Exclusive Interview with Scott Pugh, Regional VP & General Manager- APAC of Mixpanel

Leverage the product analytics tool from Mixpanel to have digital experience in 2022

Product analytics tool is flourishing in the global tech market for their effective user interaction in software applications. Applications are for smart devices such as web and mobile devices to offer meaningful insights into onboarding, retention, and many more. It helps to automatically capture all kinds of interactions without any event setup. The global product analytics tool market size is expected to hit US$25.3 billion in 2026 with a CAGR of 21.3%.

Here is an exclusive interview with Scott Pugh, Regional VP and General Manager APAC of Mixpanel, who explains the need for digital experience through digitization and product analytics tools.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialisation and the services that your company offers.

Mixpanel is a product analytics company to help companies understand how their users engage with their digital products (i.e. websites and apps). Given the rapid rate of digitization, especially in the last two years, product analytics is becoming mission-critical for companies to manage and grow their digital properties.

Companies really need to measure and understand key metrics like conversion, user engagement, and user retention. This is only possible if they understand how users are actually interacting with their digital products and that's where a product analytics tool like Mixpanel comes in.

The company also understands that the digital world is fast-paced, and time to insight is critical. Users can get the incredible depth of analysis in a self-serve fashion with a lightning-fast UI built on a proprietary database with products. The team wants to help customers get important insights to their teams quickly so they can take action on the insights.

With what mission and objectives, was the company set up? Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.   

The mission is to help the world learn from its data. When the company was first formed in 2009, the world was only starting to go digital and Mixpanel's pioneering event-based tracking solution gave budding digital products the ability to understand user behaviour within their products.

Fast forward to today, it is now in an environment where digital products are no longer just nice to have— they're essential for any company that seeks to stay relevant and connected to their customers. This development has really supported Mixpanel's growth as a business as more and more organisations start to recognize that product analytics is essential to building better digital experiences.

There was a time when the team had also built new products to address adjacent market needs. But over time, it realized that this was taking away focus from the core product and features that were most meaningful to customers. The decision was to refocus on core analytics capabilities. The team was committed to pushing product analytics to new heights and now has over 6,000 paying customers.

The team has also used Mixpanel for themselves to help understand users better. For example, it looked into the data to determine the user path or funnel that helps to maximise the rate of new user activation within products and growing to love it. This helped to optimize the path for new user activation and make informed decisions and led to a host of UX improvements. The NPS scores triple as a result of this strategy.

What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?        

When it comes to understanding user behaviour and driving product innovation and better digital experiences, companies need to answer questions like:

• Who are my power users? Do they behave differently from other users?
• What makes some users convert and not others?
• Do different groups of users retain differently? Do users who use a specific product feature retain more than those who don't?
• Did the new product feature cause the desired change in user behaviour and lead to the business outcomes that we wanted?

These questions are really hard to answer without a tool like Mixpanel, that's made for analysing user behaviour. It has seen many people trying to do this with alternatives like marketing analytics tools and it doesn't work well because those tools were made for answering other types of questions like where users are coming from and bounce rates, etc.

The other key is the depth of analysis that provide without users really needing any technical skills to create their own reports and dive deeper into the data at any time. For example, the creation of a new funnel analysis in a business intelligence tool might take several hundred lines of SQL code but it takes just a few clicks in Mixpanel. Faster analysis and insights help customers to stay ahead.

If one looks at the movement to democratize data and companies wanting to put insights in the hands of more if not all of their employees, one will then appreciate just how important good UI and UX would be. If users don't want to use the tool and hate using it, then data democratisation cannot take off. Customers regularly share on social media about how they love UI and I hear the same feedback in my conversations with them. Combined with the ease of use the team provides, I think the team is perfect for helping companies get user behaviour insights to every team so they can make better decisions.

Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it           

Customers use Mixpanel to understand how their users are engaging with their digital products. This helps them to make the right decisions from product pricing, promotions, onboarding flows, product feature development, marketing budget investment, and more.

Take KKDay, a leading travel e-commerce company operating across Asia for example. Through analysing the search keywords that users were using, they realized that 80% of the users searched using city names. This prompted them to create a new feature in their search tool to display the top 20 cities the moment a user clicks into the search box. Since the 20 cities form the bulk of the search queries, most users could find what they were looking for in a much shorter time.

A separate analysis of how products were being sorted and displayed yielded other interesting insights. KKDay noticed that sorting the products by ranking them based on a combination of the number of times a product was sold and the number of times they were viewed produced the most relevant results. By implementing this, they saw a 7.7% increase in click-through rates.

Another great way to use product analytics is to help determine product-market fit. Passion Factory, creators of a popular South Korean health and wellness app, use Mixpanel to track the conversion rates of different chatbot dialogue options in their app. The chatbot is an integral part of how they drive user engagement. By identifying the best performing dialogues and keeping them, then replacing poor performing options with new ones, they were able to optimise the user experience to drive more engagement. The chatbot optimization and other data-driven product decisions helped them to drive a more than 250% increase in their four-week user retention rate within a year, validating product-market-fit.

How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

The big investment for companies from a data perspective is moving to a first-party data strategy and having a central source of truth to manage that data. Companies are moving to a modern data stack strategy where they will invest in a data lake and/or data warehouse as a central source of truth and a tool like DBT to transform, test and document their data. From there they can send their data to Mixpanel for analysis using ingestion APIs or Reverse
ETLs such as Census enable their entire organisation to run quick, real-time analysis of their products and provide answers that everyone can use and trust without having to write SQL. The team believes this is the future for product analytics and Mixpanel is uniquely positioned to enable this strategy with proprietary database ARB that enables companies to load, reload, and augment data that they trust.