Pioneering US merchant John Wanamaker was once quoted as saying: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half!” Mr Wanamaker, who opened his first department store in 1876, certainly didn’t have the benefit of the digital tools we have today for measuring online marketing activities.

As a digital marketer, it’s vital to know what impact your marketing programs are having. Without this, you will have no idea which campaigns are working for you, which need refining so they are better targeted and more effective, and which may need to be ditched altogether!

While Google Analytics (GA) remains a very popular platform, others such as Mixpanel are catching on too. We take a look at what Mixpanel offers, and why it can actually dive deeper into your data than GA.

Google Analytics

GA is one of the most well-known analytics tools around. It works largely by tracking page views, which means it runs code when a user browses a web page, collecting data that can be captured in reports and graphs. So essentially it reports on website traffic, as well as how long a user stayed on a page, and also on ‘bounce rates’ – i.e. the points at which visitors leave the site.

GA also comes with an Experiments feature for testing out different versions of a website and tracking the responses to each one. This is similar to A/B testing except that it allows testing of up to ten versions of a site.

Mixpanel Analytics

Mixpanel is an advanced analytics platform that provides deeper information than traffic data. Mixpanel’s developers consider that page views are insufficient in themselves and that it makes more sense to measure actions, so you can see what people are actually doing when they visit your site.

Essentially it measures two things – events and properties:

• Events – these are actions that users take. The site owner gets to decide which actions to measure. Examples of actions might include browsing, creating an account, adding credit card information, purchasing or subscribing.
• Properties – these describe events, and as is the case with events, are defined by the site owner, as they need to be specific to the business. Examples might include users’ age, gender, and location. The properties of an individual user can be stored in a profile, which allows for more detailed analysis. It’s also possible to group users by their activity profiles.

Other features include:

• Ability to set personalised business goals – for example, achieve more sales, subscriptions, post shares, and so on.
• Real-time analysis – unlike GA where there can be a delay.
• Funnels – ability to build funnels as you go rather than having to define them at the beginning.
• A/B testing for mobile – while A/B testing is available in GA through the Experiments feature, it is more easily done for mobile in Mixpanel.
• Retention analysis – allows measuring of the activities of repeat visitors.

Unlike GA, bounce rates are not generally measured, as it’s considered they are not necessarily meaningful in themselves.

Need assistance with marketing analysis?

Digital marketing analysis is essential if you want to measure the impact of your marketing campaigns and ROI on marketing spending. If you need assistance with this for your digital marketing activities, get in contact with our team of experts at Digital Crew.