- In this video we're gonna take a look
at the key differences between Google Analytics and Mixpanel
and why you might want to install Mixpanel
additionally to your Google Analytics setup.
All and more coming up right after this.
Hi there and welcome to another video
of measureschool.com
where we teach you to the data-driven way
of digital marketing.
My name is Julian and on this channel
we do marketing tech reviews, tutorials
and give you tips on better tracking just like this one,
so if you haven't yet, consider subscribing.
Now, if you are in the market for a new analytics tool
you might be asking yourself what is actually the difference
between all these all these different analytics tools,
and obviously there's not one answer and one best tool
that you can choose out there.
It always depends on your business.
Today we want to take a look at the key different
between Google Analytics and Mixpanel.
Now, I don't actually work too much with Mixpanel
but my friend Ruben from Practico Analytics
is the perfect guy to ask
because he works with different startups
setting up their analytics infrastructure
and evaluating different tools for them
like Google Analytics, Mixpanel or segment.com.
So, I asked Ruben to make a little video for us
to discover the key differences
between Google Analytics and Mixpanel
and which tool might be better for which use case.
Now, we've got lots to cover, so Ruben, take it away.
- [Ruben] Thanks Julian, and hi everybody.
My name is Ruben and I'm here to talk about the difference
between Mixpanel and Google Analytics,
and this is a question that comes up quite a bit
with the companies that I work with
and it's something that it's very confusing initially
because they seem to do the same thing, right?
Why have two tools if they're gonna do the same reports?
But in reality they're slightly different
and they're actually complementary to each other.
Now, what I wanna talk about today is three things.
First I wanna help you understand the differences
and tracking philosophies
between Google Analytics and Mixpanel.
We'll talk a little bit about event-driven tools
versus page view tools.
Then I wanna show you what Google Analytics
is really good for, you know,
what should you be using it for and why would you keep it,
and third, I'll show you what Mixpanel is good for,
and then once you see that,
then you see how it could be complementary
and for some companies why they keep both.
So, let's start with tracking philosophies,
and to explain that we're here at this website,
we're here looking at basecamp.com,
and they're a project management tool,
and this is a good example of a company
that could benefit from keeping both tools.
So for example, so Google Analytics
is a page view-driven tool.
What that means is you add to your website
or your mobile app and a user comes in
or they, you know, they refresh the page or they view a page
and at that moment Google Analytics tracks you, right?
It says hey, you've loaded this page
and we have all this information about you as the user,
your location, your IP address, your browser, all that.
So, I could come in and I could, you know,
I could explore at the Basecamp marketing website, right,
to learn how Basecamp works,
I could scroll and, you know,
there'll be heat maps created here,
maybe look at the pricing,
look at some of the testimonials,
and at some point I'll say hey, I'm ready to sign up,
right, so I'll look for the sign up page and come in here.
And, you know, for everything that I've done
Google Analytics is great
because I've been viewing pages,
maybe I came in from different marketing channels,
which Google Analytics is really good at at breaking apart
and at some point I'm ready to sign up.
This could be set up as a conversion goal
in Google Analytics.
But we don't have, you know, specific actions, right,
which is where events come in,
so looking at pages, again, I'm ready to sign up,
this is really great for Google Analytics.
Once we've signed up, right, once we go through this process
then we get thrown into the Basecamp product.
If you're not familiar with the Basecamp product
it's similar to most project management tools
to, you know, create projects, you know,
create task, assign people tasks and so.
All those actions will be much better as events
and that's where Mixpanel will come in, right?
Mixpanel is an event-driven tool,
so what that means is an event is simply something you send,
either through JavaScript or other APIs or libraries
to track actions the user did.
So, an event for this website will be sign up, right?
Once I submit this form I could send an event
to say the user signed up
and send information alongside the event,
such as the name or the email and so on.
So, inside the product,
once we're inside a Basecamp product,
there's lots of actions that I can take.
I can create a project,
I can create a task, I can assign task,
I can complete task and so on.
