
Amazon Mobile Analytics - stevewilhelm
http://aws.amazon.com/mobileanalytics/?sc_channel=TA&sc_campaign=mobile_analytics&sc_publisher=Techmeme&sc_medium=Sponsor_posts&sc_category=web_mobile_social&sc_content=TA_Sponsor_post_A&sc_detail=TA_Techmeme.com_mobile_analytics_Sponsor_post_A
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espitia
Wow! Considering that Mixpanel charges $2000 for 20MM data points, this is
awesome. Love how the cost of starting up just keeps getting lower and lower.
:)

Also, I understand that Amazon includes 'System Events' in their free tier.
Even with this included, at an average of 15 custom events + 5 system events,
you can have 5MM sessions a month for FREE. This is more than enough for
bootstrapped companies/projects to start and grow with.

I'm not sure who the customers for these analytics companies are (small
projects that grow with them vs big projects that join them) but if it is the
latter, well Amazon is def. the better choice. Although they do not offer any
complex funnels/segmentation, I am sure this and other features will be added
in the future.

Thinking about Peter Thiel's monopoly vs competition eating profits (Zero to
One, awesome book!), I wonder if and how players in this space will be able to
differentiate themselves enough to really have a competitive advantage over
one another.

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suhail
_Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Mixpanel_

This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google
Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is
expensive!

Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing
as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if
I am wrong):

\- Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of this free tier and the paid
tiers. Start and End events are going to put reasonably sized apps into the
billions.

\- If you manage to get rid of said system events, big parts of the dashboard
are likely to be rendered useless like DAU, MAU, retention, etc.

\- You cannot deeply segment any of this information so you will have a lot of
questions remaining even just the next day

\- It will be difficult to offer funnel analysis (which doesn't exist) that is
retroactive at that scale. That means you will get the same kind of funnel
that people hate with Google Analytics' goals.

\- Generally speaking: complexity of analysis will mean higher prices

While Mixpanel pricing may seem expensive by comparison, the products are not
comparable. You get what you pay for in the level of sophisticated analysis.

Given that, over time it is our plan to lower prices relative to the rate that
hardware and infrastructure becomes less expensive. We think that's fair. And
if we can improve our technology to become more efficient we most certainly
want to make our software and products more accessible.

We are very open to your thoughts so please be harsh and candid (as I know HN
can be). We deeply care about our startup customers who made and pushed us
into who we are today.

~~~
michokest
As a second-time founder, I found Mixpanel to be the most expensive piece of
SaaS we were using in our stack: at barely 30k users, it was already far more
expensive than our whole hosting bill combined!

Then I switched solutions for a while, looking for a good combination that'd
give me Facebook attribution data plus user behavior. So far, I haven't found
my ideas combination and in a way, Amazon doesn't change that.

I find that solutions like segment.io are great in the way that you can
install their SDK just once, and have that proxy the events to all other SDKs.
For now that's what I chose to do, to avoid week-long delays for approval
publishing our apps in the app store.

~~~
alooPotato
We effectively went through the same thing - moved off of mixpanel when it got
too expensive.

We instead started throwing all of our events into Google big query. You can
steam events directly into a table or proxy then through your server to add
more metadata. You can even use mixpanels great open source client libraries
and point them at your servers.

Initially I was worried that we would miss mixpanels built in analysis and
tools but we honestly preferred querying a database with SQL better. The
tricky queries are the funnels but once you wrote the query once you can just
save the template. The only thing we had to build was a chrome extension that
could graph the results of an arbitrary query.

~~~
blumkvist
Thanks for sharing! I'm not a developer, but an analyst. I know SQL fairly
well and some javascript, but no coding experience apart from writing code for
google analytics. How easy/cheap would it be to build a custom analytics
solution like that? It's probably beyond my personal skills, but do you think
it's possible for someone with my skillset to find a developer and supervise
them? Can you point me to some resources or stories of it being done?

~~~
alexatkeplar
We recently launched mobile SDKs for iOS and Android at Snowplow
([https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow)),
so that's probably the easier route to go than a full-blown custom build :-)

~~~
blumkvist
Yeah seems good and I will check it in depth. It seems not provided out of the
box, but I assume I can use MS SQL/HDInsight as a backend, instead of
Redshift? Maybe you should consider including Azure as an infrastructure
partner. I'm a consultant in the non-valley space (rest of the world). Lots of
folks like me are looking for what you've developed. Most are pretty big MS
fanboys. Just saying :)

~~~
alexatkeplar
Great! Yep we're not based in the Valley either. Our first focus is on AWS and
Redshift, but yes Azure is interesting too :-)

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matm
(Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Heap. We build mobile analytics, so I'm far from
impartial.)

Amazon's main purpose in building an analytics tool is to drive spend to the
Amazon App Store. If you can't measure the ROI of their app store, you can't
devote more resources to it.

This applies to just about all the big tech companies and their respective
distribution platforms: Google with AdWords, Facebook with mobile ads, and
Apple with the iOS app store. _Lots of dollars flow through these platforms_ ,
and Amazon/Facebook/Apple don't want their developers measuring those dollars
with a hostile competitor's analytics offering. (Often, the hostile competitor
they have in mind is Google.)

You'll notice this in the screenshots for Amazon's mobile analytics. On the
Overview page, note the breakdown of "Lifetime Value Per User". There are
separate figures for iOS users, Android users, and...Fire OS users. A line
item for "Fire iOS users" would never be so prominent in Google or Apple's
analytics (or even present).

