A guide to product analytics tools for startups

I’ve implemented both amplitude and mixpanel for event tracking on Django apps.

I currently have a project that uses both auto JS and python-based track() calls using mixpanel.

I’ve found people commonly block js analytics and it isn’t safe to rely on for user behavior.

For example, you can instrument react hooks, but you really aught to instrument the api calls they rely on or they will not get captured in many circumstances.

I also have found mixpanel’s anon / known user ID merge to be poorly documented and the community support to be kind of slow and did not get the sense the folks answering had not personally done the implementations being discussed.

One of the biggest things I wanted out of event tracking was to build event bases web hooks to trigger drip-contact events.

Mixpanel quietly deprecates web hooks a few months ago and now wants you to use partners that process your data and do this for you.

Yeah they do Fullstory-type stuff, Heap-type stuff, plus they have an SDK in most popular languages (which no other company has.) If I didn't already set my stuff up before I had heard of them, I would have gone with them. They have the best parts of other tools.

Unless their stuff doesn't work well. I only spent a couple of hours so I might not have noticed UX issues that would have been painful to deal with.

Out of curiosity, what category is your product in? I don't think i've found a huge amount of people block js analytics, but thats probably due to the categories of products I've worked in.

Hey there!

We're kicking the tires on Mixpanel - currently we're prepping for an alpha release, and there are a few things about the dashboards I wish either don't exist, or are not easy to find:

1. I wish I had more options for visualizations. Fot instance, at this scale, it would be really nice to have a scatter plot of events at exactly the time they occur, rather than by the hour

2. I really wish I could customize the graphs more - like if I have a 3 day view, I would rather group the events by the hour rather than the day, and it seems like I can't do that.

3. Is there a place to just query all the events, and get them in a table form? Like I would love to just be able to get all of a particular event in a certain time period, and then look through the properties and exact timings one by one.

Anyway, just some casual observations from a potential user.

This new product is a consumer social / video concept.

Doesn’t just about every extension-based ad blocker block all js analytics discussed in this post?

Have you done backup backend instrumentation if particular events to see definitively that you’re getting duplicate events as often as you think?

One thing I noticed is that without the belt and suspenders approach it really was not obvious what I was missing.

I also care a lot about people who run ad blockers because I consider them to be more savvy and thus more likely to influence the behavior of others.