Today we released a new data type on our platform to give you more power and flexibility with your data: Dates.
Now you can send Mixpanel a date and we’ll let you manipulate your data. You can find this in the segmentation report.
Examples
Last time a user logged in
The date that a user signed up
The date of a specific action: photo upload, tweet, etc.
Integration
Integration is very intuitive. All you have to do is pass a property with a date formed as: “YYYY-MM-DD” (2011-01-01). You can also give us up to the second granularity if you’d like: “2011-01-02 03:34:21.” We will automatically interpret data that looks like this as a date.
Keep in mind, that you should send us dates that are in UTC format if they have granularity beyond a day level. If you send us data on a day granularity then we’ll simply take that and not convert it to UTC as it would be ambiguous.
We’ve just launched a brand new feature for Mixpanel called Formulas. Formulas is a powerful tool that allows you to combine and filter events arithmetically. If you ever wanted to view a trend of two events combined, or looked at the ratio of one event to another, or even both, then Formulas is the tool for you. Like always, this is happening in real time, and it will work retroactively with the data you’re already sending us!
How to use it
You may have noticed the new Formulas icon already on the left.
Clicking on it brings up the Formulas creation interface.
At the top, you can enter a name to save your formula to view later.
In the body, you can select the events that you want to use in your formula. Selecting an event will also bring up its properties, on which you can filter further. You can also choose whether you want to count the total number of events, or count only unique events (counted once per user that sends the event).
Initially, you can only compute the ratio between two events. Hitting the tab on the right will expand your view, where you can then add, subtract, or multiply two events.
Hitting continue will save this formula for you and display the trend.
An example formula
Here’s an example of a formula that we use at Mixpanel:
In our Streams product, we have two tabs, Streams and Users. We send these respective events anytime a new user goes to view one of these tabs. This formula lets us view the percentage of unique people that view the Streams tab. We simply take the #streams event, and divide it by the sum of #users and #streams events.
We hope formulas will help you understand your data even more. As always, feel free to contact us at support@mixpanel.com if you have any questions!
We just released the ability to view any segments that might be numeric. In the past you always passed us strings or we told you to pass us a distribution yourself (which is more work). Now you can pass us the raw age, number of invites sent, or video length time and we will handle that number correctly and show you an amazing distribution!
This graph shows how slow/fast response time takes when you load a graph on Mixpanel with our new segmentation feature. You can see that 13% of them happen to get loaded between 600-650ms. This is just a quick example of what you can do with our new distribution graphs. Enjoy!
Please note, we can handle whole numbers (age) and those with decimals (money).
On another side note: You can now save segments you create and see who made them.
Today we are announcing a new feature called Segmentation that will enable you to analyze your data retroactively and perform even more complex data analysis then ever before–of course it’s all in real-time. This is a huge step towards our overall goal: To help the world learn from its data.
To get to segmentation click on the new segmentation icon on the left hand side where events, retention, funnels and the rest of the icons are.
Segmentation is extremely flexible and therefore it’s often tough to describe which problems it may solve because it solves so many. To help introduce this new feature we’ll go over some simple use-cases that, hopefully, will excite you.
1. The ability to intersect and drill down on more than one segment.
A really simple example is if you have an ad campaign on Facebook and you would like to understand the demographic of users who ultimately purchase. Here we’re curious and filter on users who have seen a specific ad campaign that we’ve created and are only female purchasers. More importantly we are curious to see the age distribution or breakdown of that type of customer.
This is extremely powerful because not only are you seeing deep insights into your data but you’re doing it in real-time on potentially a large set of data. It’s generally a pain to wait to see the result of a question you have about your data because as marketers or analysts we generally ask our questions iteratively until we have that “Ah ha!” moment.
Keep in mind that Ad Campaign, Gender, and Age are defined by us. You can define any segments you’d like. For example, if you were a social game you could define character type, source, and item purchased instead.
2. Analyze data that is numeric
Segmentation now accepts any kind of data that may be numerical. If you know the number of invites a user may send during their sign up process to increase virality of your product, you can now see a statistical distribution of that. This is extremely powerful and helps you understand your virality. In general, an average may not be truthful enough.
Other examples of numeric data you can send us: age, page load time, number of items selected in a list, anything with money involved, coins or credits, etc.
We also support true/false values and have plans to support dates soon which will let you ask questions such as “Everyone who signed up after this date.”
3. Completely retroactive
If it wasn’t already apparent this type of analysis is fully retroactive. You do not need to define any queries/questions up front as we will look back at data you’ve already sent us and analyze that.
We believe iterative data analysis is what our customers want and is a great way to find insights in your data.
Here’s a new feature we’ve just released that many of you have asked for: email digests of your most important metrics!
Setting Up
Setup is very easy. Just start bookmarking events on your project. After an event is bookmarked, you can switch the settings for the bookmark to receive either daily or weekly reports. Our report will track either unique or total events, depending on which one the view you bookmarked is tracked.
Comparisons
It’s important to see how your metrics are growing or declining. Our comparisons give you an idea of how your metrics are trending.
Alerts
Our simple alerts system will notify you when your key metrics change in some significant way. We calculate the statistics for the past month’s worth of data, and if your events have increased or decreased by half a standard deviation, we will alert you to the change.
Not a Mixpanel user yet? What’s stopping you? Go to http://mixpanel.com to sign up.
