How to Plot Event Values Over Time: A Step-by-Step Guide

Hello all. I’ve searched here already to the best of my abilities and while some people have already asked, the answers didn’t work for me. I have a simple event with a number value property. How do I plot that value over time, like this:

4 comments

Christopher C.
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What are you trying to plot here? You can total that property across all users and plot that, or across a single user etc, or find the average - https://mixpanel.com/s/2wEH3F is a sandbox example of just summing it for all users
Aleksa S.
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Hello and thank you for the answer. It’s a kind of a system total of something that gets updated occasionally and sent from the backend. I’m aware of the things you have suggested, but this event is not tied to any specific user, since the value does not depend (only) on user actions, but on some external factors that would be difficult to track via events. I was told to use Mixpanel, but I’m beginning to think that it’s the wrong tool for the majority of things that we want to track. On the other hand, I’m surprised that you can’t plot a simple value over time. To me, that seems like the first and simplest thing to implement when making this kind of tool.
Christopher C.
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We have a few things like this, and we take one of two routes:
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Send it as an event to a specific 'system' user that only gets those types of events - we only really do this for data that is a daily extract basically for several different things, so we send through ~10 events to that user per day, each with different values for the fields
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If it is only a single number per day, we use a lookup table and then you can use it for any event (We just have a Google sheet with Date + Value columns basically and it syncs through with the google sheets Mixpanel extension, then we know it is a single value per day, and we can just sum that value and we have it against a chart)
Note this is for data that is external to our business though basically, as in there is no other way for us to get this data, and it doesn't relate to any of our users or events at all. Mixpanel probably isn't really the right tool for just visualising random numbers though unless you're trying to do things like overlay this against another metric (eg signups or logins etc) or you just don't have any other data platforms and need to fit it in somewhere.
Aleksa S.
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I get that Mixpanel solely revolves around users. I just expected/hoped that one could have a kind of standalone event that could be visualized. Nevertheless, your answer is very informative. Thanks for taking the time to answer, Christopher 🙌