How Movember unlocked full funnel visibility while maintaining privacy compliance

Movember is a global men’s health movement operating across multiple markets including Australia, UK, US, Canada, and New Zealand. “Our fathers, partners, brothers and friends face a health crisis that isn’t being talked about. Men are dying too young. We can’t afford to stay silent.” Movember is the only charity tackling men’s health on a global scale, year-round, addressing some of the biggest health issues men face: prostate cancer, testicular cancer, mental health and suicide prevention. They’re transforming the way research into men’s health is done and how health services reach and support men.

Since 2003, Movember has raised over $1 billion and funded more than 1,320 men’s health projects in over 20 countries. Fundraising activity peaks during the annual Movember campaign, held during the month of November, where they engage millions of participants worldwide to raise funds and awareness for men’s health issues.

Prior to Mixpanel, Movember used Google Analytics (GA4) in connection with OneTrust’s consent management to meet privacy compliance. The team did not have full visibility into user insights and conversion data, which made it challenging to run effective campaigns and confidently allocate marketing budget across channels due to a lack of validated attribution data. “The ability to track aggregate product utilization for users who decline cookies was completely lost in GA4,” explained Prasad Murthi, Digital Analytics, Optimization and Personalization Lead, Movember.

Movember turned to Mixpanel to close the gap. They deployed Mixpanel to production in September 2024, just in time for their critical Movember campaign period. “Mixpanel restored visibility into how a significant portion of our audience interacts with our platform, enabling us to optimize experiences for all users, not just those who accept tracking,” said Murthi.

The Movember team faced three significant challenges with GA4:

1. Substantial Data Loss from Cookie Consent

When they implemented OneTrust consent management across their markets (opt-in: UK, Ireland, EU, rest of world; opt-out: Australia, NZ, US, Canada), they experienced severe data visibility gaps. GA4’s reliance on client-side cookies meant that every user who declined consent became invisible to the Movember team. The analysis showed GA4 was only capturing 60% of registration form completions and 63% of donations compared to their backend systems. In opt-in markets like the UK and Ireland, the coverage was even lower, with nearly 60% of conversion data missing.

“For a charity that depends on understanding donor behavior and optimizing every step of the fundraising journey, this data gap was a critical problem,” explained Murthi. “We couldn’t make informed decisions when we were missing visibility into such a significant portion of our audience, particularly in our privacy-conscious European markets.”

2. Rigid Event Taxonomy and Limited User Context

GA4’s event structure required constant maintenance through Google Tag Manager (GTM). Every change needed a tedious testing and deployment pipeline. More critically, they couldn’t track aggregate product utilization for users who declined cookies. This meant they lost visibility into how anonymous users engaged with their platform, which limited their ability to optimize the pre-registration experience. They also couldn’t correlate fundraiser attributes or fundraiser quality with their acquisition channels, making it impossible to answer fundamental questions like “which marketing channels bring us the highest-quality fundraisers?”

3. Attribution Confidence Gaps

The team lacked confidence in GA4’s attribution accuracy. Without the ability to properly verify data from source platforms (Meta, Google Search Console, Salesforce) or track users through their journey, they couldn’t make informed decisions about marketing investment or channel optimization.

Mixpanel was uniquely positioned to solve three core challenges that Movember was facing:

1. Privacy-First Server-Side Architecture

“Mixpanel’s server-side tracking capability was the game-changer,” said Murthi. By routing events through their own infrastructure (Website → AWS API Gateway → AWS Lambda → Mixpanel), they could capture analytics data even from users who declined cookies. This approach allowed for privacy-preserving measurement while still providing visibility into overall user behavior.

2. Event-Based Model with Flexible Tracking

Mixpanel’s event-based model perfectly aligned with tracking user interactions throughout the fundraising journey. The team could track anonymous users at an aggregate level, which meant they could understand product utilization patterns even for users who declined tracking. This gave the team important visibility into the pre-registration experience that was completely lost in GA4.

3. Validation and Attribution Capabilities

Mixpanel’s flexibility allowed Movember to implement custom attribution logic and validate their data against source platforms. “This gave us confidence we could trust the insights we were deriving,” explained Murthi.

4. Experimentation Integration

The ability to integrate with Optimizely and segment audiences by experiment variants was something they had never achieved with GA4. This was essential for their optimization roadmap.

“Ultimately, Mixpanel was the only platform that could deliver both the data completeness we needed, and the attribution accuracy required to make confident strategic decisions,” Murthi concluded.

Movember onboarded Mixpanel as its central analytics platform to replace the shortcomings of GA4. Multiple teams at Movember adopted Mixpanel, including Product, Marketing, Fundraising, Country Directors, and Data & Optimization teams.

So what are they able to do now?

Experimentation Breakthrough

With Movember’s successful integration of Mixpanel with Optimizely, they can now segment web and app conversions against control vs. experiment variant audiences. Previously with GA4, they couldn’t reliably attribute conversions to specific experiment variants, which severely limited their ability to optimize.

Anonymous User Behavior Insights

The ability to track anonymous users at an aggregate level has been transformative. The Movember team can now understand how users who decline cookie consent interact with their platform, identify friction points in the pre-registration experience, and optimize those journeys. “This was completely invisible in GA4,” shared Murthi.

