A Must-have Event For Mixpanel Analytics
Track every page in Mixpanel
You have implemented Mixpanel analytics on your website and you closely monitor users' activities. This lets you understand users' behavior and allows you to improve your product.
Given Mixpanel’s data model you have to send the event to it to see what’s the users are doing. Unlike Google Analytics, which tracks a lot of things itself even if you don’t send any event, Mixpanel wholly relies on events to produce the insights.
There is no second opinion that the event model for the analytics platform is very strong, in fact, Google also moved to this model with GA4. However, with this model, you have to explicitly send each and everything that you want to monitor, especially with Mixpanel.
Sending events for everything has the drawback that the number of events can go out of hand quickly. Imagine a website has 100 types of pages and each type is a separate event in Mixpanel. That’s not a way to go.
A Pageview
A pageview event in Mixpanel can allow you to monitor all the navigation user performs on the website. It also reduces the overload of maintaining multiple events and if planned properly, can get you almost all of the information you need. Such as what the user viewed, where the user landed, where the user navigated to etc.
However, Mixpanel doesn’t track page views like Google Analytics. But like I said event model is really powerful in the sense that you can mold it however you want.
Consider pageview as any other event in Mixpanel, having an event name and some event properties. The event name is ‘pageview’ and event properties could be URL, hostname, redirected URL, page type, and so on.
With the combination of this one event and its properties, you can do a lot of complex analysis and get actionable insights directly in Mixpanel.
For example, assessing page effectiveness in converting users.
Reach out if you require my expertise to enhance your Mixpanel analytics capabilities.
What properties to send with the event?
Event properties vary from business to business. You will have to assess yourself what information you need when the user views any page. You can decide and group properties based on the things that are common among all the pages.
Let’s say in the case of medium.com some of the common properties could be if the page is a publication, name of publication, page type such as story, stats, home, profile, if the user is login, and so on.
Few common properties that should be send are page URL, page path, hostname for multidomain websites, redirected URL to help understand from where the user came to the current page, page title.
What about mobile applications?
For mobile applications, instead of page views, we can send screen view event. The idea remains the same to track every view of the screen by the user. And the relevant properties in the event can tell more details about the screen that was viewed.
Final Thoughts
Pageview event is just one of many events that should be tracked to get the most out of your analytics. There are many more, e.g Average time on the page. The key is to have a solid tracking plan to lay out the foundation for your analytics journey.
If you want to learn more about tracking plans here is a good course to start with.
I will strongly recommend starting the Mixpanel implementation with an analytics strategy. That is where you decide what needs to be tracked and where. Here is a good guide from Mixpanel on creating a tracking plan.
Need help with Mixpanel? Let’s talk!
Efficient event tracking goes a long way toward growth. Strategizing what to track can get you tons of insights with minimal effort.
