Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: 4 Critical Parameters

Monitoring the user traffic and engagement across a company’s website and products is really important to analyze the state of business for a particular company. It becomes even more important for businesses specializing in SaaS [Software as Service] based products as these channels serve as the main customer acquisition channels for the services offered by the business organization. Google Analytics and Mixpanel are the most popular options being used in the industry to track metrics on websites.

In this article, you will be introduced to Mixpanel, its key features, Google Analytics and its key features. You will learn about the difference between the two platforms and a detailed Mixpanel vs Google Analytics comparison will be provided. 

Table of Contents 

• Introduction to Mixpanel 
  • Key Features of Mixpanel 
• Introduction to Google Analytics
  • Key Features of Google Analytics 
• Understanding Why Product Analytics is Important 
  • Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Improve Conversion Rate 
  • Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Improve Marketing Strategy
  • Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Improve Product and User Experience
• Mixpanel vs Google Analytics Comparison
  • Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Use Case 
  • Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Product Features 
  • Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Limitations
  • Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Pricing Strategy 
• Conclusion  

Introduction to Mixpanel 

Mixpanel is a Software-as-a-Service company that specializes in business analytics. Mixpanel is a tool that allows you to monitor how users interact with your mobile and web applications. This allows you to analyze user behavior and improve your in-app features and user communications.

User survey forms and in-app A/B tests are among the services offered by Mixpanel. This data can be used to measure user engagement and retention, and unique visitors and customer reports can be developed on top of it.

Mixpanel enables anyone to conduct advanced analyses. With just a few clicks, you can query your data build interactive reports consisting of informative visualizations. This makes it simple to respond to questions regarding how your product is used, who stays around, and so on.

Official Documentation about Mixpanel can be found here.

Key Features of Mixpanel 

• Custom Alerts and iOS App: 

Custom Alerts and an iOS app let you stay on top of your most critical KPIs. You can create a personalized email alert for when your website conversion rate, or weekly signups, reaches a certain threshold. The Mixpanel iOS app can also keep you up to date when you’re on the road.

• Improved Query Builder: 

With a new query builder that works across many reports, you can get answers faster. There are new query builders for the Insights, Flows, Funnels, and Retention reports, as well as other usability improvements across the platform.

• Data Integrity and Synchronization: 

With Data Pipelines, you can keep Mixpanel in sync with the rest of your stack. Data Pipelines makes it simple to move data into and out of Mixpanel, so user analytics isn’t isolated. Connect to a data warehouse to leverage clickstream data in a larger business study, or transfer data to a real-time queue to feed machine learning models. Save time for your data engineering team while ensuring data integrity throughout your stack.

• Funnel Visualization: 

You may compare how each user segment converts visually.

The process of identifying areas for conversion rate optimization is sped up using side-by-side funnel breakdowns. To further examine regions of interest, such as low-converting portions, you may create cohorts directly using the visual interface.

• Transform Data with Custom Properties:

Custom Properties allow you to change the values of your properties using simple Excel-like formulas without having to bring in new properties from your development team. Consider the following scenario:

Users may be bucketed based on existing characteristics like “Video Duration” to form particular groupings.

(< 60 = “Less than 1 hour”, > 60 = “Over 1 hour.”)

Merge similar property values into one (“SF”, “San Francisco” —> “San Francisco.”)

Calculate new properties from multiple existing properties (Total = “Price” x “Qty.”)

• Impact Report Generation: 

Without disturbing your Data Science / Analytics Team, see how new features affect your product KPIs. The Impact report uses propensity matching techniques to adjust for confounding factors, ensuring that the change in your metrics was caused by your feature and not anything else. This is the first and only “causal inference” reporting for product teams that comes out of the box.

Introduction to Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that offers statistical and analytical data to consumers. It is quite beneficial and supports the management of search engine optimization (SEO) and associated product marketing activities. It includes a number of features that enable users to interface with other platforms and gather website data. It allows users to segment their campaigns based on a variety of variables in order to better understand how they work and make data-driven decisions to optimize performance. Because of its comprehensive reporting capabilities, it is the most popular choice for industries. It is a free service that is available to all Google users.

It displays real-time changes in data utilizing interactive elements such as a dashboard, motion charts, and scorecards. You may create a custom report using SEO Google Analytics that suits your company’s needs.

Official documentation about Google Analytics can be found here.

