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Amazon Mobile Analytics

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Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#51

Post by akatz47 »

michokest wrote: post #10
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…

As a second-time founder, I found Mixpanel to be the most expensive piece of SaaS we were using in our stack: at barely 30k users, it was already far more expensive than our whole hosting bill combined! Then I switched solutions for a while, looking for a good combination that'd give me Facebook attribution data plus user behavior. So far, I haven't found my ideas combination and in a way, Amazon doesn't change that.…

You’re definitely ahead of the game if you’re thinking about using a solution to prevent vendor lock in. The problem though is that running a mobile app is much more than choosing your analytics provider and streaming your data to it. That same stream needs to be used to power marketing activity such as new user acquisition and retargeting to lower acquisition costs and improve engagement.

With mParticle, data portability is a feature within an end to end data platform. So is segmentation with the ability to create any audience you can think of and send it to partners like Facebook, Twitter, Google DFP, AppNexus, ActionX, and many more. Think about seamlessly running an App Install campaign on Facebook to all users that crashed and did not return and then measure it with Kochava or MAT, all with just one client side integration.

Nearly every comment here reflects concerns around cost but cost also includes labor costs, switching and opportunity costs, as well as wasted user acquisition costs. The reality is that you don’t have to send all your data to every third party. You should be able to send a configurable sample of your data to a third party, but also very specifically include or exclude data to reduce costs and protect users privacy.

Disclosure: Co-Founder of mParticle

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#52

Post by alexatkeplar »

blumkvist wrote: post #49
alexatkeplar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We recently launched mobile SDKs for iOS and Android at Snowplow ( https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow ), so that's probably the easier route to go than a full-blown custom build :-)

Yeah seems good and I will check it in depth. It seems not provided out of the box, but I assume I can use MS SQL/HDInsight as a backend, instead of Redshift? Maybe you should consider including Azure as an infrastructure partner. I'm a consultant in the non-valley space (rest of the world). Lots of folks like me are looking for what you've developed. Most are pretty big MS fanboys. Just saying :)

Great! Yep we're not based in the Valley either. Our first focus is on AWS and Redshift, but yes Azure is interesting too :-)

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#53

Post by louo »

Disclosure: I work for Localytics.

Overall I agree with Suhail’s points regarding GA being the closest proxy for this service. You do get what you pay for when it comes to advanced analytics. If anything Amazon’s move shows that simple data collection around analytics is becoming commoditized. We tend to price based on MAU’s rather than events to help customers with predictability, but given that event data points are the basis of our (and pretty much all analytics company’s) cost model, that can present challenges.

The problem being highlighted in this thread is that the value derived from advanced analytics doesn’t justify the cost in the minds of a lot of startups. There are a variety of reasons for this: not enough users, deeper insights are “interesting” but not game-changing, complex to set up, hard to understand, requires lots of event tagging, etc.

Here’s one way to think about the value of more advanced analytics: they are primarily valuable for startups when they power the ability to take action on them (i.e. In the form of marketing campaigns). For example, if creating intricate and specific funnels and flows seems like overkill for your startup e-commerce app, would the value increase if you could send a push or in-app message to users who have dropped at a specific point in a funnel but have purchased before? I suspect that it would, but clearly the value fluctuates depending on the stage and context of your app.

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#54

Post by bosky101 »

lot of saas companies offer metadata & other common metrics, as an addon to their main offering. such as crittercism, testflight, bugsense, crashlytics and helpshift.

i've headed analytics/targeting at a yc company in the past before mixpanel, flurry were in the market, and saw first-hand how portability/dumps of the data made a big difference as you grow - something that not all analytics saas companies provide.

disclosure: i work @helpshift and we have several customers who may have 100M+ data points/week but we dont price based on data points. we give the basic active, engagement and session metrics like amazon, and search/faq metrics within our sdk. slice-n-dice reports based on custom events are coming soon.

but our pricing is aligned around in-app customer support & active users. we dont track/charge for metadata, breadcrumbs and you can tie as much data to an issue/user (much like Parse out-of-box). most of our users have several sdk's and we're fine with that too.

that said, i see a lot of value in heap/keen/segment that make it less important where/how the data is and let you focus on what insight to surface

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#55

Post by [deleted] »

buro9 wrote: post #35
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…

A word of warning on selling features, perhaps customers don't value those features as much as the seller does? My history is that I built a real-time analytic engine for reporting project/program progress within large multi-nationals. We had this idea of a maturity scale to guide a client along a path and to show how our features differentiated us from competitors: Level 1) A client is recording progress against key…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#56

Post by krammer »

matm wrote: post #41
krammer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For our startup the initial development scenario was: "add an event at everything the user does, lets think about what cares and what doesn't later". And for this mixpanel's "people" plans are perfect (until you have 25K users). But letting me 100M events is a no-brainer too (it's 4000 events/profile-month).

Relevant: Heap automatically takes this "capture every event" approach for you. Would be curious to get your thoughts: https://heapanalytics.com . (I'm a founder at Heap.)

Looked at it.

I like this approach. Is closer to what web developers are used to: We included analytics on every page, we don't need to create reports until we find a problem or something to optimize... and we still can do forensics.

2 side notes:

– Asked who did this in our app, he told me it was really easy to add mixpanel on "every event". But anyway, he would prefer that it was automatic... and not having to do it again on every view we include.

– As said on my previous comment, for this you need it to be cheap. If not, im creating a problem instead of a solution. At this scenario, mixpanel' people looks less exprensive than heap' sessions.

A question:

Does a "pay for the metrics you use" model makes sense?

Collect everything, what you pay is some sort of multiplier of (metrics used in reports or segments per user). It would be great, at least for this scenario.

I read in the first comment (from mixpanel founder) that the hard part is not collecting data but making them work as formulas.

That makes you able to not storing the data that has not been included on any report or segment for more than a month or something like that if you want to reduce costs.

Re: Amazon Mobile Analytics

#57

Post by mblevin »

gsharma wrote: post #37
namityadav wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have wanted to use Mixpanel for a while. But your product is very very expensive for a Startup. When we're trying to be frugal, there's no way we can justify spending $150 per month on collecting data on just 5,000 users (where 98% of them will be free-users). Your product becomes interesting to a Startup only if they won't have to worry about paying for analytics till they're really successful. That means many mil…

We circumvent Mixpanel's limited events early on and stayed under their free tier for as long as we could. This is what our setup looks like: We collect millions of data points a month and save them on our servers. We do not use Mixpanel's SDK to collect these data points, but have written our own code for that. We save the raw data on our server, aggregate a bunch of similar events to 1 event and then push it to Mix…

That's precisely why we price on a per-user basis at Indicative (https://www.indicative.com) and not on a per event basis.

What you described is a lot of work to build and maintain and very brittle. We've had quite a few customers switch to our platform from Mixpanel that were doing the same thing - aggregating data or sampling.

The problem with either is that you basically blow up your user-level data (e.g. John Smith doesn't have the right activity history), you will miss potentially important trends that are statistically significant that only appear over time, and you limit the type of analysis you do by "property stuffing", particularly around cohorts and retention.

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