Mixpanel vs. Google Analytics: Each Tool’s True Strengths

Mixpanel is greatest for monitoring funnels and person flows and digging into the small print of your knowledge, whereas Google Analytics presents a extra normal, zoomed-out view of person acquisition. 

Wish to see precisely how these two instruments evaluate? 

Let’s dive in. 

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: A Fast Snapshot

Quick on time? Right here’s a fast, visible abstract of the total piece beneath.

Function Breakdown: Mixpanel vs. Google Analytics

1. Reporting and Analytics

Mixpanel

Mixpanel presents some of the subtle behavioral analytics capabilities on the market. Companies can get deep insights into funnels, person flows, and retention, and segmentation is seamlessly in-built. 

If you wish to go deeper into a selected cohort (customers that share widespread traits throughout a selected second in time), you possibly can. As an example, say you discover {that a} bunch of customers cancel their subscriptions to your streaming service in the course of the first week of January. 

You drill down into the folks within the cohort and see they’re principally youthful of us. For the sake of this instance, let’s say research present that younger individuals are extra prone to try to economize by slicing streaming providers as a part of their New Yr’s resolutions. 

With that info, you shortly create a promo for each present and potential subscribers. In it, present base plan subscribers get steep reductions in your second-tier, ad-free plan for 3 months. 

Would-be subscribers, then again, can join the bottom tier for a ridiculously low value. 

You body all of it as a manner to assist them hold watching favourite exhibits and movies whereas additionally assembly their monetary New Yr’s resolutions. 

As quickly as this promo is put in place, the hemorrhage slows down significantly. Candy success—all since you have been monitoring close to real-time occasions with Mixpanel. 

Mixpanel additionally helps you to construct customized experiences based mostly in your product logic—aka with customized occasions and properties—so you possibly can view knowledge nonetheless you need. 

Plus, it presents limitless funnel steps you possibly can research—and these are free till you hit 1M month-to-month occasions. 

That stated, superior analytics and reporting options—like customized properties, statistical significance, experiment reporting, and cross-product anaytics—are solely out there on paid Mixpanel plans. You can too solely save conduct cohorts for future research when you’ve got a mid-level plan. 

And Mixpanel does require you to have some coding and dev information to set all the things up the precise manner.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics—especially GA4—is a well-liked device for monitoring the place you purchase customers from, how efficient your campaigns are, and who’s in your viewers. It places these insights into an simply digestible format with built-in experiences that cowl the customer journey. 

The principle experiences are:

• Acquisition—the place customers come from
• Engagement—what they do once they’re in your web site or app
• Monetization—how a lot cash they find yourself spending 
• Retention—whether or not they come again, and when

You can too see fundamental person demographics and details about which gadgets they’re utilizing. 

Your whole experiences will be saved and simply accessed in your report library. If you wish to research particular subsections of customers, you possibly can create experiences custom-made by filters, knowledge high quality, date vary, and comparisons. 

GA4 places these experiences in each chart and desk type for straightforward digestibility. 

Google Analytics additionally has computerized occasion measurement, which implies it could spot all the most typical interactions—like scrolls, clicks, file downloads, and video views—with out making you manually ask it to trace them. 

It may well additionally use massive quantities of information to make predictions about how many individuals are prone to buy a product or churn. 

However GA4 doesn’t supply practically the user-level analytics that Mixpanel does. It’s extra centered on aggregating huge quantities of information and making it digestible, and fewer centered on funnels, cohorts, and the person person journey. 

2. AI and Automations

Mixpanel

Mixpanel presents a function referred to as Spark AI—which is constructed utilizing OpenAI—maker of ChatGPT—as its subprocessor. Spark AI is pushed as an answer to work together with knowledge extra shortly—you should use it to ask questions from and get solutions to knowledge you’ve gathered from person occasions.

However Spark goes beyond basic data regurgitation. It presents instance questions you possibly can ask should you’re not sure the place to start your question, like “What % of my customers use Android?” or “What does the person funnel appear like for Product X?” 

Then, as a part of the reply, it typically presents up visually interesting tables, charts, or graphs to assist make knowledge interpretation simple.