Key Features of Google Analytics

• Web-Traffic Tracking: 

For all visitors, Google Analytics monitors websites and gathers all essential data across metrics such as region, user, clicks, products, time spent, conversion, and so on. It provides a detailed report based on the data collected, allowing firms to evaluate their campaigning efforts.

• Interactive Real-Time Dashboard: 

By monitoring sources, organic traffic, keywords, sentiments, and other factors, the Google Analytics Dashboard may help you better understand consumer behavior. The Google Analytics Dashboard allows you to learn about your customers’ habits, how they engage with your goods, why they bounce, source platform, lead generation, and more.

• Seamless Multiple Integrations: 

Google Analytics integrates easily with other Google products like Google Search Console, Google Ads, and Google Data Studio, etc., allowing users to conduct in-depth and precise analyses.

• Measure Numerous KPIs and Metrics:

Google Analytics also has the ability to track different metrics such as page speed, mobile-friendliness, and other factors that may assist businesses to assess the success of their websites. It also aids companies in analyzing the competition and making strategic decisions based on consumer segmentation and engagement.

• Automatic Report Generation: 

Google Analytics captures all of the data from the website, such as traffic, region, users, and clicks, and provides detailed analytical reports.

• Support with Strategic Decisions: 

Analytics dashboards may aid in competition analysis and strategic decision-making based on consumer segmentation and interaction.

Understanding Why Product Analytics is Important 

Product Analysis is Important for the following reason which has been described in detail below: 

• Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Improve Conversion Rate 
• Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Improve Marketing Strategy
• Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Improve Product and User Experience

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Improve Conversion Rate 

For SaaS businesses, the term “conversion” is considerably more important. It’s arguably one of the most crucial goals you can set for yourself. A good conversion rate can help your SaaS business and its product succeed immensely. You’ll struggle to convert your site visitors if you don’t have the appropriate information. This is where data analytics can help.

Every month, you should have hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors to your site. How do you know where to improve if you’re not measuring where they’re coming from or what they’re doing? You can detect holes in your site’s usability by tracking how people use it. People could visit your “Features” page and then depart. This indicates that the page isn’t fulfilling its function and needs to be improved. Analytics gives you the information you require. 

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Improve Marketing Strategy 

Marketing has a two-pronged approach. To begin, there are the shotgunners. These businesses shoot a wide-ranging shot, aiming for as many platforms and demographics as feasible. Then there are the snipers. These firms scout the many alternatives before launching a focused attack on a certain platform and market. So, how exactly do you go about becoming a marketing sniper? The first stage, of course, is to identify your target. Identifying and focusing down on your ideal customer is a significant part of this. It’s a wonderful approach to target your marketing efforts if you know your major consumers are product managers for SaaS businesses.

The rest is based on your information. You may examine how visitors arrive at your website. Do they show up on their own? Do they have anything to do with social media? Are these from your sponsored advertisements? This data is essential since it allows you to choose where you should spend more of your marketing cash. Analytics can reveal the origins of your visitors, allowing you to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.

If you are interested in learning about Marketing Reports, you can find the guide here.

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Improve Product and User Experience

One of the major differences between SaaS and other businesses is that your job doesn’t end when a prospect converts. You must ensure that your new consumer remains loyal.

As a result, one of the most significant measures is the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Any SaaS company’s lifeblood is retention. Your product should be designed with the goal of retaining consumers and decreasing churn. But there’s something you’ll need to decrease turnover. That specific item is, as you’ve undoubtedly figured, information. To prevent churning in the future, you must first understand why your clients are leaving.

That may appear to be a difficult process. How can you possibly understand a churned customer’s mind? They usually don’t want to talk to you or give you any feedback.

The answer, as it turns out, is analytics. Product analytics differ from web analytics in a few ways. Instead of page views, they concentrate on real user activities like clicking a button, adding a team member, or submitting a photo. One of the most useful features of product analytics is the ability to categorize all of your churned consumers. You may then retrace their steps by looking at that group. You can observe how people engaged with your product by looking at the screenshots.

There will almost certainly be certain key activities that your churned users never took. As a result, they may have entirely missed your product’s moment to showcase its potential. With this knowledge, you can enhance your product’s onboarding procedures to ensure that new users are directed to those critical activities. You can achieve this in a matter of hours, if not minutes, using technologies like Userpilot. Product analytics may help you figure out why consumers abandon your product, so you can enhance it and avoid it from happening again.

