How Mixpanel Marketing Analytics unlocks full user journey analysis

Like a lot of software companies, we have an ongoing core focus at Mixpanel to push growth. About a year ago, we were in the middle of a sprint to increase paid customers when we hit a speed bump.

Though our marketing team at the time was reporting healthy acquisition in Google Analytics leading to high numbers of new signups, our product team’s Mixpanel dashboard showed conversion from those signups to paying customers was low. It took some digging, but after comparing notes across analytics tools, we realized most of the users who weren’t upgrading in Mixpanel came in through the same acquisition channels. It’s a problem that could have been caught—and a marketing strategy that could have been changed—much sooner if our different teams weren’t siloed off analyzing different parts of the user journey: pre-signup vs. signup-to-purchase.

This was the beginning of our internal journey of aligning core metrics cross-functionally, starting by building the full user journey in Mixpanel so we could holistically look at our users‘ experience. It also accelerated our desire to offer the same analysis to all of our marketing and product team customers, and with the launch of Mixpanel Marketing Analytics, that’s finally here.

Activating users who will get the most value out of your product starts many steps—and many events—before signup. To meet this, you have to grow the right kind of awareness and curiosity through targeting with ads or other channels and then provide effective content on your website once potential users arrive.

By incorporating Mixpanel’s new Marketing Analytics features with a solid product analytics foundation, you can get answers about all of the above and more to help you build a comprehensively designed full user journey experience.

Being able to marry post-login identified activity with pre-login anonymous activity (including channels users interact with even before your website) is the real secret sauce to getting a clear picture of the full user journey. We’ve simplified this with ID Merge, which even pulls in activity from the same user across multiple devices into one holistic user activity stream. Mixpanel also integrates seamlessly with the most widely used customer data platforms like Twilio Segment so you can add even more profile data to your analyses and responsive strategies.

With multi-touch attribution (in beta), you can identify which channels are the most effective in driving engagement and conversion in your product. The ability to look at multiple touchpoints provides richer input by considering all the channels, irrespective of whether they were direct or assisted. In addition to that, the ability to ingest ad performance data like ad spend, clicks, and impressions into Mixpanel makes it possible to calculate an ROAS (return on ad spend) metric. The answers you get with this can help you direct marketing budget toward the most long-term valuable acquisition channels.

Our new session tracking updates and automated page view tracking help you design a company website that leaves an impactful first impression and gives you solid user behavior data to feed into your full user journey funnel. Mixpanel can now easily handle website metrics like session bounce rate, average session duration, and which pages are performing the best—all of which can be automatically tracked as events with just a two-line snippet of code. One step further, our advanced customizations also let you modify what a user session definition is, including what range of properties to capture, in order to best suit your use cases and the context of your connected product.

We’ve also released new features to pull together all your user journey behavior to build actionable analysis: tables, custom buckets, and view users. With tables, you can understand the overall health of each user segment in one view, like monitoring the total website visits, signups, purchases, revenue, and CAC (cost of acquisition) for every region. With custom buckets, you can join your users into meaningful groups on the fly, like Millennials and Gen Z. And with view users, you can zoom in all the way to see who the exact users contributing to dips or spikes are and cohort them together. To put your analysis into action, you can push these segments to the many engagement platforms Mixpanel integrates with (Twilio, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.) and fuel your acquisition and growth loops.

The above features are just a start. In the coming months, we’ll have a lot more coming out to help you better analyze your acquisition and growth together with your user product behavior. Stay tuned!

We want to make it as easy as possible for product and marketing teams to come together in Mixpanel to work toward shared metrics and goals. That’s why we’ve made it simple to get started.

We hope all the new use cases we’re unlocking in Mixpanel help you build better holistic user experiences! As we all know: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” 🙂