I love mixpanel, and this looks really promising. There's still a bit too much magic to my liking here. Not entirely sure how accurate this thing is... I asked their support how their algorithm calculates the grades, and this is what they said:<p>> <i>"In essence, it analyzes users who have converted and not converted on the specified event in the past, and attempts to construct a few default profiles based on the characteristics of those users, both in their events behavior and their people properties. Then, it compares these default profiles to your actual people profiles, and places each profile in the bucket that that profile most resembles. So that's how we end up with the grades A, B, C, and D, and place users in those buckets."</i><p>It sounds good in theory, but I'd be quite interested in false positive / false negative rates or something a bit more transparent.<p>Still, this can potentially be a big differentiator for Mixpanel. I guess we'll try to target those 'high confidence' users and see how well they convert...
As a conversion optimization consultant this is interesting, but I'm not jumping to pay for the extra $150/month (at least) for this until I see a convincing case study or experiment result.<p>Here's a low-tech way of increasing conversions: Talk to your customers, your sales prospects, and people in your target audience. Ask them what information they look for when looking for software (or whatever you're selling), whether they're able to find it on your site, whether it's convincing, do they still have any doubts and what are they, what next step would they take if they're interested (request a demo? call someone? email someone?), etc etc.<p>You may find, for example, that a lot of people misunderstand something critical about your product. Or that they prefer to talk someone before signing up for a trial. Or the pricing page wasn't clear to them. Or they didn't see a certain detail about your product and assumed it doesn't have it.<p>If you can't talk to those people, then talk to your sales team and get this info from them... They talk to prospective users all day so they should know about their concerns and questions. If they're getting the same question frequently, put the damn answer on your homepage, pricing page, contact page, ...<p>An algorithm isn't going to figure these things out for you, at least not yet.<p>(To turn the tables, I suspect Mixpanel would get a lot more upgrades for this feature if they included a case study or test result along with this announcement.)<p>There are too many products out there (probably less sophisticated than Mixpanel, I admit) that promise higher conversions with super-duper intelligent timing and segmentation... And most of them fall short.
I'm a Mixpanel customer and this is very interesting. Mixpanel suggests the main thing to do with this data is messaging the users that are likely to convert, but I'm more interested in finding out what are the indicators that makes someone likely to convert and optimizing for that.<p>This feature also supports my theory that analytics companies are really going to become broader marketing companies, so instead of focusing on just gathering and visualizing data, they will give you more ways of acting on that data.
If this really works (well), this could really be an awesome tool. Especially in connection with a notification, an in-app message, or email.<p>(By the way: The "people" features are an add-on that you have to pay by user, additionally to the engagement data points)
I've done this in the past with a pretty basic time series model. The accuracy was incredibly high and allowed us to forecast financial results months into the future.