And sure, it could and can create visible funnels based mostly in your person knowledge. If you wish to edit the funnels, it simply takes a fast question on Spark. 

You possibly can then save the queries and their solutions on a tidy dashboard or in a library to have a look at later. 

I actually like this function, to be sincere. Of all of the questionable use circumstances for generative AI on the market, this isn’t one in every of them. Spark AI is a genuinely useful solution to simply get essentially the most insights potential out of huge quantities of data. 

And you know the way Mr. Math Instructor at all times made you present your work throughout math assignments and checks in highschool? He did it for a motive—to see precisely how you bought to the conclusion. To ensure you weren’t dishonest or guessing. 

Spark does the identical. It exhibits the way it reaches every reply—together with what person occasions it pulled from. This helps you retain it accountable and catch any potential errors.

Spark is obtainable on all Mixpanel plans, however queries are restricted to 30 per 30 days within the free plan, 60 a month within the mid-tier, and 300 a month for enterprise customers. 

As for automations, Mixpanel doesn’t supply as a lot as you would possibly count on. It does let you arrange computerized alerts and anomaly detection, although. 

Plus, there’s Signal, a Mixpanel function that may be set as much as robotically correlate occasions to one another, providing you with a greater understanding of your viewers. 

Google Analytics

In contrast to Mixpanel’s Spark, Google Analytics doesn’t have a real AI assistant you possibly can question conversationally. Its cumbersomely named Analytics Intelligence AI device can dig up automated insights, however it’s not constructed for in-depth, back-and-forth evaluation of your knowledge.

However Analytics Intelligence is way from ineffective. It robotically detects anomalies, person traits, and seemingly random modifications within the knowledge gathered from customers. 

You’ll get a notification concerning the change in your Insights dashboard, and from there, you possibly can examine. Manually. With out the assistance of a Spark-like assistant. 

Analytics Intelligence can reply fundamental questions and predict what would possibly occur sooner or later based mostly on present and historic knowledge—like whether or not clients will convert or churn given a selected set of circumstances. 

If you wish to do some configuring, you possibly can arrange customized insights that you really want Analytics Intelligence to trace. 

Every little thing is collected and featured on a reasonably simple dashboard. Some insights do are available bar chart type, which is good for readability, however many are simply plain textual content. 

When the whole dashboard is stuffed with insights, it feels cluttered.

Contemplating that GA4 is free to make use of, although, I’m not complaining. The AI’s simply not as subtle as Mixpanel’s—but. 

3. Integrations

Mixpanel

Mixpanel presents robust integrations with knowledge warehouses, buyer knowledge platforms (CDPs), and pipelines to import and export occasions and sync along with your knowledge stacks. These embrace Fivetran, Amazon Net Companies, DataGrail, and Rudderstack. 

For messaging, advertising, testing, and marketing campaign instruments, Mixpanel natively integrates with Mailchimp, 1Flow, Kochava, AB Tasty, and Kameleoon, amongst others. For adverts, Mixpanel does combine with Fb Adverts and Google Adverts.

For all the things else, there’s Zapier.

See the total listing of Mixpanel’s native integrations here. 

Google Analytics

Clearly, Google Analytics integrates completely with the whole Google Ecosystem, which incorporates:

• Google Adverts
• Search Console
• BigQuery
• Tag Supervisor

Many third-party instruments already supoort Google Analytics already—together with varied advertising instruments, advert platforms, and content material administration methods like Mailchimp, HubSpot, WordPress, and Shopify.

However you gained’t discover a large listing of integrations that Google natively helps, other than different Google merchandise. It’s because third-party merchandise construct the connectors to Google Analytics as an alternative of the opposite manner round. 

So to attach GA4 to these instruments, you’ll need to already be utilizing them or enroll to make use of them and combine from that aspect. 

4. Knowledge Administration

Mixpanel

Mixpanel often holds onto uncooked occasion knowledge for longer intervals of time than GA4—as much as 5 years. This implies you should use it for so long as you want, after which some. 

Your entry to the info can be extra versatile, and you’ll question it each internally (with Spark) and externally in a third-party warehouse like Redshift, BigQuery, or Snowflake.

