I have a customer for application for schools, they would like to know in how many courses there was no activity. lets say I have a group by school, and each school has a group property of all it's courses.
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You can get close to this with Group Analytics, but the knowledge sources don’t describe an out‑of‑the‑box metric that directly answers “in how many courses was there no activity?” at the course level, so some setup/interpretation is required.Key points from the docs: 1. Events must carry the group key to be analyzed at that group level
If you want to analyze by course, you need a course_id (or similar) as a group key in Project Settings, and every “activity” event must include that course_id as an event property. [Group Analytics; Group FAQ]2. Group properties can be lists
You mention “each school has a group property of all its courses”. That’s a list property on the school group profile. Mixpanel supports list properties and can break them down, but that only tells you which values appear, not which never appear in events. [List property]3. What you do with the current model (group by school only)
If you only have a school_id group key and a list of courses on the school profile, Mixpanel can:
- Break down school‑level metrics by that list property (e.g. “courses” list), treating each course in the list as a separate breakdown value. [List property]
But it cannot automatically compare “all courses on the list” vs “courses that had at least one event” to give you “courses with zero events”.4. Recommended modeling to answer your question cleanly
Based on the docs, the reliable way to answer “how many courses had no activity?” is: - Define two group keys in Project Settings:
- school_id (School group)
- course_id (Course group) [Data model; Group Analytics]
- Track all course‑level activity events with both:
- school_id event property
- course_id event property [Group Analytics; Group FAQ]
- Create Course group profiles (via SDK or Groups API) and set:
- school_id on the course profile
- any course metadata (name, subject, etc.)
- Then in reports:
- Switch the identifier from “Users” to the Course group key so you’re counting unique courses, not users. [Group Analytics]
- Build a metric like “Total Events” or “Active Courses” over your activity events, grouped by Course.
- To get “courses with no activity in period X”, you’d typically compare:
- Total number of Course profiles (all courses)
- Minus number of courses that had at least one activity event in that period (unique Courses in an Insights query).The docs do not show a built‑in “show me groups with zero events” toggle, nor a direct way to subtract those counts inside the UI, so that last subtraction step may need to be done outside Mixpanel or via a more advanced approach (e.g. JQL), which is not explicitly documented for this exact use case in the provided sources. [Group FAQ; JQL groupBy]If you share how you’re currently tracking events (do you already send a course_id on events, or only store courses as a list on the school profile?), I can map this to the most realistic option given your existing data.
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