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Amazon Mobile Analytics

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Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#21

Post by suhail »

nbevans wrote: post #12
suhail wrote: post #5

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Mixpanel This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is expensive! Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if I am wrong): - Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of th…

"This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us." Keep telling yourself that. Microsoft and Amazon will douse the flames of your party before long; they are taking their first steps now.

While your opinion is a fair and valid one, you're extremely mean person on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nbevans

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#22

Post by wzsddtc »

suhail wrote: post #5

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Mixpanel This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is expensive! Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if I am wrong): - Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of th…

every startup/mid-size company I worked/contracted for went through the same thing: Flurry sucks -> MixPanel too expensive -> Back to Flurry or GA.

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#23

Post by raquo »

That free tier is quite generous – worth about $140/mo if you were to exceed it by the amount of free allowance. Need to be careful if you rely on it being free, and then grow.

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#24

Post by nbevans »

suhail wrote: post #21
nbevans wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us." Keep telling yourself that. Microsoft and Amazon will douse the flames of your party before long; they are taking their first steps now.

While your opinion is a fair and valid one, you're extremely mean person on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nbevans

Maybe so. The truth can't always make everyone happy.

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#25

Post by zaroth »

suhail wrote: post #5

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Mixpanel This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is expensive! Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if I am wrong): - Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of th…

> Given that, over time it is our plan to lower prices relative to the rate that hardware and infrastructure becomes less expensive.

Could your COGS really be more than 10 - 20%? Usually margins on SaaS is 85%+ and money is spent mostly downstream on payroll for sales, marketing, support, and development.

So I'm a bit surprised to hear 'once infra costs come down we'll lower prices'. When, outside of 'have 1TB of S3 storage for free for your photos', is infra ever the driving cost?

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#26

Post by sehugg »

swanson wrote: post #2

"1st party" analytics on Android is a bit weird at the moment. Since Google Analytics for Mobile requires Google Play Services - you can't use it in for installations on Amazon Fire devices. Of course there are third party services (Crashlytics, Mixpanel, etc), but it's just interesting to see Amazon and Google essentially forced to build their own versions of each other's services to compete on Android.

You can use the older version or the Measurement API

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#27

Post by suhail »

zaroth wrote: post #25
suhail wrote: post #5

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Mixpanel This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is expensive! Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if I am wrong): - Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of th…

> Given that, over time it is our plan to lower prices relative to the rate that hardware and infrastructure becomes less expensive. Could your COGS really be more than 10 - 20%? Usually margins on SaaS is 85%+ and money is spent mostly downstream on payroll for sales, marketing, support, and development. So I'm a bit surprised to hear 'once infra costs come down we'll lower prices'. When, outside of 'have 1TB of S3…

You're right, the primary cost for us (and like most B2B companies) are the employees that serve our customers. That's about 25% for our business. However, the % of cost substantially increases to become infra for the highest volume customers.

So, in a way, you make an interesting point: it's quite difficult to reduce costs for your smallest customers since the cost of supporting them isn't generally infra related (unless you're a consumer startup?).

There are number of advantages to have lots of smaller customers, no matter how seemingly "unprofitable" on paper they are: marketing, product feedback, etc. Your mileage may vary though for each business and its timing in the market.

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#28

Post by matm »

(Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Heap. We build mobile analytics, so I'm far from impartial.)

Amazon's main purpose in building an analytics tool is to drive spend to the Amazon App Store. If you can't measure the ROI of their app store, you can't devote more resources to it.

This applies to just about all the big tech companies and their respective distribution platforms: Google with AdWords, Facebook with mobile ads, and Apple with the iOS app store. Lots of dollars flow through these platforms, and Amazon/Facebook/Apple don't want their developers measuring those dollars with a hostile competitor's analytics offering. (Often, the hostile competitor they have in mind is Google.)

You'll notice this in the screenshots for Amazon's mobile analytics. On the Overview page, note the breakdown of "Lifetime Value Per User". There are separate figures for iOS users, Android users, and...Fire OS users. A line item for "Fire iOS users" would never be so prominent in Google or Apple's analytics (or even present).

Thus, Amazon et al. focus on making their own analytics tools good at measuring acquisition (prioritizing their own channels) and some high-level metrics. Digging into the data is much less of a priority. Even basic questions - "what's the conversion rate for my signup flow?", "what are the email addresses of my active users?", "what percent of my revenue comes from repeat visits?" - require you to use a different tool.

Bigger companies are aware of this feature gap and happy to pay the price premium. But startups are (appropriately) more price-sensitive, even though a solid investment in growth/analytics is arguably more important for startups.

I'd love to hear HN's feedback on how Heap (and other analytics companies) can structure their pricing to better accommodate small companies.

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#29

Post by anix »

matm wrote: post #28

(Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Heap. We build mobile analytics, so I'm far from impartial.) Amazon's main purpose in building an analytics tool is to drive spend to the Amazon App Store. If you can't measure the ROI of their app store, you can't devote more resources to it. This applies to just about all the big tech companies and their respective distribution platforms: Google with AdWords, Facebook with mobile ads,…

Only web and iOS? why no love for android?

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#30

Post by gorkemcetin »

You may also want try an open source (self-hosted) solution like Countly (https://count.ly). It may well meet expectations if free-to-use Community Edition (https://count.ly/products/editions/community) is what you'd need. If not, you can go with Enteprise Edition (https://count.ly/products/editions/enterprise) which is also open source, self hosted, but with a lot more features like drill-down events, funnels and retention (cohorts).
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