Analytics Startup Mixpanel Is Tracking 4 Billion Actions Each Month
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
For each impression I'm going to make at least one mixpanel call, maybe more if I'm tracking CTR on different page elements, so mixpanel fees would be a significant portion of my revenues. The only way I can think to get around it is to sample the calls, e.g. based on FBID.
How do people afford it? I'm not trolling, people use them and they are growing, so what am I missing?
Also, they offer a deal where if you put a banner of theirs on your home page you get like 150k free data points a month extra. Definitely sweetened the deal for us.
(cough) http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/10/facebook-analytics-platform... (cough)
For example, rather than just telling a customer how many visitors came to their site from Twitter, Mixpanel can show how many visitors came in from Twitter, broken down by country, and limited to those were between the ages of 10 and 13.
I don't want to know for certain that I have any users under the age of 13. I don't even want to provably have the capability of knowing.
There are serious implications under COPPA if you have such knowledge. Without it, you instead fall under the "directed at children" prong of the test which is far easier to avoid.
I'm curious, because a lot of people on HN seem to be genuinely concerned about the spread of online surveillance. Collusion was on the front page just a few hours ago. But a lot of startups and other web services also benefit from tracking everything their users do. How does one resolve this apparent moral dilemma?
Some of them almost definitely are. Half the benefit of Mixpanel is tracking how people use your web and mobile apps.
HN could be using it. "User kijin logged in. User kijin viewed a story. User kijin commented on a story." -- all these events can be sent from the server to Mixpanel, then you can build ad-hoc reports on things like "how many users that read a story last week came back and read a different story this week".
You can't block that kind of tracking, it's not happening in your browser, but it's just as specific to you. Mixpanel has APIs for server-side tracking in all the popular languages and all the mobile platforms. Every website you log in to, every Facebook app you interact with, every game you launch on your phone could be sending all the event data to Mixpanel and you wouldn't know.
I use AdBlock and Ghostery to block pretty much every client-side tracking and analytics tool (including everything from facebook), so the best that I can say is that no data goes directly from me to an analytics service. But I honestly have no control over same-domain server-side scripts that pass my data to third parties behind my back.
At least they'll have to go through a lot of hassle to track me across different sites.
I can't speak for anyone else, but we have three key points. Hopefully it goes without saying that this should all be clearly and transparently described in the site's privacy policy.
1. We collect data from our server logs and run custom analyses in order to see things like which parts of our site (which features, operating on which data) are most popular and which methods of attracting traffic in the first place are working.
2. We use a little JavaScript to phone home with certain non-personal technical data that isn't provided in HTTP requests by default, such as screen size/device orientation.
These help us to steer future development of our own site towards what our own users seem to want, both in terms of the content we invest in and the ways we present it, and it helps to better attract the kind of people who enjoy using our site. I see no moral conflict with either of these kinds of "surveillance": they are genuinely in the interests of all concerned, and the data doesn't get used for shady purposes.
3. We are sceptical about using external analytics tools, anything we don't host ourselves and that shares data about our visitors with third parties for whatever reason.
In the early days, something like Google Analytics might be better than nothing for legitimate purposes, but it comes with "moral baggage", and it's not very accurate anyway since as you point out it can easily be blocked. We don't see this kind of tool as the way forward.
In any case, anyone in Europe needs to consider whether using such third party services is even legal any more if they use tracking cookies or similar technologies. There may be a temporary moratorium on going after anyone for violating the new rules introduced last year, but the rules are there all the same for exactly the kinds of reason you mentioned, and the moratorium is only temporary.
They want to segment their users to figure out how to market and how to evolve -- are their users males between the ages of 18 and 35 from the UK? Do the users spend their time on the front page of HN or the comments? What's the ratio?
That's the kind of analysis these companies do. They don't care about what kijin does on the site -- if they do, the fact that it's YOU versus anyone else is 100% inconsequential.