Understand user behavior with Group Analytics

I’m Kiley Sheehy, a Customer Success Manager here at Mixpanel. My team helps our customers find new ways to incorporate user analytics into their innovation process. Every day, we answer questions like “How can you best capture clicks, swipes, scrolls, and sessions?” and “How do you use those findings to improve your product, user experience, and bottom lines?” A perennial few lines of dialogue through the course of these conversations go something like this:

Customer: “Kiley, you’re great. This is great. Everything is great. But…”
Kiley: “…uh, yeah, what’s on your mind?”
Customer: “We have excellent visibility into how our individual users are performing, but… I have a number of questions about [insert a very important collection here].”

These important collections typically include:

Previously, my team would solve this challenge using Cohorts, which allowed us to look at individual users or bring together all the users in a company. But Cohorts didn’t show all the activities our most successful (or least successful) accounts shared. Now, our recently launched Group Analytics allows us to query user behavior at an aggregate level and pull together entire accounts and projects. Group Analytics is the perfect tool for Customer Success Managers to understand the performance of their accounts in their book of business.

At Mixpanel, we use Group Analytics to see which features are most utilized or underutilized, and where we can offer training or resources to give the entire accounts the best experience. We’ve enacted Group Analytics on our users by a property we call Billing_ID, and a second property we call Project_ID. We use Billing_ID for everyone in one account, per contract. Within an account, we label all individual projects as Project_ID, so there might be somewhere between one and one million projects per contract, and between one and one million users per project.

Putting that in action, I like to use Group Analytics to show Mixpanel account stakeholders who their power users are in the company, and what exactly they are looking at. Most power users have high-hitting numbers in Insights, Flows, or Retention. These are the people who are out there chasing metrics and iterating product, marketing, or customer success collateral. From a team perspective, I might see the same reports resurface if those power users are really carrying the team. However, if Live View shows up instead in the top-performing team reports, that might tell me that a dev team is really at the helm. Live View shows a newsfeed of every single event that fires, as it fires, for a Mixpanel Project. That might signal to a CSM that the team needs more support with implementation. We now have a host of tiles in our CSM team, CSM regional, and individual dashboards that alert us about increasing and decreasing activity in our accounts.

These account-level insights help our Customer Success team understand our users better so we can surprise and delight them through their Mixpanel journey. In short, Group Analytics is changing the game for us internally, and we are proud to share it with you.