MixPanel (YC S09); my mini review
After spotting the mixpanel logo at the bottom of HN I decided to give it
a spin on a reasonably serious site to see what it can do. I've got some
issues with GA that I can't seem to resolve so I figured maybe MixPanel
can replace them.

First impression is that it looks really neat and simple, but on my browser
(ff 3.01) the form fields all somehow manage to hang outside the containing
blocks.

The sign up process is very quick, but there is no email verification, which is
a bit of a pain because it could mean that people use a fake address leading
to emails dumped on unsuspecting bystanders.

After signing up you get a secret token and a skeleton piece of javascript
that you can flesh out to track variables that are important. This is mostly
a manual operation, you insert the relevant bits in strategic spots on your
site, 'instrumenting' it so MixPanel can keep track of what is happening.

The upside of this approach is that you, not they decide exactly what gets
tracked and what it is called.

Right after signing up you are offered to get some 'datapoints' if you get
someone else to sign up, that seems a bit premature, I haven't a clue what
datapoints are.

Other than the initial signup form error the design of the site is very clean
and functional, the documentation is easy to read and stuff can be found
more or less where you expect it.

The 'secret' token that gets generated for your site is not that secret
however, since it is plainly visible in every page that has the javascript
embedded in it. Maybe it should be named 'site specific' token ?

Meanwhile the tag is in place on my site now, and registering visitors
according to the live stats, time to read up on the data points.

Datapoints are mixpanels way of making a business out of this, essentially
they charge you 'per event' on your website. The whole thing revolves around
the 'funnel' concept that anybody in internet marketing is familiar with.

Garbage in at the top, and 'espresso' out at the bottom, mixpanel allows you
to track exactly what the loss percentages are at every stage of the process.

Datapoints cost money, and I think they are way overpriced.

The current pricing scheme is:

0...10,000 points: Free
10,000...100,000: $25
100,000...500,000: $100
500,000...2,000,000: $200
2,000,000...10,000,000: $700

Let me explain why I think they are overpriced: at 100,000 points for
$25 (the first 'plan' they have) for any small ad driven website that
has an ECPM < $0.25 they are costing you as much (or more!) for your tracker
as what you were making on your visitors.

And on a for-pay site that makes $20 / month per user, with a COA of $5 and
a 1:2000 conversion rate on a 1:50 new traffic vs old traffic ratio (all of
those numbers are pretty 'normal') you would again be making a net loss.

One of the sites I run that I could have tried mixpanel on gets 3,000,000
pageviews monthly, the ECPM is around $0.11, so it makes $300 /month.
It's a no-brainer because it costs less than $5 to host on a flatrate 100Mbit
leaseweb box. Using MixPanel with that site is out of the question though.

So, you'd have to be buying a very large volume of points in one go to make
it worth your while, but that means a fairly big up-front cost. $700 in
one go is essentially several months hosting cost for many sites. The
price difference between 'volume buys' and smaller buys here is
$c0.007 / hit on the largest plan, versus $c0.025 per hit on the smaller
ones. That's a 350% or so difference. For a virtual product that is
not reflecting the difference in cost to the provider, which essentially
is only the extra cost incurred by the transactions to process the
payments.

MixPanel currently uses Amazon as their payment processor, which
is a pretty good indication you don't need to worry about where your
credit card details will end up.

The real time statistics are neat, but they will also be very expensive for
MixPanel to maintain long term, and they don't seem to add much actual
value, it's more of a gimmick. A functional real-time stats tracker that is
cheap to operate is very hard to design, which is one of the reasons all the
free tracking tools are using batched updates.

Google Analytics also allows funnel analysis using the 'goal conversions', only
they do it for free and a whole lot more besides.

Meanwhile, I've set up a secondary instrumented set of pages, but for some
reason the data never showed up in the reports. I double checked the code
and the javascript error console, no idea what is going wrong there. The
'feedback forum' seems to be mostly enhancement oriented, not set up
to track problems. It is also externally hosted, which means that you leave
the site, it would be better to have a simple ticketing system (a la trac)
inside the MixPanel environment, where there is a lot more context available.
Incidentally, uservoice, the site that hosts the forum is listed as a customer
of mixpanel, but they also use analytics and quantcast.

MixPanel will probably work well if you have well defined landing pages and
are a straightforward e-commerce, but at the current pricing levels it is too
expensive for high volume low conversion websites, especially for continuous
deployment. And that's a pity because it is especially those sites that would
benefit most from a tool like this.

You could use it for targeted a/b testing though, but setting up a test
seems to be quite labour intensive and error prone.

MixPanel provides you with csv exports of the reports so you can import the
data in to your favourite spreadsheet.

On the whole I think that the concept of an analytics site that concentrates
on the funnel aspect of operating a web service has promise, but I would
like it to be significantly cheaper and easier to set up. As it is it really can't replace GA for all the other features it offers.

edit: in response to an email, COA = cost of acquisition