bothering to pull it together (i.e. why do I get
emails about product features I already use?) to use to make my life better.

On privacy, companies need to make sure they are being open with users. For
most of these so-called "people analytics" companies can choose whether to
include personally identifiable info. Companies need to be intentional, and
should choose to anonymize customer data when they can (but should still treat
people uniquely based on their past interactions, even if they can't put a
name on someone).

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kmfrk
I will reserve any judgement of the service, until I see it in action. I think
an example dashboard - that doesn't require registration - would do more good
than harm in alleviating users' privacy concerns.

Even so, all analytics services are basically privacy atrocities, and as such
I don't think Mixpanel should receive a disproportionate amount of resentment.

User information utility and privacy are mutually exclusive.

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reustle
Interesting, but the guys over at <http://intercom.io> have been doing this
for some time now.

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henryl
This is revolutionary and really closes the collect data -> analyze -> act
feedback loop. Come to think of it, it really minds me of a DMP. If I were
building a consumer app today, MP would be a big part of my growth strategy.

~~~
chexton
Excuse my ignorance, what's the acronym DMP stand for?

~~~
brandnewlow
Data Management Platform: [http://www.adopsinsider.com/online-ad-measurement-
tracking/d...](http://www.adopsinsider.com/online-ad-measurement-
tracking/data-management-platforms/what-are-data-management-platforms/)

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physcab
User privacy concerns aside (yes, I realize that is a _big_ aside), I feel
like there are only a handful of use cases where knowing this user data is
actually helpful in analytics scenarios, and anything beyond just feels creepy
to know.

1) More intelligent marketing spend. If you know you have a higher LTV for
females for your app between the ages of 18-34 and you do a portion of your
advertising on Facebook, it would be good to target just those users.

2) Insights into broad customer engagement. Let's say your 18-34 female users
return to your application more often than male users in the same demographic,
it'd be helpful to know what friction points cause these users to drop off.

3) Insights into spending users. Being able to segment all your user actions
by those who are free and those who spend money would help you optimize your
paying funnel.

4) Bug reporting. Knowing where your users are located can help illuminate
whether you have server and localization problems.

I can't think of any reasons why you'd use this information to voluntarily
contact users other than support-related issues. If Netflix sent me an email
that said "We think you'd like these movies because other males liked these
movies" I'd probably de-activate immediately.

~~~
petenixey
I'm often surprised when people ask "what's the point in knowing these
metrics". The point is simply that anything gives a better insight into use
behaviour and user needs is immensely valuable.

If we were physically interacting with our users (i.e. we ran a shop or a
community centre) we'd be using thousands of signals to determine who needed
help, who was afraid, who was ready to purchase more and who was making
trouble.

As developers we try to cultivate online social environments, socially-engaged
shops, games which envelop the user and collaborative business tools but with
absolutely none of these emotional cues. That's hard.

Imagine trying to design an amusement park if all you had was an anonymous
ping each time someone went on a ride. The value to all of us (and to the
users) in these new wave of analytics is to take us closer to the user and let
us feel what they feel and service them where they need to be serviced.

Asking why one should do that is about the same as asking why you'd need to
watch people queuing for the rides in an amusement park in order to improve
the queues. Because if you don't you won't know what the user feels, wants or
needs.

(Side note: what mixpanel is doing is incredible and they really are a
pleasure to use. There is a Zen quality to their product and the way it gives
you great power from great simplicity (although a custom dash would be great,
ty! ))

~~~
physcab
Oh, I assure you, I know the importance of measurement. I'm an analyst for a
large social game company :)

My point is, it doesn't help you to measure something that isn't actionable.
And my list above was just the four that I can think of where gender, age, and
location details actually helped across many of the applications I've studied.

I agree with you that the goal of analytics is the help improve your products,
but its easy to be misled to the wrong conclusions. Sometimes, too much data
may actually be harmful to your business.

~~~
petenixey
I do appreciate what you mean about actionability and tbh it's hard for me to
comment on this new mixpanel feature set as there's not too much information
on the sales pages.

However I've been investing a lot of time and code in Analytics and in
mixpanel recently and while I would definitely agree that not all data is
actionable, it doesn't stop it being useful or worth investing in as long as I
take the time to examine (and prune) it afterwards.

What I find exciting is that these new types of Analytics open up value in for
product design in a way that just wasn't practical without a tonne of custom
dev before.

However, just as a new boss taking time to talk to each employee in the
company isn't predictably actionable but still has vast value, so these new
Analytics tools allow us to understand users in way that is not always
actionable but is invariably valuable. The only real question surely is "is it
valuable enough"?

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hammerdr
Something that many B2C developers may not be aware of, but for businesses
that interact with a small number of users (most of B2B), it can be incredibly
important to track a specific user. The expectations of privacy are definitely
altered and many customers would be delighted to have direct contact with a
customer experience team that knows their exact behaviors.

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dpritchett
I feel that this is one of those "great for data miners, terrifying for
consumers" moments.

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karlwirth
Apptegic, <http://www.apptegic.com>, has also been offering this for a while.
We let mobile and web companies understand what each user is doing in their
app on a per user and per account basis, and then respond directly to that
user in Salesforce, by email, or real-time in-app.

On privacy, we designed in an inability to correlate user data across our
customers. So, for example, we cannot know that an end user of Apptegic
Customer A is also the same end user of Apptegic Customer B. With this in
place, the data is used only for our customers to understand and better serve
their customers.

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dflock
Has anyone has chance to try this yet? How is this different to what
KISSMetrics does?

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jhuckestein
I'm curious if these people properties can be used on the segmentation screen?

We're were doing something similar with mixpanel, except (in mixpanel client-
side parlance this is called super properties) we have to send all attributes
such as "number of pages viewed", "amount of money paid" with all our events
in order to segment by that data.

And sending emails based on analytics is incredible! I've always wanted to
build that for my app but didn't have the resources to. Is it horrible to
gloss over the privacy concerns?

~~~
chexton
I will also be curious to see this. It seems logical to think you'll be able
to use this people data to segment in the future, I think it's a huge part of
the value of this new feature.

Also, if you're interested in automating emails based on analytics you should
checkout <http://getvero.com> (disclaimer: I'm a founder). We're working on a
Mixpanel integration as I type so we should pick up right where Mixpanel
leaves off :).

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tlrobinson
Is there anything stopping someone from using the JavaScript library to mess
with your analytics by typing a little JavaScript in their console?

It seems like at the very least it should support server-side validation of
user ids based on their cookie or something, so a user can only screw with
their own stats.

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khangtoh
This is amazing. This is pretty much what we have seen lacking as far as using
Mixpanel. Thanks to the awesome work.

That said, as a customer, I felt that Mixpanel could have been a little more
transparent with their roadmap.

It would have been _A LOT_ much better for customers like us to know that was
in the pipeline for rolling out and would have saved us a lot of unnecessary
headaches and pains.

~~~
chexton
100% agree, this was my only real complaint when it came to recommending
Mixpanel, great to see full user history elegantly laid out!

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justauser
Thank you Ghostery and friends.

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duiker101
now i feel really stalked.

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jasonwilk
Interesting stuff. I know PipeWise has been innovating in this space as well
which we're currently testing out.

