Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Analytics For Web Apps

i.TV recently launched a hot new web app called Viewer along with Entertainment Weekly. This app required some pretty specific analytics. The kind that a typical page-views style tracking system won't count.

The big diff with webapps vs. typical web pages is it's usually only one page, so instead of capturing pages you have to capture events. Logins, posts, filtering, replies, replay in our case. We also need to know how long people are using the app. These are all events (or at least can be).

Thankfully we found MixPanel, which provides some awesome graphs along with an easy to use event-capturing system.

In addition to some pretty awesome support. MixPanel lets you bookmark reports that you create and they e-mail them to you regularly. You can't yet bookmark funneled reports (the fancy kind that show you the drop-off between various events: log in, post, etc), but you can send multiple reports.

The monthly prices start at free, which is what we started with! That can log up to 25,000 events.

All in all MixPanel is awesome for doing analytics for web apps!

2 comments:

  1. Jamund, are you still liking MixPanel? are you using any of the export functions? I am curious about the ability to use mixpanel for the data aggregation and then using the query results in my own custom visualizations.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. @Paul. I'm not with i.TV anymore and thus no longer actively using MixPanel. I know that i.TV is still using it, but not doing much with exporting aggregations, just loved getting those nightly e-mails telling us how we were doing :) For more advanced metrics I ended up writing some server-side stuff that shoved data directly into MongoDB. I didn't do much with the MixPanel stats though. :-/

      Delete