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Missing Users

J
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I am seeing issues where some of our users do not get added correctly to the Users section in Mixpanel.


I used to think it was due to them blocking scripts and trackers but now that I checked, they were added to other third party services that rely on JS like Intercom, Fullstory and so now I am concerned its specific to mixpanel.


Does anyone have experience with this and how they fixed it?


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Best answer by dianneb 28 March 2019, 22:42

Hi @jsimon9633 -

Can you elaborate on why these users "do not get added correctly"? Are they showing up at all? or are they missing entirely?

I would consider two things:

1) How are you handling identity management?

If you are seeing these users in Explore, but they do not have their own profile, then I would confirm that you are following Mixpanel identity management best practices and using the proper alias and identify calls.

2) Have you tested ad blockers?

It may be that some of these users are affected by ad blockers in Mixpanel, even if they show up in other third party tools. Here is a helpful article on that!

I hope this helps!

Dianne



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D
Userlevel 3
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Hi @jsimon9633 -

Can you elaborate on why these users "do not get added correctly"? Are they showing up at all? or are they missing entirely?

I would consider two things:

1) How are you handling identity management?

If you are seeing these users in Explore, but they do not have their own profile, then I would confirm that you are following Mixpanel identity management best practices and using the proper alias and identify calls.

2) Have you tested ad blockers?

It may be that some of these users are affected by ad blockers in Mixpanel, even if they show up in other third party tools. Here is a helpful article on that!

I hope this helps!

Dianne


J
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@dianneb


We are def doing it right as most do appear in user explore. It is just that many are missing and while I understand that 2 can be the issue, it does not really make sense that other third party tools which rely on very similar JS arent failing as often as Mixpanel.

If we have to do a backend integration to ensure they are there, that is a bit of a pain and points to the mixpanel JS having some type of issue that others are avoiding.


They are just missing for the record.


G
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@jsimon9633 I am having the same problem with regards to capturing user names. I can see the user email address and their events, but the user names are not being captured.

Similarly, we user other software such as Intercom and the names are captured regardless of ad blockers, so I'm not sure why Mixpanel cannot do the same. Would love to hear some more input on this.



D

@jsimon9633 did you ever resolve your issue? I am having the same issue where most registered users appear in Users Explore, but not all of them. We use Hubspot for client success and it captures a more complete list of users.

cherise
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Userlevel 6
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HI @dmclancy06  —

I think these two posts might offer more context:

https://community.mixpanel.com/data-management-10/user-data-displayed-in-live-feed-but-not-in-explore-user-profile-2653

 

https://community.mixpanel.com/strategy-and-planning-9/mixpanel-tracking-a-lot-of-nameless-visitors-4237

 

This is all dependent on how you are using the people.set call to send people data to Mixpanel, and what you are specifically seeing in your project that indicates not all profiles are there. My guess is likely that a people.set call is not getting triggered as you would expect it to be, which isn’t capturing your full set of users. To start investigating this, I would look at when you are using a people.set call and confirm that all registered or signed in users are triggering these calls to your project.

 

Hope this helps!

D

Thanks, @cherise . We are consistently triggering the people.set call and setting unique id and email. The users that do appear in Explore have complete information. We believe the issue is that some registered users are not being tracked at all. Our leading hypothesis is that their browsers are blocking tracking.

N

Hi

 

We’re facing the exact same issue. 
We’ve integrated via Intercom and there’s some users that does not show up. 

On the other hand, we’ve integrated with Intercom, Heap and Amplitude for a comparative, and they show up in these other paltforms.

cherise
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Userlevel 6
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@Natev —

Can you share more about how you know that these users are not showing up? Are you using a specific value to find them in Explore? Or are you looking at user counts and the number is different?

 

When you compare your integrations to other platforms, I’d check the following:

  • Are you collecting this information at the same step? What does a user have to do/ trigger in order for this information to be sent to Mixpanel?
  • How is the user identity handled — is there a unique identifier that would separate that user into their own profile? Depending on how the integration is set up, sometimes bulk updates accidentally push groups of users into 1 profile in Mixpanel. This is often the case for anonymous users — ie, all anonymous users get lumped into one profile in Mixpanel because there is not a unique identifier for that profile.
  • ad blockers can also change the way that users are reflected across platforms

If these steps still don’t help point you in the right direction, please share more details so we can understand your specific situation.

 

Thanks!

D

We know users are not showing up in Mixpanel because they register for our product and we can compare the user count in the product to Mixpanel. We can also compare to the number of users in Hubspot, which is populated using their pixel/non-Hubspot form data collection feature.

We collect all tracking data starting on our registration page. The page is part of our product (not our marketing site). Both Mixpanel and Hubspot have tracking setup on this page (and the rest of the product).

We assign a unique ID to all users so that they are separated into their own profile.

Are there any stats you can share about the % of users we should expect to not be able to track due to ad blockers? Right now we see anywhere from 20-40% of user profiles missing depending on the week. I would assume Hubspot has the same issue with ad blockers, but we see more complete user coverage there.

cherise
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Userlevel 6
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@dmclancy06 — 

How are you handling identity management?

You mentioned that you assign a unique ID to all users so that they are separated into their own profile, can you explain more around how you are assigning this ID? Depending on how these calls are structured, it may be that you are creating the user profile, which is uniqued based on the user’s distinct_id, before the unique id that you are setting gets associated with the intended profile, creating a race condition. 

I’d also review your hubspot implementation in comparison with your Mixpanel implementation because you may not be comparing apples to apples — the implementation of events and people data may not be triggered or collected in the same way. 

Hope this helps point you in the right direction!

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