My Product Analytic Tool Friends
In the past couple months, I’ve been taking charge on product analytics at work as we were launching an on-boarding product for the first time. I was very excited since it was the first time we ever implemented analytics tools into our product (and it’s always fun to be data-driven!). Here are the tools I used and what I’ve learned about them so far…
Mixpanel
Mixpanel was probably the tool I used the most. It was great with product data tracking since it allowed for customization on what exactly I wanted to track. It was also very flexible since Mixpanel tracks data by ‘events’. You could set it up once and use those ‘events’ to set up many other things in Mixpanel.
Implementing Mixpanel was not super complicated. I defined ‘event’ points on my wireframe flow of where exactly I wanted Mixpanel to get the data from, passed that flow on to the engineer, he put a line of code on each of the points, and then it’s done.
I customized different ‘funnels’ using the ‘events’ that we set up. Funnels are basically a user journey made up of ‘events’. This allowed me to see very specific data such as the percentage of people who completed the free registration flow out of everyone who visited the landing page and where people dropped out along the way.
I also had to filter out all traffic from Bangkok at first since most of them were our colleagues testing the product. Filter formulas were simple to set up, and again, customizable. I could filter data by devices, countries, cities, or even set up our own properties to filter out.
Email Notifications
We are now planning to use Mixpanel to send out our email campaigns. Mixpanel makes that easy because it can filter users by specific behavior, and triggers the email to those specific groups. For example, users who haven’t logged in in 5 days, or users who haven’t try a curtain feature.
One downside about Mixpanel is it is very expensive.. :(
Google Analytics
From what I’ve seen, if a company uses a analytics tool, it’s probably Google Analytics (GA).
GA is free and it is also very useful for both business and product uses. I mostly use GA to watch where the traffic is coming from for the new on-boarding product launch since we were doing some A/B testing on the landing page.
For me, GA is good for seeing a bigger picture. Apart from telling you where the traffic is coming from, it also tells the of the drop off rate of those traffic, the average time of page, etc., in clear comparable format. This makes it easy for me to share the data with the team, and for them to understand the data clearly for business or product decision makings.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg was used purely for landing page A/B testing. It provided the team and I some click heat maps and scroll heat maps which was very helpful for making design decisions.
I especially liked the scroll heat maps. Since our landing pages were parallax scrolling one page website, knowing exactly where the users dropped out was very necessary. We were able to improve contents on specific parts, make content swapping decision, and saw improvements right away.
However, Crazy Egg doesn’t provide options for data filtering, and the url update was a little bit inaccurate.
