Web and mobile analytics startup Mixpanel today introduced a new feature addition to its platform, making analytics personal and providing a new way for websites to quickly identify, reach out to and interact with their strongest – and their weakest – fans and customers. It’s a way to zoom in on individual cases rather than look at things from the bird’s-eye view most data-driven approaches usually take, and it could drive insights companies aren’t able to get anywhere else.
The new Mixpanel user-centric approach to data makes targeting easy, and allows users to set filters that ensure you can send out more relevant messages (direct from the dashboard, by the way) to only the types of users who fit the criteria you’re targeting. Want to reach only women who’ve accumulated a certain number of credits on your site? Drop downs make it a few seconds work, as opposed to before when those working with large data sets would have to export as a CSV file, and then import into whatever mail provider tool they were using.
On the whole, Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi believes that this approach is all about helping companies connect with their users on a personal level, giving them the opportunity to tailor offerings, spot trends and identify exactly where and why changes to a site or app might be having an unintended effect, with a degree of specificity not possible before on platforms like Google Analytics.
“Basically, we’re taking the next leap in analytics” Doshi explained. “We can actually tie data to a real user. This is a little different, because other companies tie data to something a little less important, like a pageview or a session, but with Mixpanel now we’ve built a way to tie data to a physical user.”
Mixpanel has also introduced a new Insight section to its analytics dashboard, which allows users to quickly and easily set parameters and compare its users according to a variety of factors, including gender, age, and any other site-specific metrics of their choosing. So, for a site employing virtual currency, for instance, they can see how much is being accumulated by users in a certain geographic area, and at what rate. The Insight panel is designed to be experimental, so that users can quickly change data ranges, scale, and the types of things being compared, in order to possibly realize through experimentation things they might not have gleaned through intentional, directed searches.
Doshi thinks that his company’s user-centric approach will help put it ahead of the curve as the tide turns in analytics. We’ve already seen a shift to engagement metrics away from vanity metrics like simple pageviews and clicks, and so it does make sense that the next stage would focus on taking a look at not only engagement as an aggregate, faceless set of statistics, but as something tied specifically to users. Already, there’s been a big focus on influencer targeting strategies and keeping track of who can become a potentially powerful brand ambassador. Now, Mixpanel is anticipating that putting names to those numbers will become the next big thing in connected analytics.
