Solved

What is the best way to find activation metric in Mixpanel?

  • 7 April 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 907 views
B

Hi, I’ve been researching more about activation for our SaaS product that I’m in charge of tracking. This excerpt is from Mixpanel Guide to product metrics Ebook:

Facebook identified adding 7 friends in 10 days as their activation metric when they were a start-up. They found it was a key milestone in driving long-term usage, and thus made adding friends a central part of their onboarding experience

My question is - what is the best way to do this in Mixpanel? Or if any of you have a framework or workflow how to identify this, it would be great. Or were you doing this manually? There must be some better way that I'm not seeing, right?

 

Basically I can explain my thinking - what I would want to do.

Take users who did an event (purchase event for example)

Specify another event (signup event for example)

And see the count of specific events that the users did in between those two events. And then maybe a median of those counts could be some sort of activation metric. Or am I thinking about it wrong?

 

I guess one way would be having a superproperty with some key event counts on the purchase event, so then in a funnel I could do a breakdown by this superproperty. But isn’t there another way how to do it? We don’t have such superproperties set up at the moment, so I wouldn’t be able to work with past data, and it would take quite a long time to get some relevant statistically significant results then.

 

Second idea I had was to use funnels and the frequency report. So set up a funnel of signup event and then another key event I have in mind to investigate, in a 14 day window (length of our trial), and see in frequency report how many times was that event completed. But that doesn’t seem to work either, I see all conversions from that cohort having frequency of just 1 even though that’s not true. Not sure if it’s bugged or whether I am doing something wrong.

icon

Best answer by Peishan 8 April 2020, 12:00

View original

2 replies

P
Rank
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

Hello,

To your question: 

Take users who did an event (purchase event for example)

Specify another event (signup event for example)

And see the count of specific events that the users did in between those two events. And then maybe a median of those counts could be some sort of activation metric. Or am I thinking about it wrong?

 

Your idea for using the funnels and frequency report is definitely on the money. In your case though, how many times can a user actually sign up? Can they do it multiple times? Or can they only do it once? If it’s the case of a user creating an account for instance, typically, they’d only be able to do it once.

If you’re trying to mimic the Facebook ‘Add 7 friends in 10 days event’, perhaps the idea would be to stretch out the funnel into a 3 step funnel. E.g. 1. Create an account. 2. Log into Facebook. 3. Add Friend.

In the above example, you’d look at the histogram between steps 2 and 3. 

Does that help?

 

B

Your idea for using the funnels and frequency report is definitely on the money. In your case though, how many times can a user actually sign up? Can they do it multiple times? Or can they only do it once? If it’s the case of a user creating an account for instance, typically, they’d only be able to do it once.

 

Yeah they can signup only once in this funnel. The signup is the first step in the funnel and purchase the third step, the second step should be an arbitrary event that I should be able to choose. And that would allow me to see some statistics about the frequency for users who actually convert and complete the third step. But the problem was that the frequency report didn’t seem to work that way, when I tried to set it up, I always saw frequency of just 1 for everybody. However I tried to day once more and it seems to be working, so perhaps I was doing something wrong or it might’ve been bugged.

Thanks.

Reply


Community Terms of UseCookie settings