Mixpanel is great! Yes, I am re-iterating Mixpanel is awesomely great. That make me write another tech blog. I am sure u would love this article. As always, comments and suggestions are warmly welcome.
So, you remember the FADU Bakery shop, new startup. As a product owner, Mrs. Fadu wants us to add data analytic to the application. She also wanted us to add a feature that enable him to the real-time analysis of each major action people take to the application. An action can be buying particular buns or watching details regarding Kaju cookies. She also wanted us to analyze visitor( not visit) flow retroactively.
We as a developer explored few options to add this major feature. Google analytics is one of the option but not only one. Google analytics is good in majoring and analyzing the page view better. Google Analytics is like a swiss army knife that can do almost anything (but with some effort) while Mixpanel is a tool focused on visitor-level event engagement easily.So here we go! We found something to save our life and that is our friend called Mixpanel.
There are two major things we developer need to know while using Mixpanel: events and properties.
So, What is an event and property means?
An event is just an action user takes in your application. Its a single key metric that you bet your company on. For Fadu Bakery, this would be “buy product”.
Property is the attribute that describes an event fully. Eg. Fadu Bakery might send an event like “Buy product”. With this event, they may include attributes called “type of product” to determine the kind of product bought. Mixpanel does not have this information implicit so they need to send to with each event they want to track.
Properties are sent as key: value pairs and you can define any number of properties you want.
eg
{“cookies_type”: “G”, “age”:18,”gender”:”F”}
Using the inbuilt integration library and API we can easily create events, group all events and push it to Mixpanel server using MixpanelAPI after few configurations. The library is available for integration in JS, iOS, Android, Java etc. In next blog, we will see the code level details and integration of library in an application.
