At the end of the day, developers all want the same thing: to build products that are useful, beloved, and seamlessly integrated into people’s daily lives. We’ve always dissuaded customers from relying on “bullshit metrics” like DAU and MAU. In our view, a truer indicator of success is retention, which will tell you (and your investors) how sticky a product is, and how many users return to it after their first experience. Whether you’re building a game, a social network, or a CRM tool, your ideal customers are the people who engage with your product at least once every day -- better still

This is a guest post from Jonathan Kressaty, a founder and the CEO of Levers , a predictive analytics platform. Kressaty’s startup business includes SMS marketing, software consulting and digital marketing. When we started working on admin tools for Levers , we realized that there were a large number of questions we wanted to answer. Many of these requests from our team focused on event-based actions, and we knew that Mixpanel would be a great way to handle tracking that data. Our previous post here talked a lot about how we’ve built marketing processes around Mixpanel functionality;

As Android and iOS duke it out for dominance in the United States, it’s easy to forget that the fight to the top is an international one. But for app developers, especially those looking to expand beyond the stateside (and English-speaking) market, knowing where and how to localize is crucial. We took a look at the countries generating the most data from mobile apps, and then removed all countries where English is the primary language. The results surprised us: first and foremost, of all the mobile data generated by the 15 most active countries, 64% came from Android devices. Once we cracke

It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your users are? (We do.) We took a look at the data streaming into Mixpanel from across the United States, and decided to break it down by hour and region, focusing on three key areas: California, the Tri-State Area, and the Heartland. What we discovered surprised us — not to mention validated certain coastal stereotypes. At 10:00 PM across the country, the majority of people are unwinding with a game (or several): gaming apps far and away send the most data overall at this hour. In California and the Midwest, folks are also firing up their fitness apps

Over the weekend, we received reports that applications which included our iOS library were being rejected by Apple’s App Store. Apple indicated in their rejection notices that apps that did not actually display advertisements would not be allowed to access the Identifier For Advertisers (IFA). Our iOS library had been using the IFA as the default identifier for users of your apps. So any app that does not display advertisements, but does have Mixpanel, was at risk of being rejected. Though there has been an override option in previous versions to avoid using the IFA, today we released a ne

This is a guest post from Emily Timm, the Professional Services Director at Levers, a forecasting and simulation dashboard for marketers. Emily has years of experience in the virtual ecosphere, including digital marketing, startup branding, mass communication and multimedia journalism. Mixpanel’s Notifications filled a gap between emails from Levers, our sales funnel, and our customers’ in-app actions. Prior to using Mixpanel, we’d been using a confusing combination of various platforms: Campaign Monitor meshed with Tout meshed with Intercom, etcetera. We quickly tired of swapping between

Hot on the heels of the new year, we're pleased to introduce an even more powerful way to connect with your users: In-App Notifications. Designed specifically for mobile, in-app notifications are swift, native, and beautiful. But the true beauty of in-app notifications lies in their flexibility: regardless of your use case, you can build, edit, and send an in-app notification in a snap. It's now extremely easy to redirect users from one part of your app to another, introduce a new feature, make an announcement, or simply give your audience a heads-up about the news, deals, or tips of the day.

This Christmas, we saw one surefire way to get Americans to put down their phones: give them a stack of presents. While there was certainly a lot to covet this year -- from gold iPhones to personal drones -- we're of a singular mindset at Mixpanel: data is one gift that truly keeps on giving. We're pleased to give you one last, belated present: the second annual Mixpanel Christmas Metrics report. We've taken a deeper dive into metrics from December 25, 2013, to paint a portrait of consumer behavior on a day that many spend with family, friends, and handheld devices. Every month, Mixpa

Who will win the mobile OS battle? We're placing our bet and think we have the data to back it up. By the end of 2014, Android will be the dominant mobile Operating System (OS). And we're not talking about devices shipped. While that's a useful reference, it does not get at devices in hand and really is somewhat nebulous. Instead a better measure is actual consumer activity--that means actions consumers are taking on their mobile devices. So back to the actual bet: by the end of 2014, Android devices will eclipse iOS as the dominant smartphone activity generator and will grab at least

Tablets are the new battleground in tech and to understand what's happening in the tablet market you need data. We've added two new reports to Mixpanel Trends to give insight into consumer activity on tablets and which tablets they are using the most. Desktop vs mobile vs tablet activity report: In the past 10 months tablet's share of total activity has increased 3%. While it's a relatively small rise in total numbers, it is a clear demonstration that more and more consumers are using tablet devices. You can use this report to watch tablet activity over the Christmas holiday in re