
Introducing Predict – see who will convert, before they do - amitmathew
https://mixpanel.com/blog/2015/11/17/introducing-predict-see-who-will-convert-before-they-do
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gingerlime
I love mixpanel, and this looks really promising. There's still a bit too much
magic to my liking here. Not entirely sure how accurate this thing is... I
asked their support how their algorithm calculates the grades, and this is
what they said:

> _" In essence, it analyzes users who have converted and not converted on the
> specified event in the past, and attempts to construct a few default
> profiles based on the characteristics of those users, both in their events
> behavior and their people properties. Then, it compares these default
> profiles to your actual people profiles, and places each profile in the
> bucket that that profile most resembles. So that's how we end up with the
> grades A, B, C, and D, and place users in those buckets."_

It sounds good in theory, but I'd be quite interested in false positive /
false negative rates or something a bit more transparent.

Still, this can potentially be a big differentiator for Mixpanel. I guess
we'll try to target those 'high confidence' users and see how well they
convert...

~~~
jonknee
> It sounds good in theory, but I'd be quite interested in false positive /
> false negative rates or something a bit more transparent.

I believe it's machine learning, difficult to make transparent. That said it
should be easy to test if changing your marketing to different levels of
likely customers changes your total conversion rate.

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gk1
As a conversion optimization consultant this is interesting, but I'm not
jumping to pay for the extra $150/month (at least) for this until I see a
convincing case study or experiment result.

Here's a low-tech way of increasing conversions: Talk to your customers, your
sales prospects, and people in your target audience. Ask them what information
they look for when looking for software (or whatever you're selling), whether
they're able to find it on your site, whether it's convincing, do they still
have any doubts and what are they, what next step would they take if they're
interested (request a demo? call someone? email someone?), etc etc.

You may find, for example, that a lot of people misunderstand something
critical about your product. Or that they prefer to talk someone before
signing up for a trial. Or the pricing page wasn't clear to them. Or they
didn't see a certain detail about your product and assumed it doesn't have it.

If you can't talk to those people, then talk to your sales team and get this
info from them... They talk to prospective users all day so they should know
about their concerns and questions. If they're getting the same question
frequently, put the damn answer on your homepage, pricing page, contact page,
...

An algorithm isn't going to figure these things out for you, at least not yet.

(To turn the tables, I suspect Mixpanel would get a lot more upgrades for this
feature if they included a case study or test result along with this
announcement.)

There are too many products out there (probably less sophisticated than
Mixpanel, I admit) that promise higher conversions with super-duper
intelligent timing and segmentation... And most of them fall short.

~~~
rdoar
If you're already paying for an event plan, you get 10 thousand user profiles
for free. Gives you a little bit of room to test it out without spending the
extra 150/month.

~~~
gk1
Huh... Interesting. Their public pricing page doesn't mention that (or I
missed it), and the account upgrade screen (when logged in) doesn't mention
any pricing at all, so this wasn't clear to me. Thanks for clearing that up.

EDIT: Seems the terms are different if you're on their "badge" program. I
suggest just chatting with them and asking what it would cost, if anything.

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amitmathew
I'm a Mixpanel customer and this is very interesting. Mixpanel suggests the
main thing to do with this data is messaging the users that are likely to
convert, but I'm more interested in finding out what are the indicators that
makes someone likely to convert and optimizing for that.

This feature also supports my theory that analytics companies are really going
to become broader marketing companies, so instead of focusing on just
gathering and visualizing data, they will give you more ways of acting on that
data.

~~~
Sujan
> analytics companies are really going to become broader marketing companies,
> so instead of focusing on just gathering and visualizing data, they will
> give you more ways of acting on that data.

This tends to happen when they run out of money or start looking to make more
money. See UrbanAirship, Localytics and many more. Good thing: It works for
them. Bad thing: Products tend to get more expensive and to expensive for the
small/hobby guys.

~~~
amitmathew
I agree that the products get more expensive, although I like the idea of
centralizing some of these data-driven marketing efforts through our
analytics. Otherwise you have to buy 10 different tools and get them all to
talk to each other.

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Sujan
If this really works (well), this could really be an awesome tool. Especially
in connection with a notification, an in-app message, or email.

(By the way: The "people" features are an add-on that you have to pay by user,
additionally to the engagement data points)

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gonyea
I've done this in the past with a pretty basic time series model. The accuracy
was incredibly high and allowed us to forecast financial results months into
the future.

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codesuela
am I the only one who expected some kind of intelligence surveillance project
after reading the title?

