In a recent post, I explained how to set up Custom Variables to track Sections of a Site in Google Analytics – the process is cumbersome, too say the least. And unreliable, as sometimes the variables do not show up in GA, testing this is hard, as the data appears with a delay of about half a day and most of the time it’s terrible to view this data in the bloated GUI of Google Analytics. You think, it should be simpler than that? I bet ya – here comes Mixpanel.
Mixpanel does Realtime-Analytics: Basically, you send it events like this:
mpq.track("Project", {'name': 'My Project', section: 'bachelor', }); |
…and mixpanel than records this event in a users Event-Stream in realtime. And that’s about it – no need to remember slots or scopes, just send the event and then look into the very clean and functional Mixpanel GUI to segment events by attibutes, perform funnel-analysis, slice and dice your data, even view users clicking live on your website – and if you’re not yet happy, just export the event-data. Want to track events on the server, like a triggered download? No problem, there are integration apis for python, ruby, php – you can even track events from iphone or android.
Toss GA, go with mixpanel, you can have so much fun with the data they produce…