Best practices for getting started with Mixpanel

Our hope here is to provide a more up to date outline of some of the best practices for quickly getting up and running with Mixpanel.

We advise you begin by instrumenting only a small handful of key metrics. We think you’ll be amazed how much value you can get out of even just 5 events. By starting your implementation small, you can quickly separate signal from noise, and begin from day one with a manageable reporting environment that you can share with your co workers. You’ll also be able to start making decisions based on your data faster, allowing the tool to demonstrate its value before additional development time and effort are spent on a more elaborate implementation. Furthermore, a small implementation is also easier to fix if, for instance, after chatting on the phone with a Solutions Architect you decide you’d like to adopt a new system of organizing or naming your events and properties.

One easy way to start small is to envision a single funnel, measuring one of the most important processes on your site or in your app (sign-up, or purchase funnels are good choices). Try choosing the steps of that funnel as your first few events.

Properties are the place to articulate all the details associated with an event. Properties fall into two camps: event specific (like the revenue associated with a purchase event) and user specific (like demographic
information about the user). The user specific data we call “super properties.” For example, you might want to send the gender, age, or traffic source of a particular user along with their events. All the user specific data is stored in a cookie (on the web) or in a local object (on native mobile) and appended onto all subsequent events for that user. A rich set of event and user specific properties will allow added agility in reporting, since mixpanel lets you drill down and inspect the intersections of many different properties across all reporting. It’s important to keep in mind that properties are entirely defined by you. Do your best to avoid storing details in event names that could be stored in properties. For example, don’t do mixpanel.track(“Facebook Share”). Do something like this: mixpanel.track(“Share”, {“Network”: “Facebook”}). More on that here.

Employing this strategy makes Mixpanel’s UI and reporting significantly more powerful and easier to understand.

We advise always using clear, human readable event and property names. This makes your reports much easier for everyone on your team to understand. There’s no reason you can’t use spaces as opposed to underscores if you’d like. Naming things nicely makes reporting more navigable for everyone on your team. For example, don’t use us a property name “c_id” for the id associated with a video channel if you don’t have to. Why not send us a property called “Channel” and use a plain-text representation of the channel name as opposed to a raw numeric id?

As you continue to expand and improve you mixpanel implementation, keep track of the choices you’ve made about what to track with an implementation specification.

A common question is “how do we delete some old development data we sent while we were instrumenting?” The answer, unfortunately here, is that you cannot. We advise all customers to create at least two projects. If our project was called “Mixpanel” then we would call one project “Mixpanel – Dev.” and the other “Mixpanel – Prod.” Use logic in your code to swap out the two project tokens for when you’re developing and pushing to production. It costs you nothing extra to have multiple projects as we price based only on the amount of data you send us.

One of the most important properties in mixpanel is distinct_id. Distinct_id is a property that is sent with every mixpanel event, and it is what we use to determine uniqueness across all reports. In JS or in the iOS/Android SDKs you can let mixpanel handle distinct_id for you, but you can also choose to control it yourself. You can set distinct_id using the identify method. You can grab distinct_id using mixpanel.get_property(“distinct_id”) in JS (or the equivalent in our mobile SDKs).

A common question is what to do when an anonymous piece of traffic traverses the signup funnel and then finally converts to a user. If you are setting the distinct_id yourself (to say your internal user id) so that if a registered user comes back on a new machine, or after clearing their cookies, you’d like to keep tracking them as the same user. You may then find yourself changing the distinct_id part way through a funnel, which will break your funnel! And unfortunately there is no way to change the distinct_id of an event that has already been sent to mixpanel. Oh no!

The best practice here is to allow mixpanel’s JS library (or mobile SDK) to issue its own automatic distinct_id value to a user when they visit your site. Allow the user to send events from that distinct_id as they traverse the signup funnel. At the time of registration (if you are using mixpanel’s JavaScript library v. 2.2 or later) then you can fire mixpanel.alias(“whatever_you_aliasing_to”) to alias that previous id to your newly issued internal id. From then on, when that user returns and authenticates, ensure that they have the id you just aliased by using mixpanel.register({“distinct_id”: “whatever_you_aliased_to”}) or mixpanel.identify(“whatever_you_aliased_to”). That way you ensure that the signup funnel does not break, and also that you continue to attribute all post authentication activity to that user, using the same id as originally used in the signup funnel. More on aliasing here.

The Engagement section of reporting pulls and renders event-based data. The People analytics section pulls and renders People data. Right now these two data types are totally separate from one another. That said, often data is sent to both. For instance, when registering a super property marking a user as paid=true, it makes sense to send both people data and event data.

Javascript is the most robust library we have for integrating Mixpanel into your website. You are of course welcome to host the JS library locally, or to modify it if you desire, but unless you have a good reason, we recommend using our snippit that pulls the full library asynchronously from our CDN. Our Javascript has many features to make instrumentation as easy as possible, and if you use our snippit, you will be able to tap into updates that we make to the library without changing your code at all (in most cases).

In some cases, sending events server side makes more sense. For these instances, we offer more functionally limited libraries in many server side languages (python, php, ruby, etc.).

The javascript library works well for mobile applications that consit of html5 views, but for native apps we advise using our native Android and iOS SDKs. Our mobile SDKs are mature, offer the same functional richness as the javascript library, and the strategy for implementation is similar.

If you’re a paid customer, the user who “owns” (is the admin of) the project must also hold the billing information for the project. You can email support@mixpanel.com if you wish to transfer your project or billing info to a different mixpanel account.

If you have similar user behavior coming from multiple platforms (perhaps a Facebook game which also has a mobile version), we recommend you send all the data to one project and track the platform the data came from as a super property. That way you can look at one user’s behavior across platforms, and choose whether or not to view all user activity on the same set of axes, or filter down to a particular platform. This is of course only recommended when the basic actions taken by users are similar enough to be described with the same set of event names (properties can be different).

Mixpanel is very flexible and open ended tool. You can use it for anything from measuring how your users fair slaying digital monsters, to QAing a back-end fix, or monitoring and tweaking performance metrics such as how long it takes a UI to render. Anything that can be thought of as an “event” with “properties” can be tracked with mixpanel. Furthermore you can send us data from literally anything that can send an http request. Hacking our data model is not just expected but heartily encouraged. So use your imagination when you send events and properties. Don’t let traditional ideas about web analytics limit the questions you can answer in a data driven way. And if you come up with a new or cool use for the tool drop us a line at support@mixpanel.com so we can brag about you!