I'm a paying customer of Mixpanel. I like Flow. My biggest request is the same as the biggest request for the rest of Mixpanel: remove the wall between page views and other events. A flow of pages is nice but a flow of events might really teach me something new about my users.
Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
31–40 of 45 posts
Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
#32Why 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…
Adding the badge to your site is not at all required to use Flow. We would like it if you did, so we will give you 4x the page views if you do, but it's not necessary at all.
Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
#33Interesting, they just mask listia.com's data for their example.
Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
#34This 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 abo…
Allowing cycles in your graph is confusing. If a user visits pages A -> B -> C -> A, what is the dropoff between A and B?
Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
#35Why 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…
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Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
#36Does this work for single-page javascript applications using html5 pushStates or hash-bang URLs?
It does. Using the new Mixpanel JS library you would call:
mixpanel.track_pageview(window.location.href);
Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
#37Flow looks nice but it doesn't show what I want out of analytics, which is link sources and conversions. What I would like to see is flows like:
CPC ad click -> Product Page (secondary goal: email signup) -> Cart -> (time passes) -> Googled "product" -> Product Page -> (time passes) -> email click -> Product Page -> Cart Page -> Payment (primary goal)
I want to see is where people come from, where they went, and why it works. In the example above, the thing that worked was email reminder. It gets even worse when referers are involved, and blog posts don't remove the utm_campaign=email link.
Basically, I'd like a backwards flow from individual conversions.
Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
#38Why 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…
I don't think you need to be worried about it being free. It's not actually free for everyone, I'd assume.
The fact that they let you put a badge on your page to get "4x more views" makes me believe they're going to price it similarly to how Mixpanel is priced—it's free up to a certain number of interactions, and then has tiered pricing from that point on.
Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
#39It looks pretty, the example looks pretty slick, but, it's not all that easy to use in a hurry, and I'm not even sure history exists
It shows a very good 'State of the Machine' at the current moment in time, but it does feel slightly like candy
One major, major thing I would add to convert this into something I would use for my 'strtup' is time, and the ability to see what happened at a time, or event
I am basing this on the 'live demo', but it seems like a report on what's happening now, which isn't really that useful in the grand scheme of things. For instance, if I drop a new feature or blog post on HN, I want to see what effect that will have on my application, and what users do and where they go after first opening that email or clicking on that link
This may seem insane, but I promise I am going somewhere. In my GCSE Physics exam, we were given energy diagrams, and told to do things with them like fill in the blanks. On the left, there was a kind of 'origin', which represented the energy given out by an object. So say a lightbulb gives out 80% light, and 20% heat energy, that would be represented by a 10cm wide arrow on the left hand side, which then breaks into a 8cm wide arrow pointing right, and a 2cm wide arrow breaking off from the main chunk and pointing downwards, to represent waste energy.
This loops back into analysis, say when Flow was first posted onto HN. You could break that down into signups, showing where people dropped off, what pages they viewed and where they went from there, and then render that in a pretty diagram, hopefully showing you where the friction points are
I do also have two minor issues I picked up on from Flow, and I suppose Mixpanel
Given it's a free product, which may or may not have the aim of pushing users into Mixpanl, I could not find any obvious links to https://mixpanel.com on the main page. Which was kind of sad, I wanted to read more about Mixpanel and what the bread-making product does, and how it sustains this free app
Secondly, I emailed Mixpanel back in January asking about details for an internship. Since then, I have received a grand total of nothing from them. Which is sad, metrics and user statistics are two things I thoroughly enjoy, and I would love to work with Mixpanel to build things like this
Re: Introducing Flow from Mixpanel
#40I 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.
Exactly. I shouldn't have to hover my mouse over everything to see all the data. Also those tick marks on the outer edge of the circle signify nothing. I thought perhaps the '6' visitors would be signified by 6 ticks... nope. And why does the dropoffs have to fade out? That just is confusing. It would be nice if the dots on the flowchart arrows were proportionally sized to the traffic flow.
It's like "mystery meat navigation" of statistics. If I care about statistics, I'm probably comfortable looking at a page full of numbers. Give them to me, don't make me hover everything.