Groups also can arrange occasions and properties in a manner that matches their product, plus join nameless person exercise with identified customers as soon as they enroll or log in. 

That stated, managing Mixpanel knowledge takes a whole lot of maintenance. Somebody has to handle and clear the info to maintain it dependable. There’s no automated Mixpanel knowledge administration system that makes data governance simple.

That is the draw back of a system that retains knowledge for therefore lengthy, and with out a simple solution to hold it underneath management.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is constructed to scale up. It may well deal with humongous quantities of information with out collapsing. GA4 particularly presents extra agency, correct numbers, too, versus the estimates extra widespread in older variations of GA.  

Retention is versatile—you possibly can alter how lengthy your knowledge sticks round. Free accounts can retain knowledge for 2-14 months, whereas paid Google Analytics 360 customers can retain it for as much as 50 months, so simply over 4 years. 

Plus, GA performs properly with Google’s BigQuery. You possibly can ship knowledge from GA to Google’s warehouse and blend it with different knowledge sources out of your CRM—and even real-life, offline knowledge. 

That stated, GA4 doesn’t have its personal full, standalone warehouse like Mixpanel. You do need to export to BigQuery or one other system for deeper evaluation. 

And as everyone knows, Google loooves its updates—which might mess issues up. In the course of the change from Common Analytics to GA4, for instance, all Common Analytics knowledge received deleted. 

Customers received a number of upfront warning and have been in a position to export that knowledge elsewhere, however nonetheless—issues like this could make it exhausting to maintain historic knowledge constant and in a single place. 

5. Help

Mixpanel

Mixpanel presents various ranges of help based mostly on what plan tier you pay for. If you happen to’re utilizing the free model, you get: 

Paid customers do get dependable e mail help, and enterprise customers get onboarding, a devoted account supervisor, and the choice to improve to quicker/extra subtle e mail and Slack help.

Google Analytics 

Whereas Google Analytics presents a searchable help center and a discussion board you possibly can ask questions on, that’s about all of the help you get. If you happen to use the free model of GA4, that’s. 

If you happen to use the paid model straight from Google—Analytics 360—your help comes within the type of e mail or stay chat. If you happen to purchase from a Google Associate (reseller), that reseller is your solely assist. 

What’s infuriating to me is that Google Analytics acts prefer it presents a solution to contact an actual human at Google, even when solely by a gradual medium like e mail. 

However after I typed in a query and navigated to “Contact Choices,” there was just one contact choice.

And that “contact choice” was to put up to the “assist neighborhood,” aka the unmoderated discussion board for frustrated GA4 users. 

I imply, should you don’t supply precise, Google-led help for non-paying customers, simply say so. Don’t lead us on with “contact us” and “contact choices” buttons. 

Pricing Breakdown: Which Has the Greatest Worth?

Whereas Google Analytics has a sturdy free plan, it jumps straight to a tremendous costly enterprise plan should you want greater than what the free model can supply. Mixpanel gives extra detailed, in-depth insights in its free and mid-tier paid plans—and its full suite of instruments for the enterprise plan.

With Spark AI and higher help, I’d say Mixpanel beats GA4 in worth—it presents a much less clunky interface and a extra personalised and user-focused method.

Last Verdict: Is Mixpanel or Google Analytics Proper for You?

Mixpanel shines on the subject of product and behavioral analytics, and it far surpasses GA if it’s good to perceive person journeys, retention, and in-app conduct. 

Google Analytics, then again, is nice for a birdseye view of promoting efficiency and acquisitions—plus seamless merging with the Google ecosystem.

Many companies use instruments like Mixpanel aspect by aspect with the free model of GA4. 

Need even extra detailed insights on your web site—and a neater solution to collect each quantitative and qualitative suggestions from clients? 

Strive Loopy Egg, one other glorious alternative to GA4.

With heatmaps, session replay, surveys, A/B testing, error monitoring, and internet and conversion analytics, Crazy Egg is a one-stop shop for lots of the identical belongings you’ll discover in Mixpanel and GA4.