Tracking reimagined

Alon Binman
2 min readDec 9, 2022

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We all see evolvement in tech areas (AI, No code platforms etc). It’s time we evolve the events we track.

Following my Starting with why post I wanted to give you a new perspective on sending events that will help you understand more.

We need as product managers to start looking at events as actions and understand why the users did that action and give context to each event rather then just sending vanity events that allow me to just see a number.

Working with clients allows me to see the difference it makes once you start asking those more complex questions. Suddenly you can uncover the true reason why users are doing or not doing what you want them to do in your product.

Let’s take an example for Uber. Instead of tracking map scrolls and zooms (vanity metric) I can send a “selected pickup” event with a property of select method and send as a list what they used to get to the pickup location. Did they search then zoom, did they scroll then tap? If i add this under my main event suddenly I can create breakdowns allowing me to really tap into the user actions.

Mock event showing the power of property context
Mock event showing the power of property context

Now we can see avg based on the zoom count and the map scroll count and understand the distribution of the users and how it impacts the time to order.

Just one tip that is super crucial. Test it out before going to developers, make sure the data is usable

To do that I usually create a test project and use the import API to send a single event and see that I can query the way I expected.

You can even use the “builder” to easily do that within the documentation UI

https://developer.mixpanel.com/reference/import-events

Mixpanel developer API demo
make sure the data is usable

Please like and subscribe on Medium this motivates me a lot!

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Alon Binman

Serial entrepreneur with 10 plus years as a Product Manager executive and heavy Mixpanel usage and technical implementations