Insights
Overview
Insights is a powerful and flexible tool designed to visualize trends and compositions within your data. You can analyze events, cohorts, and user profiles, and display the data in a wide variety of chart types.
Advanced Insights features also allow you to create formulas, compare current data to past data, and generate custom events and properties for deeper analysis.
Use Cases
Here are some of the sample questions you can answer in Insights:
- Product Analytics
- How is my WAU changing over time? (unique users)
- How often are my users getting value? (frequency analysis)
- What is the distribution of my users across regions/devices etc? (property breakdown)
- Lifecycle analysis (opens in a new tab)
- B2B (in this case, a messaging application)
- How many messages were sent in the US in the past 30 days? (total events, filtered)
- How many users had a mobile app session yesterday? (unique events)
- How many messages are sent per session? (formulas)
- How much revenue was generated on plans purchased in the past year? (property aggregation)
- How has the power users cohort grown over the past 6 months? (cohort trends)
- Marketing
- Which advertising campaigns generate the most checkouts? (property breakdown)
Frequency Analysis
It's important to know what's the natural frequency at which your users use your product and experience the core value proposition of your product--do the majority of your users use your product daily? Weekly? Monthly? A16Z wrote a great article about the Power User Curve (opens in a new tab), and this video (opens in a new tab) shows how you can reproduce that within Mixpanel.
Quick Start
Step 1: Choose or Define your Behavior
Metrics are basing building blocks of an Insights report. A metric is made up of a behavior, and a way to measure that behavior. By default, Insights will prompt you to select the most basic form of a behavior: an event. However, you can also press the "+ Metrics" button to select add a metric based on a different type of behavior. You can also add a formula, which is a metric that is a function of other metrics.
To select an event and start with an event based metric, press "Select Event".
To select a different type of metric, press "+ Metrics" and choose your metric type from the list. See Metric Types for a full list of supported metric types.
Step 2: Choose your Measurement
Once you've selected your behavior, you can choose how to measure that behavior. Depending on the type of behavior selected, Insights will default to a different measurement. If you're measuring a basic event, Insights will default to measuring the nubmer of unique users who have done that event.
Step 3: Choose Filters
Filters exclude unwanted data. In this case, we only care about events performed on the iOS platform. Therefore, add a "Platform" filter, where Platform equals "iOS Native". At this point, your query should look like this:
Step 4: Choose Breakdowns
Breakdowns segment data into groups. In this case, we want to count message-sending users in different cities. Therefore, add a "City" breakdown. At this point, your query should look like this:
Step 5: Change Visualization
Choosing a different chart can help you visualize data better. Line charts help you see a trend, but other charts will help you see the aggregate value.
Step 6: Analyze Results
You now have a full analysis that you can use and add onto a Board, or use as a starting point to dig in further. This might mean adding more filters or breakdowns, or adding another metric and seeing if there's an interesting comparison to be made. You could also change the counting type or the chart type.
FAQ
- Some content about users in multiple segments, events not present, cardinality, null values
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