Donation Form Optimization

The team uses Mixpanel to track donation form efficiency, payment method usage, and correlations between donation amounts and fundraiser types. For example, they can analyze whether solo fundraisers, team fundraisers, or workplace fundraising drives different donation behaviors and amounts. This granular analysis helps to optimize the donation experience for different fundraiser segments.

Channel Quality Analysis

Movember can now correlate acquisition channel with fundraiser quality (how much they go on to raise). This has revealed that while some channels bring high volume, others bring higher-value fundraisers. This insight is reshaping their marketing investment strategy.

The transition from GA4 to Mixpanel was smooth with the team taking a strategic approach:

• Leveraged Existing Infrastructure: By using their existing data layer and GTM setup, they minimized implementation effort. They didn’t have to reimplement tracking; they reformatted what they already had.
• Parallel Running Reduced Risk: Running both platforms simultaneously during their critical November campaign gave them confidence. They could validate Mixpanel’s data while maintaining GA4 as a safety net.
• The main complexity was architectural: Setting up the API Gateway, Lambda functions, and the user ID hashing mechanism required careful planning. The daily salt rotation in AWS Secrets Manager needed to be rock-solid reliable. They also had to educate stakeholders about the 24-hour session window limitation (a consequence of daily distinct_id rotation), which differs from GA4’s session definition. However, these were one-time setup challenges.
• Timing and Validation: The evaluation and testing took place through mid-2024, with production deployment in early September 2024. They ran Mixpanel in parallel with GA4 during their Movember 2024 campaign, which allowed them to conduct rigorous validation against both GA4 and their backend conversion systems.

“Once deployed, the system has run reliably without the constant maintenance burden we experienced with GA4,” said Murthi.

One of the most significant discoveries by the Movember team is centered around their market segment analysis that revealed something significant about the impact of cookie consent on their data. In opt-in markets like the UK and Ireland, GA4 was capturing less than 47% of their donations. Mixpanel, with server-side tracking, captured 72-77%, a 25-30 percentage point improvement. “This wasn’t just a data quality issue,” said Murthi. “It fundamentally changed our understanding of campaign performance in these critical markets.”

The team had been systematically underestimating their impact in their most privacy-conscious markets, precisely the ones where trust and transparency matter most to their mission. “Mixpanel didn’t just fill a data gap; it revealed we were making strategic decisions based on an incomplete and biased picture of reality,” said Murthi.

In addition, the donation behavior analysis has revealed interesting patterns: the correlation between fundraiser type (solo, team, workplace) and donation amounts has helped the team tailor their fundraising strategy and support to different fundraiser segments more effectively.

In a short amount of time, Movember has already achieved these impressive results:

Data Completeness:

• ~44% average increase in overall event volume vs. GA4
• 24 percentage point improvement in registration capture (84.2% vs. 60.2%)
• 29 percentage point improvement in donation capture (92.1% vs. 63.2%)

Attribution Accuracy:

• 28% more Organic Search traffic captured vs. GA4 (0.9 vs. 0.7 ratio to GSC clicks)
• 60% more Paid Social traffic in key markets (0.4 vs. 0.25 ratio to Meta clicks)

Time Savings:

• Reduced analysis time through purpose-built dashboards; previously this manual work impacted 15 FTEs
• Eliminated the GA4 sampling issues they faced on high-traffic campaign days

In addition, they have developed confidence in decision-making. “We now trust our data and can validate it against backend systems and source platforms,” Murthi said. “This confidence means marketing leaders make budget decisions without second-guessing the underlying data.”

They have gained strategic capability, moving from “we think this might be working” to “we know channel X drives 23% more high-value fundraisers than channel Y.” This enables strategic sophistication that the team previously couldn’t achieve.

Movember now has organizational alignment and consistent metrics across teams. Product, marketing, and fundraising all work from the same source of truth.

They have achieved all of this while maintaining full GDPR compliance in a privacy-respectful measurement. “This proves you don’t have to sacrifice data quality for privacy,” Murthi shared.

Movember has lofty goals for the next phase, and they anticipate that Mixpanel will be instrumental in achieving it. In their medium-term plans, they will focus on mobile app integration by bringing AppsFlyer and Mixpanel data together for unified mobile measurement. They also envision real-time campaign dashboards powered by live Mixpanel data. 

Looking further out into the longer term horizon, they plan to roll out AI-powered insights, leveraging Mixpanel’s data in their Snowflake environment for predictive modeling. The team is currently in the process of ingesting, cataloging and preparing their data across Mixpanel and other platforms to build a foundation for AI initiatives. “As a global charity with highly seasonal campaign dynamics across 20+ countries, we see significant potential for AI to enhance our impact,” said Murthi. “We’re particularly interested in using AI to analyze patterns in our Mixpanel data that correlate acquisition channels with fundraising quality and long-term donor retention.” 

They envision AI helping to optimize digital experiences through intelligent experimentation, identify supporters who may benefit from mental health resources, and ultimately uncover insights that connect digital engagement patterns with real-world health outcomes to accelerate progress in men’s health.

“We are looking forward to furthering our mission in partnership with Mixpanel,” said Murthi. “Through our usage of Mixpanel, we’ve proven you can have both privacy compliance and comprehensive measurement. This has positioned Movember as a leader in privacy-respecting digital fundraising, which aligns perfectly with our mission-driven brand values.”