Thus, Amazon et al. focus on making their own analytics tools good at
measuring acquisition (prioritizing their own channels) and some high-level
metrics. Digging into the data is much less of a priority. Even basic
questions - "what's the conversion rate for my signup flow?", "what are the
email addresses of my active users?", "what percent of my revenue comes from
repeat visits?" \- require you to use a different tool.

Bigger companies are aware of this feature gap and happy to pay the price
premium. But startups are (appropriately) more price-sensitive, even though a
solid investment in growth/analytics is arguably _more_ important for
startups.

I'd love to hear HN's feedback on how Heap (and other analytics companies) can
structure their pricing to better accommodate small companies.

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swanson
"1st party" analytics on Android is a bit weird at the moment. Since Google
Analytics for Mobile requires Google Play Services - you can't use it in for
installations on Amazon Fire devices. Of course there are third party services
(Crashlytics, Mixpanel, etc), but it's just interesting to see Amazon and
Google essentially forced to build their own versions of each other's services
to compete on Android.

~~~
dublinben
Are Android devices without GPS a large enough market for you to worry about?
I didn't think that anyone was actually distributing a significant amount of
apps through the Amazon market.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Many of the devs I know aren't, but then they haven't put much effort into
Amazon. Amazon App Store is basically Amazon Fire tablet users only. The
Amazon Phone has barely sold so can be discounted for right now. Other than
that, the folks who install the Amazon store... which requires manually
enabling 3rd party apps on your Android phone and then installing it... are
folks looking to get the free apps Amazon gives away to get people to use
their store. So, not only is it a much smaller audience, it isn't necessarily
the best quality audience. That's what I've heard anecdotally at least.

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jakozaur
Mobile analytics is relatively new Amazon offering. Seems follow their typical
approach, start with low prices with small number of features and build new
ones.

Amazon unlikely will be the best solution (e.g. I bet Mixpanel will be
significantly better for at least next few years), but they may cover a lot of
typical use cases. That will commoditize the user event analytics and put
pressure on the other companies.

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prebrov
Very basic dashboard and reporting made me think it must be all about APIs and
reusing data in other AWS products.

You know, Analytics + SNS + SES would make up a nice a little marketing
automation solution and I wouldn't mind building my own reports in R or
whatever.

However, there's no way to retrieve and reuse any data through the API. Seems
like a major opportunity loss with AWS users as target audience.

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louo
Disclosure: I work for Localytics.

Overall I agree with Suhail’s points regarding GA being the closest proxy for
this service. You do get what you pay for when it comes to advanced analytics.
If anything Amazon’s move shows that simple data collection around analytics
is becoming commoditized. We tend to price based on MAU’s rather than events
to help customers with predictability, but given that event data points are
the basis of our (and pretty much all analytics company’s) cost model, that
can present challenges.

The problem being highlighted in this thread is that the value derived from
advanced analytics doesn’t justify the cost in the minds of a lot of startups.
There are a variety of reasons for this: not enough users, deeper insights are
“interesting” but not game-changing, complex to set up, hard to understand,
requires lots of event tagging, etc.

Here’s one way to think about the value of more advanced analytics: they are
primarily valuable for startups when they power the ability to take action on
them (i.e. In the form of marketing campaigns). For example, if creating
intricate and specific funnels and flows seems like overkill for your startup
e-commerce app, would the value increase if you could send a push or in-app
message to users who have dropped at a specific point in a funnel but have
purchased before? I suspect that it would, but clearly the value fluctuates
depending on the stage and context of your app.

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siliconc0w
This seems awesome but it could really use more real time metrics and more
sophisticated reports/funneling/cohorting.

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skram
This is great especially considering the REST API meaning this can be adapted
to other environments other than mobile...

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gorkemcetin
You may also want try an open source (self-hosted) solution like Countly
([https://count.ly](https://count.ly)). It may well meet expectations if free-
to-use Community Edition
([https://count.ly/products/editions/community](https://count.ly/products/editions/community))
is what you'd need. If not, you can go with Enteprise Edition
([https://count.ly/products/editions/enterprise](https://count.ly/products/editions/enterprise))
which is also open source, self hosted, but with a lot more features like
drill-down events, funnels and retention (cohorts).

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raquo
That free tier is quite generous – worth about $140/mo if you were to exceed
it by the amount of free allowance. Need to be careful if you rely on it being
free, and then grow.

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bosky101
lot of saas companies offer metadata & other common metrics, as an addon to
their main offering. such as crittercism, testflight, bugsense, crashlytics
and helpshift.

i've headed analytics/targeting at a yc company in the past before mixpanel,
flurry were in the market, and saw first-hand how portability/dumps of the
data made a big difference as you grow - something that not all analytics saas
companies provide.

disclosure: i work @helpshift and we have several customers who may have 100M+
data points/week but we dont price based on data points. we give the basic
active, engagement and session metrics like amazon, and search/faq metrics
within our sdk. slice-n-dice reports based on custom events are coming soon.

but our pricing is aligned around in-app customer support & active users. we
dont track/charge for metadata, breadcrumbs and you can tie as much data to an
issue/user (much like Parse out-of-box). most of our users have several sdk's
and we're fine with that too.

that said, i see a lot of value in heap/keen/segment that make it less
important where/how the data is and let you focus on what insight to surface

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hoopscity
+1 for [http://keen.io](http://keen.io)

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dengjh
i try mixpanel, it has best solution for startup, also have highest price.

