From the Data Warehouse to GA4, AI, and Beyond: Mixpanel Paves the Way with Event-Based Analytics

Mammoth Growth: Insights From The Trenches

Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast! In this new interview led by Mammoth Growth CEO Ryan Koonce, Mixpanel SVP Product Neil Rahilly establishes Mixpanel’s value for event-based analytics. Neil makes the important point that Google Analytics (GA) is more focused on website performance and traffic analysis, while Mixpanel allows for more in-depth analysis of user behavior and complex questions. Ryan offers more context to this, sharing that while GA can tell you what happened in different website sessions, it’s not designed to tell you who did what in those sessions. And that means, you can’t ask questions about particular users or cohorts in GA, since it wasn’t built to be a true cross-platform behavioral UX tool.

When Google sunsetted their popular Universal Analytics (UA) on July 1st 2023 and forced growth marketers onto Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Mixpanel took the opportunity to define a very specific niche:

• Whereas many people found GA easy to use, oftentimes you couldn’t get the answers you needed for even the most basic questions about user engagement and conversion. GA4 has many of the same limitations with an even steeper learning curve.
• On the other hand, while SQL is both extremely powerful and flexible, and it can give you answers to just about any question related to business intelligence (BI), it is too difficult for most people to use, and much too slow.

Mixpanel has positioned their event-based analytics solution at the sweet spot between GA and BI, offering everyone from growth marketers to product developers the opportunity to quickly get meaningful insights from their customer data.

Neil concludes the conversation with a taste of Mixpanel’s AI tool, Spark. While Mixpanel has done everything they can to make event-based analytics as accessible as possible, Spark aims to reduce any remaining barrier to entry even further. Ask Spark a question about your customer data, and it will automatically build a chart to answer that question, and you can see exactly how it did it. Neil hints that Mixpanel’s next application for AI could be a tool that looks for spikes, drops, or anomalies that might indicate a broken data pipeline.

Thanks for listening!
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Since 2015, over 850 companies have trusted Mammoth Growth to surpass their marketing, product, and business intelligence goals. We offer consulting, integration, and strategic planning services in the following areas:
- Data Engineering / Governance
- BI Reporting & Dashboarding
- Customer Data Platform (CDP)
- Product & Behavioral Analytics
- Lifecycle / Email Marketing
- Modern Data Pipelines
- Multi-Touch Attribution
- Machine Learning
- A/B Testing
Mammoth Growth has deep expertise in a wide range of tools, including Amplitude, Braze, Heap, Mixpanel, Optimizely, Rudderstack, and Segment.
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