Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

flow.mixpanel.com

21–30 of 45 posts

Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

#22
post #5

This is the coolest thing I have seen in Analytics for a long time. This really gets to the heart of most of the information you need on user flows and its fast and clear. Can't wait till they add events to this.

Not sure how many are unaware, but Google Analytics has had this same feature for at least a few months (I think) with a different, slightly more fancy, UI. From the new Analytics dashboard, if you go to Standard Reporting => Audience => Visitors Flow, you'll see it. http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

neat, thanks!

Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

#23
Awesome. I've been wanting to see this in analytics for a long time. Not because I would use it, but because I thought it made the most sense. I came across this article on HN a while back that seems to hint at the same thing: http://www.contrast.ie/blog/the-future-of-analytics-products...

I believed it was such a necessity that I worked on building a MVP for about a year, but then gave it up a few months ago. The project was way outside my technical ability even after all that I learned and I had absolutely no experience with analytics in general. It was a bad decision to work on it for any period of time, let alone a year. Especially since I had other ideas that I was better suited to build and believed more in.

Now all that's left of the project is a demo video I put together for a job application. This isn't really what I had in mind then, but what the hell...

Show HN: Real-time, visual, click-path, analytics (pathtrends.com) http://vimeo.com/27327367

Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

#24
post #20

This is neat looking, but I'm not sure how actionable it is. Of course there is going to be a drop-off of users as they drill down. That happens in almost every funnel situation. Also, this doesn't seem to account for other factors that may be to blame. What happens if you stop your marketing? What if you pushed a new version the night before? What is most illuminating for a chart like this is seeing these numbers as…

The Google Analytics version of this feature does let you do this. In case my other comment mentioning it gets buried, it's called Visitor Flow: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&....

In the Google Analytics version, you can view and interact with the flow graph based on different segments, including "Visits with conversions", "Visits with transactions", and a bunch of other metrics.

Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

#25

I like the simplicity of the UI overall, but I'm always surprised when people go through the trouble to make certain interactions really fancy when the less fancy version would be both better for the user and easier to implement. In this case, the little popover when I hover over a circle. As I move my mouse around the circle, the popover follows along on the perimeter of the circle, and I must hover over the (hopefu…

I think that lately there has been too much emphasis on "beautiful". Don't get me wrong, I love beautiful, I'm just tired of reading variations on sentences with the word beautiful in them as a marketing shtick.

Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

#27
This is beautiful. It would be nice to be able to collapse pages together or somehow view cycles. On sites where users tend to have long sessions the graph of site traversal has cycles which may themselves be as interesting as how users exit a given page. For example if you have a group of desirable actions (say you have a site with shopping and user-user messaging) and you want to roll up the exits (collapse the above pages together and find out how much in users are falling out of those pages into help).

Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

#28
Why is this free?

Is this a loss-leader to get people to sign up for the full Mixpanel service?

These days I just don't trust free services. I don't think there's anything nefarious about them, I just don't trust that they're going to be around in a year (why keep running a service that has costs but no revenue), or that they won't get bought for their talent and promptly shut down.

If it uses resources to any significant degree (a JS on every page load can definitely do that when used at scale) there should either be a fee or a damn good reason why I should put my faith in it, especially if you're asking me to base business decisions / process on it.

Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

#29

Why is this free? Is this a loss-leader to get people to sign up for the full Mixpanel service? These days I just don't trust free services. I don't think there's anything nefarious about them, I just don't trust that they're going to be around in a year (why keep running a service that has costs but no revenue), or that they won't get bought for their talent and promptly shut down. If it uses resources to any signif…

This is free because to install it, you must put a link on your page back to MixPanel. MixPanel likes links because Google likes links: it increases the domain authority and PageRank for MixPanel. You'll notice that alt text in the link back to www.pixpanel.com is "Real Time Web Analytics", surely a set of keywords that MixPanel is aiming to own in search.

This is a very clever and subtle SEO move that provides real benefit to users at the same time.

Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

#30

I like the simplicity of the UI overall, but I'm always surprised when people go through the trouble to make certain interactions really fancy when the less fancy version would be both better for the user and easier to implement. In this case, the little popover when I hover over a circle. As I move my mouse around the circle, the popover follows along on the perimeter of the circle, and I must hover over the (hopefu…

As I move my mouse around the circle, the popover follows along on the perimeter of the circle

Seconded, this is a terrible design. Scrap the popovers and just display those 4 figures right inside the circle. Save the eye-candy for where it doesn't get in the way.

Post reply on HN