Those are all tasks that may happen with page views
as people are loading pages
but it makes more sense to look at them through events
and not so much pages.
So, once we're in the product
it doesn't really matter if I view 10/20 page views,
what really matters is did I complete the actions
that I'm supposed to complete?
And if you're a product company,
let's say you have a web app or mobile app
like Basecamp does,
you're much interested in looking at the actions
the users took, not the page views they view, right?
And that's, you know, that's where Mixpanel excels,
and that kind of group of tools,
the event-driven tools, right?
So, companies like Basecamp who have apps,
who have this style, who actually have a marketing side,
and they have a web app or a mobile app,
Mixpanel is really great for those companies.
If you're let's say an e-commerce company
or maybe a content company
or as a blog or something similar,
Google Analytics would be really good for you
and it'll be more than enough than what you need.
Now, I mentioned before that Basecamp
might actually keep both which is true.
Basecamp might keep Google Analytics
as the marketing analyzing tool
and Mixpanel to analyze the product and gateway, right?
So, let me show you what makes GA great, right?
So, we know, GA is the gold standard
for analyzing marketing traffic.
It gives you a lot of data out of the box,
and gives a lot of reports to do that out of the box.
You don't have to configure a lot of things.
So, for example, you know, we might have
the acquisition report which you might be familiar with
where we look at the different channel groupings
and look at a performance against a goal.
Again, e-commerce sites will benefit quite a bit
for the e-commerce integration that Google Analytics offers
that lets us analyze the market traffic.
This is something that Mixpanel doesn't really do well.
In fact, it doesn't really do at all.
So, analyzing marketing traffic is one of those things.
I mentioned before that the e-commerce setup
for Google Analytics it's perfect for e-commerce companies.
You can see revenue, your conversion rates,
your sections and so on,
and again you can see it in the context of marketing traffic
which is what we're looking at.
And finally, Google Analytics offers
the multi-channel attribution out of the box as well.
So, the whole theme is that if you're analyzing
marketing traffic, if you're doing vigil spending,
if you wanna see how you're performing against conversions,
this is where Google Analytics comes in,
and in fact, for companies I usually recommend for them
to keep Google Analytics for anything pre-signup, right?
Now, we're assuming we're looking at a product company
who has a web app, so you're gonna keep Google Analytics
for anything pre-signup,
and you're gonna use a tool like Mixpanel
for everything post-sign up.
So, a tool like Basecamp will keep Google Analytics
to analyze everything that happens before a user signs up,
where are users coming from,
what channels are driving those users,
what's the conversion rate,
how are the marketing and pages working,
what's the engagement of those pages,
and then the user signs up and at that moment
we can move over to something on Mixpanel
and say okay, what's the user doing,
how are you going to do the onboarding process,
are you doing action X or action Y and so on.
Finally, you know, in Google Analytics
just gives you a lot, I mentioned some data out of the box,
you know, data like the location data
to see where users are coming from,
and how's that compared to performance,
you know, to conversion rates,
and of course one of the popular reports in Google Analytics
is just the mobile breakdown against performance again,
I guess a conversion goal of some kind.
Now, let me jump into Mixpanel,
and show you what Mixpanel what makes it great
and why people set up Mixpanel.
So, Mixpanel the setup for Mixpanel is much higher
than Google Analytics.
A typical project will take maybe 10/20 hours
to just get it going,
it'll take multiple months to become familiar with it
especially if you're implementing Mixpanel
and giving it to a small team.
Then you have to train everybody on how to use it.
So, first, the first thing that brings people to Mixpanel
is identifying users by name or email specifically.
So, once you set up Mixpanel
then you can actually look at a user by their email
and by their name and see exactly
what they did, right?
So, each of this actions here are events
that we sent to Mixpanel
and they're simply tracking the different actions
that a user took,
and then, you know, what were they interacting
with the app, with the web app or a mobile app in this case.
So, Google Analytics doesn't let you identify
users by name or email.