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics Comparison

Both the platforms have been compared on the following parameters: 

• Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Use Case 
• Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Advantages 
• Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Limitations
• Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Pricing Strategy 

Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Use Case 

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Google Analytics Use Case

Even today, Google Analytics remains the gold standard for marketing attribution. Even at the free level, it is a powerful tool that can accomplish a lot. Google Analytics is based on a pageview paradigm and gathers majority of the data you care about right away. Of course, you can use Google Analytics to track events, which I’ll go through in the following part.

Google has been hard at work developing additional reports such as cohort analysis, improved funnels, and the ability to monitor individuals by ID (instead of anonymously). In summary, Google Analytics is great for figuring out where people come from (marketing attribution) and may be especially useful for “simple” websites with few user interactions. This category includes informational websites, blogs, and Ecommerce sites. Ecommerce, in particular, provides the possibility of implementing Ecommerce Tracking, which allows revenue to be tracked.

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Mixpanel Use Case

Mixpanel is primarily designed for product teams that are attempting to understand their consumers’ behavior. This includes software firms, e-commerce firms, and media firms. Mixpanel is for you if you have a digital product and want to see how consumers engage with it. Mixpanel is solely based on event tracking, which is a versatile approach to organize your data. You may then build reports such as funnels to check how much time has passed between steps.

Mixpanel retention data may also be used to determine how sticky your product is over time. These reports are all designed for complicated items. Mixpanel may be overkill if you have a “simple” (relatively speaking) website with minimal user interactions. Ecommerce businesses are intriguing because they may profit from technology such as Mixpanel, but they might also get by with Google Analytics. Because software goods are inherently complicated in terms of how they are used, they are ideal. You’re spending too much if you’re only utilizing Mixpanel to track pageviews. This might be a good fit if you’re going to create a data structure that’s rich and sophisticated.

Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Product Features 

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Google Analytics Product Features

1. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: No Additional Costs 

Google Analytics is available for free in its basic form. The expense of all your varied tools may quickly build up for early-stage SaaS firms. You won’t have to worry about hidden fees using Google Analytics. Google Analytics’ basic version is entirely free to use. You receive all of the different features and capabilities for free, offering all that small businesses want.

Keep in mind that if you grow to the point where you want more sophisticated capabilities, such as more thorough real-time data, you’ll have to pay a whopping $150,000 a year. 

2. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Track the Source of User Acquisition

You may learn about the origins of your users. The acquisition is an important element of any SaaS marketing plan. You will not acquire any new users if you don’t have it. Google Analytics is a wonderful tool for determining how people find your website. It breaks out all of your traffic into social networks, paid advertisements, organic, direct, and other categories. In other words, you can observe which channels are more effective in bringing visitors to your website.

Not only that, but you may also determine which of these traffic sources converts the most. Although paid advertisements may bring in more visitors, if social media is converting better, you should focus your efforts there.

3. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Ease of Setup and Initialization 

It only takes a few clicks to set up a Google Analytics account, especially if you already have a G Suite account. Adding a verification tag to your website’s HTML is all it takes to integrate it. Your web developer will just have to work for five minutes. If you have a little technological know-how, you can even do it yourself. As a result, you can begin analyzing your site’s metrics in minutes.

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Mixpanel Product Features

1. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Interactive Funnel Visualization

A funnel is one of the most simple methods to depict user journeys. While both Google Analytics and Mixpanel provide funnel visualization, Mixpanel’s method is considerably more user-friendly. Mixpanel’s funnels may be created by defining user journey steps. These might be user activities, pages visited, or any other relevant data item. It’s also worth mentioning that these funnels are quite simple to build on the fly. Especially when contrasted to Google Analytics, which needs you to set up your funnels carefully before you can see your data.

2. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Integration of Website and Product

You may link your goods to your website. Both your site and your product may utilise Mixpanel to measure user activity. This provides you with a complete picture of each user’s trip. Because there isn’t a gap in the first place, no data is lost. It implies you can examine how people who found you through social media behave differently than people who discovered you through sponsored advertisements. This is a significant advancement over Google Analytics, which can only provide information about your website. Mixpanel is an excellent solution for SaaS firms who want a comprehensive picture of their customers’ experiences, from prospect to power user.

3. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Actionable Insights

If you don’t act on the data and analytics, all the efforts for data aggregation and analytics will prove to be useless. Mixpanel allows you to test hypotheses based on the data you’ve gathered. You may run product tests, change messaging, and tailor your offering to different user groups. You could take your Google Analytics data and test various messages with another tool, but Mixpanel’s all-in-one approach makes life a lot easier.

Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Limitations

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Google Analytics Limitations

1. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Lack of Event Tracking 

Google Analytics primarily records a user’s location and length of stay. As a result, you may lose out on information on how users interact with your site. You can build up custom events to fire, but it’s a bit difficult and restricted. As a result, you won’t be able to get the information you want.

You’ll need another tool, such as Mixpanel, to track real occurrences like button presses or scrolling distance.

2. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Website and Product Division 

The majority of SaaS businesses have a website and a product that are two separate entities. The website serves as a marketing tool rather than a finished product. Google Analytics was designed with websites in mind, not standalone apps or products. As a result, you’ll need a different solution to track product data.

Hence, you may notice a discrepancy in your statistics. You won’t be able to correlate a user’s online behaviors to their activities in your product. As a result, a comprehensive tool such as Mixpanel may be the way to go.

3. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Funnels Creation with Limited Details

In terms of the amount of information you can offer, the funnels you can create in Google Analytics are pretty restricted. It’s also difficult to use and set up.

First-touch, ongoing, and last-touch attribution are the three forms of attribution. The first-touch attribution is the emphasis of Google Analytics. It will inform you how a visitor got to your website in the first place. It will show you the last-touch attribution that drove the conversion to a certain extent, but only if you put it up appropriately. However, when it comes to continuing attribution, Google Analytics is a little hazy, and you never get a complete picture of the trip.

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Mixpanel Limitations

1. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Limited Traffic Attribution 

Mixpanel does track attribution channels, but it falls well short of Google Analytics. Google Ads data may be pulled into Google Analytics, allowing for a seamless and complete connection. Mixpanel is just unable to compete. Google Analytics is a superior tool if you’re more interested in tracking where visitors come from rather than what they do.

2. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Upfront Costs

Mixpanel has a “free” beginning package that allows you to track up to 1,000 users each month. This is ideal for companies in their early stages. Mixpanel, on the other hand, becomes a little more expensive as you expand up. A minimum of $779 per year is required. As you scale, you’ll see this cost increase as you add more people to track. You’ll also have to pay extra if you want to utilize Mixpanel’s chat and experimentation features.

In comparison, unless you’re a large Enterprise firm, Google Analytics is absolutely free.

3. Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Limited User Friendliness for Beginners

Many Mixpanel users agree that getting accustomed to how it works might take some time. Google Analytics, on the other hand, may appear difficult at first, but it is pretty simple to use once you get the hang of it. If you want to get up and running as soon as possible, Google Analytics could be a better option.

Comparing Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Pricing Strategy 

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Google Analytics Pricing Strategy

The great part about Google Analytics is that it is completely free! Look no further if you’re trying to stay lean and bootstrapped. There are also no costly integrations or add-ons. You get exactly what you see. Larger organizations may consider investing in Google Analytics 360, which is its advanced version and covers all of the fundamentals.

If you’re dealing with a lot of data, the enterprise edition has a lot more features, requests, integrations, and power. Nonetheless, most businesses will find that Google Analytics ‘ basic version meets their requirements.

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Mixpanel Pricing Strategy

They have three plans you can choose from.

While both programs are free, Google Analytics offers more at that level. The first, called “Starter,” is free for the first 1,000 monitored users each month. Analytics flows, cohorts, and other features are included. You may also add an infinite number of team members with a data history of up to 90 days. It’s not bad.

The “Growth” option costs $89 a month and includes up to 25,00 monthly monitored users as well as a year’s worth of data. Finally, “Enterprise” is paid individually for each customer and includes configurable data history (based on how far back you need to go), single sign-on, and group/B2B analytics.

Conclusion  

In this article, you learned about Mixpanel, its key features, Google Analytics, and its key features. You learned the reasoning behind the need for product analytics and the use cases suitable for both platforms. Detailed compassion of Mixpanel vs Google Analytics was provided based on multiple parameters. 

If you are interested in learning about Data Automation, you can find the guide here, or if you want to learn about the differences between Redshift and Teradata, you can find the guide here.

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