When two or three products have the lion’s share of the market, everybody has an opinion about which one is the best. Coke vs Pepsi, Google vs Apple … the list goes on. While Kissmetrics and Mixpanel won’t be the subject of passionate position-taking among the general population, product people harnessing the power of digital marketing are certainly polarized by the two competing services.
So How Do They Compare?
If you’re in the process of choosing a funnel analytics solution and haven’t yet managed to contract Kissteria or Mixmania, this post will give you an honest-to-goodness overview of the two most celebrated championship contenders in the funnel analytics arena.Mixpanel vs Kissmetrics: The Similarities
Both analytics platforms are used to monitor the activity of visitors as they move through your marketing funnel, from first engagement to conversion, hence their dominance as funnel analytics tools. Both applications allow you to generate customized reports from the data gathered by the software. It’s also possible to drill down through various levels of data to gain specific insights into site and visitor activity. When your prospects make it all the way to the end of the funnel and convert, you want this to be the start, rather than the end, of their engagement with your product or service offerings. Kissmetrics and Mixpanel both help to provide visibility into how effective your business is at retaining customers once it has acquired them. Retention reports are standard features of both applications. Kissmetrics and Mixpanel both provide a major advantage over other funnel analytics tools. They let you track and monitor the progress of individuals through your marketing funnel, whereas most of their competing products only show you data that’s aggregated from all your website visitors. As an example of how you might use Kissmetrics or Mixpanel, let’s assume you’re in the software sector and that your company provides a SaaS service. If this assumption seems uncannily accurate, don’t worry, we’re not monitoring you—it’s pure coincidence. Anyhow, here’s how you might utilize Kissmetrics or Mixpanel to monitor your customers’ journeys.- You would use these funnel analytics tools to identify what your leads are doing when they visit your website. You can find which site elements your visitors interact with the most, and how they engage with your content.
- As a SaaS provider, you might offer free account signup, which would be one of the early events in your funnel. Kissmetrics and Mixpanel let you continue to track your customers once they have signed up as free users.
- Once your prospects and free-account holders become paying customers, you would use Mixpanel or Kissmetrics to identify which features of your SaaS site they are using and which ones they aren’t. This is important intelligence when you want to optimize your service to retain existing customers and attract new ones. On the (hopefully rare) occasions that you lose customers, these analytics tools will help you to understand why.
Brian says
Your section on Data Storage is incorrect. You are correct that at Kissmetrics (as with Mixpanel) you have people and events.
At Kissmetrics you can assign properties to people – This can be what city they are from or if they are a creator/follower (account type). You can also assign properties to the event – Event : clicked button (properties : “big red button”)
Dan McGaw says
Brian,
Thanks for making us aware of the update. This has changed since we wrote the post and I will update the post to reflect.
How else can we make this post better?