You're not allowed to set up personal information
but Mixpanel let's you do that, right?
So, we can actually then take the email
of a user that we know,
query it to Mixpanel and then we'll get the profile
and we can see exactly what the user did
over the past 90 days, 100 days,
ever since the user was identified by Mixpanel.
And everything that run on Mixpanel
is built around this idea,
that you're working with users,
and that you can track it back, right?
The second report that is really great in Mixpanel
is the funnel report.
So, this is a typical conversion funnel,
a marketing funnel that you might see before.
What makes Mixpanel great is that this reports
can be built on the fly
so you can build multiple reports
and they're retractive, right?
So, you can build a report and you can see the data
for the past 90 days.
So, the report is built on events, so you know,
we say action one, action two, action three,
action four coming back to our Basecamp example, right,
a user signs up who might be interested in seeing
how they onboard, right,
and that might mean we want them to create a project,
create a task and then bite someone, right.
Those might be the three actions that we want a user to do
before we consider them onboarded.
So, Mixpanel can let us create that funnel
with three actions,
and then come in and see okay, you know,
our user's completed on this onboarding funnel,
where are they getting stuck and so on.
And of course, we can segment this report
and see how it breaks down by different things
like city or country and so on.
We can access the same location data as Google Analytics.
You know, this kind of funnel report is hard to find
on Google Analytics just because of the way it is,
at least in the free version of Google Analytics,
so flexible funnels and being able
to play around with the funnels
is a big plus for Mixpanel.
The third thing that brings people to Mixpanel
is the retention analysis,
and this is the color analysis that, you know,
if might be familiar with
we look at users who did one action,
let's say users who signed up
and then came back and did anything, right,
doesn't matter what they did,
they just did anything.
And then we can see the conversion rates.
So we can see, you know,
we can see how many users signed up on a specific week,
and then see how many of them
came back and just redid any action, right.
So, this color analysis once again is based on users,
and it's based on the users that we can then follow
and the profiles and go on to understand them.
So, we might find a user who has
a really high retention rate
and then we can just simply go and see who they are,
what they did, what are their attributes,
how can we replicate those kind of users?
And finally, Mixpanel and a lot of tools
are really moving in this direction
but they're moving to help you do the analysis, right?
So, what that means is we're starting to see,
for example, we can look at one action,
and then see how that correlates with let's say,
fourth week retention, right?
So, what this means is we wanna understand if to
in a specific action, let's take a Basecamp project, right,
if people create projects,
is that correlated with people
being retained in the forth week.
Maybe, maybe not, right?
So, there's that kind of analysis
that now Mixpanel is starting to offer
doing the analysis for you, running the math for you.
And this is something that I'm also start to see companies
come into Mixpanel just for this kind of report, right
where they can get the data to Mixpanel,
and simply run this report quite quickly
without having to do very complex manual analysis
on the side.
And I can mention, you know, in most companies
you are gonna have both and that's fine, right.
I could see a company like Basecamp having Google Analytics
for anything marketing related,
and having a tool like Mixpanel
for everything product related, right?
And if you're a content company like a blog
or if you're an e-commerce company
you might actually be fine with just Google Analytics
because you'll be able to get everything that you need
in one tool.
That's it for today.
If you have any questions just let me know in the comments.
Thanks everyone.
- Alright, so there you have it.
These are the main differences
between Google Analytics and Mixpanel.
In my mind Google Analytics and Mixpanel as well
has a whole different world view on the data itself,
so Mixpanel is more event driven
and if you value the post-signup as very important
in the lifetime of your customer
then it might be worth tracking that
with an additional tool like Mixpanel.
Well, thanks Ruben for putting this video together for us.
If you wanna find out more about what Ruben is up to,
then head over to practicoanalytics.com
where he also has some great resources,
a free Mixpanel course,
a free segment.com course,
so check that out as well,
and if you like this video,
don't forget to give us a thumbs up
and hit that subscribe button as well
because we'll bring you new videos every Wednesday.
My name is Julian.
Til next time.