Company

GTxcel is a mobile-first, end-to-end modern media company that brings print publications into the digital age. With SimilarWeb’s annual “State of the Mobile Web in the US” report stating that 50% of all digital traffic is now generated from mobile devices, publications can’t afford not to be mobile-optimized. So, GTxcel works with more than a thousand different companies to create rich, responsive digital editions of magazines, catalogs, brochures, and marketing materials.

Goals

GTxcel wanted to be able to show its customers that reader engagement increases substantially when they go digital using GTxcel’s platform and services. By offering every customer a customized Mixpanel dashboard within the GTxcel platform, they empower media apps and publishers to be more data-driven.

Solution

Giving publishers access to data

With Mixpanel, GTxcel gives its customers deeper insights into reader engagement, a key metric unique to each of the individual publishers.  “Mixpanel’s reporting API gave us the flexibility to create a reporting dashboard that specifically addresses the reporting needs of magazine publishers,” says Fitek. “Between the reporting API and the way we built our dashboard, we launched a completely custom Mixpanel reporting interface that highlights the things that are most important to our customers, and they never have to leave GTxcel to get their analytics.”

Answering complex analytics queries 10X faster

“If a customer has some specific questions that they’re not able to ask from the standard dashboard, we have a button called ‘Dig Deeper,’” says Fitek. But “data deep dives” like this required more advanced capabilities than simple Segmentation reports. Mixpanel’s JavaScript Query Language (JQL) allowed GTxcel to get to the next level of extensibility across its platform.

“Before, we had a solution that required combining the results of multiple Segmentation queries, but that was slow and for customers with large amounts of traffic, the report could time out and crash the user’s browser. We realized we had to try to re-architect how we were tracking sessions,” said Dan. “JQL increased our session speed calculations by 10X. With JQL, we were able to run a Segmentation query that didn’t cause people’s browsers to crash. All that logic went into JQL, and instantly we were so much faster.”

Creating a seamless integration with SSO

GTxcel’s users expect a flexible, easy-to-use digital publishing solution. So once GTxcel began integrating Mixpanel with every install, they needed to be sure to keep the interface consistent. “Thanks to the single sign-on setup,” says Fitek, “Any publisher that’s looking at the GTxcel dashboard has the ability to log in to Mixpanel and pull their custom reports without ever leaving their GTxcel backend.”

Monetizing digital properties with the power of data

Mixpanel analytics and custom reporting have helped GTxcel’s customers know where to target their advertising. Through Segmentation reports, publishers discover that the longer a reader spends in a session, the greater the opportunities there are to monetize that reading experience.

“Our customers can provide advertisers with numbers and analytics from Mixpanel to demonstrate the return on investment,” says Fitek. “Then, once they find out what articles people are spending the most time reading, they can keep producing the most engaging types of content.”

Mixpanel is flexible enough to handle GTxcel’s data and advertising tracking across multiple ad types and platforms. These cross-platform capabilities allow publishers to quickly adapt to reader trends and act on monetization opportunities as they arise, wherever they arise.

“By implementing cross-platform session tracking, one customer was able to nearly double their key metric, Sessions Per Reader, from a more typical 1.2 to 1.9. In the publishing world, that’s a huge jump.”

Using data to support customer retention

GTxcel also uses Mixpanel itself to see how customers are integrating their instance of GTxcel. Through JQL and custom dashboards, GTxcel can improve its own business model and product suite based on its unique engagement metrics.

“We track engagement with the GTxcel platform over time for each individual publisher, and even engagement within different areas of their magazine,” says Fitek.

“In doing so, we can detect unique ways to help our customers reach their KPIs.” Armed with these insights, GTxcel deeply understands its customer journey and how it can help its customers with their own business initiatives.

Results

”We make publishers more efficient by giving them the digital infrastructure and the necessary data to save money and generate a larger readership to drive revenue,” says Dan Fitek, Senior User Experience Designer. “By providing Mixpanel analytics, our customers understand what their readers are doing in their apps and how to optimize the experience. Thanks to Mixpanel, analytics has become a key reason for customers to choose GTxcel.”

“An emerging part of our business is broadcast, and right now we’re using a different app and web platform for them,” Fitek says. “We’re integrating that with Mixpanel, so broadcast customers can track what their customers are doing within videos, live streams and more.”

As Fitek and his team continue to deliver a superior all-in-one digital publishing, custom CMS, and broadcast solution, GTxcel’s unified digital platform must be able to adapt quickly.

“It’s all about flexibility for us,” Fitek continues. “We love having the flexibility to provide product analytics for our customers, and Mixpanel offers an extensible solution that helps us build our product for the future.”