How Tribun Network uses Mixpanel to evolve from pageviews to engagement and build Indonesia’s next media super-app

Tribun Network is one of Indonesia’s largest media groups, reaching over 100 million digital users per month across digital platforms and local newsrooms. While historically driven by pageviews and ad revenue, the organization is now transforming toward deeper audience engagement centered on TribunX (Tribun Experience), its rapidly growing mobile app.

Tribun Network recognized a fundamental industry shift: pure traffic volume was no longer enough to drive sustainable growth. The team needed to understand how users behave, what keeps them engaged, and what brings them back.

Their previous analytics stack could only show surface metrics like pageviews and demographics. But they couldn’t answer deeper questions:

• What journeys do users take after reading an article?
• What content actually drives retention?
• What features deliver long-term value? 

Mixpanel gave Tribun Network this missing visibility. Within months, insights from Mixpanel reshaped TribunX’s product strategy, improved content engagement, uncovered new revenue opportunities, and aligned all teams around a single source of truth.

1. Limited insight into real user behavior

Traditional tools couldn’t map user journeys, analyze retention, or reveal the impact of new features.  

2. Fragmented tools and inconsistent reporting

Editorial, product, business, and marketing teams each created their own spreadsheets and dashboards, often with conflicting numbers.

3. Reliance on pageviews in a shifting market

As the business model evolved beyond banner ads, Tribun Network needed engagement-focused analytics, not just traffic counts.

4. No single source of truth

Stakeholders spent more time debating data than acting on it.

According to Tribun’s team, the decision was clear:

• Easy, intuitive UI even for non-technical users
• Event-based tracking and flexible segmentation
• Real-time dashboards for leadership 
• Unified behavioral view across anonymous → logged-in journeys
• A single source of truth shared across the organization

“Mixpanel empowers us to answer questions in real time. When leadership asks for data, we show it instantly,” comments Kintan Putri, Business & Product Manager at Tribun Network.

Tribun Network adopted Mixpanel as its baseline analytics layer

The team now uses Mixpanel to validate internal tracking, build retention cohorts, and standardize data for all stakeholders—editorial, product, business, and marketing.

Cross-team transformation

• Editorial teams now measure return readers and content engagement—not just pageviews.
• Product teams track feature adoption, bounce rate, and retention using funnels and cohorts.
• Marketing teams evaluate campaign effectiveness, LTV after campaign participation, uninstall impact, and cross-feature interactions.
• Business teams inform strategy, identify user needs, and provide data-backed recommendations for both content and product.

For the first time, all teams are aligned on the same behavioral data and collaborate using one shared analytics language.

Session Replay for qualitative insight

Although still early in their rollout, Session Replay has already become a powerful qualitative complement to Tribun Network’s behavioral analytics. The team currently uses it on key TribunX flows—starting with ticketing, one of the app’s highest-engagement features—to visualize exactly how users interact with each screen.

With Session Replay, Tribun Network can now:

• Observe real user behavior, not assumptions: seeing where attention goes first, which elements users ignore, and how they naturally navigate each page.
• Identify UX friction instantly, like when users scroll past important elements, hesitate on forms, or miss call-to-action buttons.
• Validate layout improvements: for example, noticing that many users scroll straight to the comment section after reading articles, leading the team to consider moving the comment entry point higher on the page.
• Understand post-purchase behavior: observing what users do after purchasing event tickets helps the team optimize content placement and session depth.

Today, Session Replay is focused on the ticketing experience, but Tribun Network plans to expand it across every page of TribunX, using it alongside heatmaps to support rapid UI/UX iteration.

“Session Replay shows us how people actually use TribunX—their attention, their clicks, their scroll behavior. It gives context to the numbers and helps us improve the experience much faster.” Putri says.

10–20% increase in active users with the launch of new Services section

Mixpanel revealed that TribunX users were far more interested in non-news content than expected—such as ticketing, automotive, beauty reviews, and local commerce. This led to the launch of a new Services section inside TribunX.

Impact:

• 10–20% increase in active users within 3 months
• Ticketing became the highest-engagement entry point
• Users purchased event tickets before consuming news (the opposite of prior assumptions)

This insight reshaped product strategy, positioning TribunX as a media + commerce ecosystem, not just a news app.

6x increase in active content engagement

Before Mixpanel, only 5% of users actively viewed content. After Mixpanel-informed UX improvements and feature enhancements:

• The share of users actively viewing content rose to 30%
• User interest and engagement increased substantially
• Improvements reinforced the perceived value of content

This growth in active content consumption represented one of TribunX’s most meaningful engagement and value-driven wins.

Cohort insights revealed a new loyalty program

Mixpanel showed:

• Only 2% of users log in
• But 40% behave like highly loyal users

This gap represented a massive opportunity.

The team has since built a loyalty program where logged-in users earn points for reading articles, watching videos, posting statuses, and purchasing tickets—redeemable for vouchers and partner services.

Mixpanel cohorts directly shape:

• Loyalty segmentation
• Reward triggers
• Content personalization
• Habit formation strategies

Faster decisions, fewer silos, one source of truth

Before Mixpanel:

• Editorial exported data manually
• Product built intuition-based features
• Marketing lacked long-term engagement metrics
• Business teams struggled to advise strategy

After Mixpanel:

• All teams reference the same dashboards
• Decisions happen faster, with more confidence
• Teams understand why users behave the way they do
• Collaboration has improved significantly

“Mixpanel changed our culture. We no longer build features from intuition, only from data-backed evidence,” Putri says.

TribunX is now working toward 1 million monthly active users, and Mixpanel will be central to that journey.

Coming next:

• Full adoption of Session Replay across every app page
• Implementing Heatmaps for layout optimization
• Personalized experiences using advanced Mixpanel segmentation
• Scaling community-driven growth (UGC, status posting, discussions)
• Deeper analysis of habit formation and long-term retention
• Improving identity collection with better onboarding and login incentives

“Mixpanel will be key in tracking the entire TribunX ecosystem as we scale. It guides our decisions on user habits, retention, and personalization,” Putri concludes.