
Revenue Analytics - noinput
https://mixpanel.com/revenue/
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jhuckestein
I already have a revenue property on all my users in mixpanel. It seems like
this new feature does two things

1) It keeps track of a revenue property as a time series. I.e. you can later
look at the changes of revenue for a user over time (in their HTTP API you use
a new $append command instead of $set)

2) It allows you to look at aggregate values (such as sum and average) for all
revenues of all people in a certain group

I'm curious if this is something that could be extended to arbitrary
properties on users. I operate a phone service and track usage of minutes in a
similar way. It'd be great if I could do a similar kind of analysis.

It would be even better, if people analytics and events tied in a little more
closely. I'm already tracking a "Charge succeeded" event that's tied to a
distinct_id. If I could segment events by people properties (i.e. show me the
"Charge succeeded" events for all people with Source=x), I could use the
aggregate functions of the segmentation screen to do a lot of what revenue
analytics provides and much more. I also wouldn't have to redundantly attach
people properties to all my events anymore. Currently all of my events contain
all people properties (such as Revenue, Number of minutes used, etc), so that
I can segment by them.

In case suhail or anyone else is following along this thread, it'd be great to
hear your thinking.

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suhail
We hear you and we're thinking about how. It's a huge engineering/scalability
challenge given the amount of data a single customer potentially can have.

~~~
jhuckestein
Thanks Suhail! I'd gladly compromise on convenience/ease of use to make it
easier to build (I'm sure you're more careful about making those trade offs
for the less technically inclined users though)

For instance, I'd be happy to manually designate a small number of events and
properties as available for the revenue-like analysis. I could say "For all
_Amount_ properties on all _Charge succeeded_ events, I want to be able to see
the average value per user, the sum per user and the sum across all events on
all users". Technically that doesn't seem much different from what you already
built except I could maybe add two or three of my own events.

As for segmenting events by people properties, it seems like you already have
most of the infrastructure in place. Events are indexed by distinct_id and I
can use the People tool to retrieve a list of distinct_ids of people matching
certain criteria. Tying that together would be huge.

The related but different functionality of segmenting events by the people
properties as they were when the event occurred is less important to me (this
is what I can already do by copying people properties into each event). I can
see how this would be a bigger headache. On the other hand though, you're
already allowing us to do this because there's no restriction on the number of
properties on an event.

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ianstormtaylor
Awesome to see Mixpanel getting into the revenue game, since it's pretty much
the most important thing to get a handle on.

We've just added support for revenue in Analytics.js this morning! (Just track
a `revenue` property on your events and we'll take care of the differences
between Mixpanel, KISSmetrics and the rest of the providers.)

~~~
jot
First thing I wondered when I saw the announcement was how long until you'd
support it :)

Great work!

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azifali
Sorry to dissapoint you guys @ Mixpanel, but Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per
Sale metric is a very standard feature in most advertising systems...something
that doesn't even get mentioned.

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jskopek
Mixpanel is still fairly early in the game, but their development pace is
pretty rapid. They also seem to be able to build on existing features pretty
well; for example, they rolled out the ability to build user profiles a few
months ago, and then the ability to message those profiles a couple months
later.

I've used GA, KISSMetrics and now Mixpanel, and I've been personally been
really happy with them. Nearly everything is there, and the missing parts look
like they're being worked on.

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amccloud
I wonder how this could integrate with ad revenue.

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j_s
Orthogonal to this discussion, I use Ghostery because I don't believe MixPanel
and their customer's best interests always align with my best interest.

I only mention this here because the linked page does not work when JavaScript
is enabled but MixPanel is not. Defensive programming, people!

Timestamp: 1/29/2013 1:28:52 PM Error: TypeError: mp.landing is undefined
Source File: <https://mixpanel.com/revenue/> Line: 98

~~~
jhuckestein
I share some of your concerns, but I just wanted to point out that this is not
something about Mixpanel or tracking services. It's just the way web
applications works. At the very least, the server that the app is running on
will always know all your actions because otherwise it couldn't respond to
them!

~~~
j_s
As I explained elsewhere, the problem is when 3rd parties track users across
completely different websites.

Your point regarding how the web works makes sense on an individual request
basis, but imagine something like Scroogle over Tor... sure my actions would
be known, but 'which my' would not.

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spitfire
That link seems to be missing CSS. The content is fine, but it looks straight
out of circa 1995 internet (minus the "under construction" sign).

~~~
trefn
Ghostery (or something similar) may be blocking everything on cdn.mxpnl.com,
which would prevent both css and js from loading.

~~~
spitfire
safari adblock was the culprit here.

However, I'm not going to turn it off to see their site, so they should
probably figure a way to rectify the issue.

