Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

User privacy concerns aside (yes, I realize that is a big aside), I feel like there are only a handful of use cases where knowing this user data is actually helpful in analytics scenarios, and anything beyond just feels creepy to know.

1) More intelligent marketing spend. If you know you have a higher LTV for females for your app between the ages of 18-34 and you do a portion of your advertising on Facebook, it would be good to target just those users.

2) Insights into broad customer engagement. Let's say your 18-34 female users return to your application more often than male users in the same demographic, it'd be helpful to know what friction points cause these users to drop off.

3) Insights into spending users. Being able to segment all your user actions by those who are free and those who spend money would help you optimize your paying funnel.

4) Bug reporting. Knowing where your users are located can help illuminate whether you have server and localization problems.

I can't think of any reasons why you'd use this information to voluntarily contact users other than support-related issues. If Netflix sent me an email that said "We think you'd like these movies because other males liked these movies" I'd probably de-activate immediately.

I'm often surprised when people ask "what's the point in knowing these metrics". The point is simply that anything gives a better insight into use behaviour and user needs is immensely valuable.

If we were physically interacting with our users (i.e. we ran a shop or a community centre) we'd be using thousands of signals to determine who needed help, who was afraid, who was ready to purchase more and who was making trouble.

As developers we try to cultivate online social environments, socially-engaged shops, games which envelop the user and collaborative business tools but with absolutely none of these emotional cues. That's hard.

Imagine trying to design an amusement park if all you had was an anonymous ping each time someone went on a ride. The value to all of us (and to the users) in these new wave of analytics is to take us closer to the user and let us feel what they feel and service them where they need to be serviced.

Asking why one should do that is about the same as asking why you'd need to watch people queuing for the rides in an amusement park in order to improve the queues. Because if you don't you won't know what the user feels, wants or needs.

(Side note: what mixpanel is doing is incredible and they really are a pleasure to use. There is a Zen quality to their product and the way it gives you great power from great simplicity (although a custom dash would be great, ty! ))

Oh, I assure you, I know the importance of measurement. I'm an analyst for a large social game company :)

My point is, it doesn't help you to measure something that isn't actionable. And my list above was just the four that I can think of where gender, age, and location details actually helped across many of the applications I've studied.

I agree with you that the goal of analytics is the help improve your products, but its easy to be misled to the wrong conclusions. Sometimes, too much data may actually be harmful to your business.

I do appreciate what you mean about actionability and tbh it's hard for me to comment on this new mixpanel feature set as there's not too much information on the sales pages.

However I've been investing a lot of time and code in Analytics and in mixpanel recently and while I would definitely agree that not all data is actionable, it doesn't stop it being useful or worth investing in as long as I take the time to examine (and prune) it afterwards.

What I find exciting is that these new types of Analytics open up value in for product design in a way that just wasn't practical without a tonne of custom dev before.

However, just as a new boss taking time to talk to each employee in the company isn't predictably actionable but still has vast value, so these new Analytics tools allow us to understand users in way that is not always actionable but is invariably valuable. The only real question surely is "is it valuable enough"?

If you need greater customizability, have a look at http://www.instahero.com, it's what we're working on at the moment. It's still very young, but it aims to provide powerful yet easily customizable analytics (so you don't have to wait for MixPanel to give you people tracking, for example, you can just easily write a simple version of it yourself).

This is really cool! I'm doing something with a similar perspective, that it's better to simplify the programming model around it than to limit the feature set. I'll give instahero a try.

Oh, nice! What's your product called? Has it launched yet?

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