Revenue Analytics | Hacker News Reader

Revenue Analytics

mixpanel.com

70 pointsnoinput21 comments

I already have a revenue property on all my users in mixpanel. It seems like this new feature does two things

1) It keeps track of a revenue property as a time series. I.e. you can later look at the changes of revenue for a user over time (in their HTTP API you use a new $append command instead of $set)

2) It allows you to look at aggregate values (such as sum and average) for all revenues of all people in a certain group

I'm curious if this is something that could be extended to arbitrary properties on users. I operate a phone service and track usage of minutes in a similar way. It'd be great if I could do a similar kind of analysis.

It would be even better, if people analytics and events tied in a little more closely. I'm already tracking a "Charge succeeded" event that's tied to a distinct_id. If I could segment events by people properties (i.e. show me the "Charge succeeded" events for all people with Source=x), I could use the aggregate functions of the segmentation screen to do a lot of what revenue analytics provides and much more. I also wouldn't have to redundantly attach people properties to all my events anymore. Currently all of my events contain all people properties (such as Revenue, Number of minutes used, etc), so that I can segment by them.

In case suhail or anyone else is following along this thread, it'd be great to hear your thinking.

We hear you and we're thinking about how. It's a huge engineering/scalability challenge given the amount of data a single customer potentially can have.

Thanks Suhail! I'd gladly compromise on convenience/ease of use to make it easier to build (I'm sure you're more careful about making those trade offs for the less technically inclined users though)

For instance, I'd be happy to manually designate a small number of events and properties as available for the revenue-like analysis. I could say "For all Amount properties on all Charge succeeded events, I want to be able to see the average value per user, the sum per user and the sum across all events on all users". Technically that doesn't seem much different from what you already built except I could maybe add two or three of my own events.

As for segmenting events by people properties, it seems like you already have most of the infrastructure in place. Events are indexed by distinct_id and I can use the People tool to retrieve a list of distinct_ids of people matching certain criteria. Tying that together would be huge.

The related but different functionality of segmenting events by the people properties as they were when the event occurred is less important to me (this is what I can already do by copying people properties into each event). I can see how this would be a bigger headache. On the other hand though, you're already allowing us to do this because there's no restriction on the number of properties on an event.

Hi Jonas! You might be interested in our Mixpanel integration: At Bitdeli, you can create all the segments and metrics you need by running custom analytics scripts for all your raw historical data from Mixpanel - all without changes to your current setup.

http://bitdeli.com

We like to think our approach as best of both worlds: Get the beautiful interface and intuitive functionality Mixpanel provides with the ability to answer the occasional hard questions about your data.

Feel free to drop me a line at jyri@bitdeli.com and we can help you get started!

Awesome to see Mixpanel getting into the revenue game, since it's pretty much the most important thing to get a handle on.

We've just added support for revenue in Analytics.js this morning! (Just track a `revenue` property on your events and we'll take care of the differences between Mixpanel, KISSmetrics and the rest of the providers.)

First thing I wondered when I saw the announcement was how long until you'd support it :)

Great work!

Sorry to dissapoint you guys @ Mixpanel, but Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Sale metric is a very standard feature in most advertising systems...something that doesn't even get mentioned.

Mixpanel is still fairly early in the game, but their development pace is pretty rapid. They also seem to be able to build on existing features pretty well; for example, they rolled out the ability to build user profiles a few months ago, and then the ability to message those profiles a couple months later.

I've used GA, KISSMetrics and now Mixpanel, and I've been personally been really happy with them. Nearly everything is there, and the missing parts look like they're being worked on.

I wonder how this could integrate with ad revenue.

Orthogonal to this discussion, I use Ghostery because I don't believe MixPanel and their customer's best interests always align with my best interest.

I only mention this here because the linked page does not work when JavaScript is enabled but MixPanel is not. Defensive programming, people!

Timestamp: 1/29/2013 1:28:52 PM Error: TypeError: mp.landing is undefined Source File: https://mixpanel.com/revenue/ Line: 98

Are you referring to the dislike of your actions being tracked on a website? I share your concern, but isn't that just the cost of doing business with a website? Most applications would be able to build a pretty decent understanding of your usage patterns with or without mixpanel - either through data models or raw logs

Thanks for asking for clarification; it's not really relevant to this discussion. I'm glad MixPanel has this new product, I'm sure website owners will find it useful. My primary intent in posting was to let MixPanel know that people like me can't even click 'See it in Action' because JavaScript processing stops after the first error (counting on MixPanel loading).

I'm all for apps using the data I give them to build usage patterns as a part of improving their service; that's an unavoidable part of the value they provide. Cross-site collectors a-la Google, Facebook, Adobe, MixPanel, etc. eliminate a barrier to a centralized understanding of everything I do online.

Edit: TL;DR - Pikwik yes, MixPanel no. And degrade gracefully if your external JavaScript doesn't load, especially analytics.

For anyone wanting to opt-out of Mixpanel's tracking, feel free right here: https://mixpanel.com/optout/ - we try to make it pretty simple.

Thanks for making this easy.

Unfortunately this opt-out approach (not your specific implementation) is not really useful... opting out on every browser that I use, keeping the MixPanel opt-out cookie when clearing everything else, opting out of > 1,000 tracking services individually, etc.

Sounds like the precise idea behind the Do Not Track header. No idea if MixPanel respects it; I'll let one of them answer.

I share some of your concerns, but I just wanted to point out that this is not something about Mixpanel or tracking services. It's just the way web applications works. At the very least, the server that the app is running on will always know all your actions because otherwise it couldn't respond to them!

As I explained elsewhere, the problem is when 3rd parties track users across completely different websites.

Your point regarding how the web works makes sense on an individual request basis, but imagine something like Scroogle over Tor... sure my actions would be known, but 'which my' would not.

That link seems to be missing CSS. The content is fine, but it looks straight out of circa 1995 internet (minus the "under construction" sign).

It looks fine to me. You might be using some kind of browser extension like Ghostery that blocks some content related to tracking. Considering this is an analytics site, it's not surprising that would be the case. (as a matter of fact, I have Ghostery not to block mixpanel.com for that reason)

Ghostery (or something similar) may be blocking everything on cdn.mxpnl.com, which would prevent both css and js from loading.

safari adblock was the culprit here.

However, I'm not going to turn it off to see their site, so they should probably figure a way to rectify the issue.

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