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Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers to common questions about using Mixpanel.

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General

Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that helps businesses track user interactions with digital products such as websites and mobile apps. It provides detailed insights into user behavior, allowing teams to analyze usage patterns, measure engagement, and optimize the user experience. With features like event tracking, funnel analysis, cohort reports, and A/B testing, Mixpanel enables data-driven decision-making to improve product performance and growth.Mixpanel offers a variety of ingestion SDKs and import/export integrations to make it easy to collect and use product analytics data across platforms.Learn more about Mixpanel and send your first event.
Mixpanel offers sample datasets representing a range of use cases (including B2B, AI, and e-commerce) to help you learn the platform’s features effectively. To access these datasets, create a Mixpanel account, log in, then select Mixpanel Demo Sample Datasets from the project menu dropdown.You may also book a demo with our team.
Mixpanel offers flexible pricing through the Free, Growth, and Enterprise plans. You can explore the features available in each plan on our pricing page. The page includes a Plan Builder tool that helps you estimate your cost based on projected data usage.

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Sending Data to Mixpanel

There are several common reasons why you might not see any data in your Mixpanel project:
  1. Incorrect Project Token - Using the wrong project token in your initialization code will lead to your tracked data not arriving to your project. Always verify that the token matches the token shown in your project settings.
  2. Mismatched Data Residency - If your Mixpanel project data residency setting does not match the API endpoint you are sending data to, your data will not be ingested. If your project data residency is set to EU or India, make sure to route your data to the correct API server URL in your initialization code. Learn more about EU Residency and India Residency.
  3. Implementation Issues - Implementation errors can prevent Mixpanel SDK methods from triggering as expected. To help identify and resolve these issues during development, enable debug mode in your SDK. This will provide logs of the Mixpanel requests being triggered, along with the associated payloads.
Learn more about debugging your implementation.
You can use any Mixpanel SDKs to track and send events directly from your applications, both on the client and server side.Mixpanel supports direct imports from data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Databricks through Warehouse Connectors. You can set up recurring syncs to keep Mixpanel in sync with your warehouse data.If you use a CDP like Segment or Rudderstack, you can add Mixpanel as a downstream destination to receive your data. Learn more about data ingestion integrations.
Ad-blockers can significantly affect Mixpanel tracking, particularly when using the client-side JavaScript SDK. These blockers and privacy extensions often target known analytics endpoints (such as Mixpanel’s), preventing events from being sent and recorded. As a result, users with ad blockers enabled may not be tracked in Mixpanel, leading to discrepancies between backend data and Mixpanel reports. Depending on your audience and the types of blockers in use, an estimated 30% or more of client-side events may be impacted.To reduce the impact of ad-blockers, use server-side tracking for critical events (server-side requests are not subject to ad blocking) and implement a proxy server to route client-side requests through your own domain (making them less likely to be blocked).Read more about the differences between client-side and server-side tracking.
To track first-touch UTM tags in Mixpanel, you can rely on the default behavior of the Mixpanel JavaScript SDK. When a user visits your site for the first time with UTM parameters in the URL, the SDK will:
  • Automatically capture the UTM parameters from the landing page URL (such as utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, etc.) and add them to events fired from that page load.
  • Store these first-seen UTM parameters as user profile properties prefixed with initial_ (e.g., initial_utm_source, initial_utm_campaign). These properties represent the first-touch attribution and will persist on the user profile for future reference.
No extra configuration is needed for first-touch tracking if you are using the default SDK settings and identifying users normally. The UTM parameters will be persisted as super properties in a last-touch manner and the initial values will be set on the user profile automatically in a first-touch manner.Learn more about UTM tracking.

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Identity Management

A distinct_id in Mixpanel is the unique identifier used to track a user across events and profile updates. This ID allows Mixpanel to attribute actions and properties to the correct user, ensuring accurate analytics and reporting.When two events have the same distinct_id, they are considered to be performed by the same unique user. If two events have different distinct_ids, they are treated as coming from different users.Learn more about identity management.
On the client side, the Mixpanel SDK automatically generates a random, unique distinct_id for anonymous users. When a user registers or logs in, you can assign a known user ID (such as a database ID) by calling the identify method in the SDK. The ID is then stored in the cookie or local storage for persistence.On the server side, you are responsible for generating both anonymous and known user IDs, as well as ensuring their consistency and persistence across events.Learn more about identifying users.
As a best practice for client-side identity management:
  1. Call identify() during both registration and login, using a consistent user ID in each case to ensure proper user identification.
  2. Call reset() on logout to clear cookies or local storage and generate a new ID. This prevents unintended merging of data from multiple users sharing the same device.
  3. Include your user ID as both a super property and a user property. Doing so makes it easier to query and export data.
Learn more about identifying users.
Seeing data from two different users under a single Mixpanel profile is most commonly caused by improper identity management - specifically, not calling reset() when users log out on shared devices.If multiple users use the same device and you do not call reset() when a user logs out, the next user who logs in will inherit the previous user’s distinct_id. When you then call identify() with the new user’s ID, Mixpanel merges the previous and new IDs into a single identity cluster. This causes events from both users to appear under the same profile.Learn more about identifying users.

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Building Reports and Analyses

Check out our Guides for a walk-through on how to plan, implement, and analyze in Mixpanel!
If you are worried about a report being correct, first confirm that the data is being tracked as expected. From there, review the docs about the specific report to make sure you understand the logic behind it. If something looks off, try to find an example of a specific user or event that you thought should/shouldn’t be included in the report and see if there’s anything about that event/user that would lead to the behavior seen (ie is there a filter on the report, filtering out the event?). If you still need help, reach out to Support via the web form with a link to the report and some context on what looks off.
The most common analysis is done in the four core reports:
  • Insights: Visualize trends and compositions within your data
  • Funnels: Measure conversions through a series of events
  • Retention: Measure engagement over time
  • Flows: See frequent paths taken by users to or from any event
Check out templates and demo datasets for various industries (accessed through the ? menu) to get a feel for popular metrics.
Growth and Enterprise plans can create custom alerts based on reports. When an alert fires, Mixpanel’s Root Cause Analysis feature analyzes the properties of unexpected events and automatically generates a Board with reports broken down by relevant properties so you can search for the underlying cause of any unexpected data point or fired alert.Organizations with enterprise plans can also set up anomaly detection alerts to automatically monitor their metrics and notify you when significant anomalies occur.Learn more about custom alerts here.

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Exporting Data

Event data can be exported via the Export API, while user profile data can be exported via the Engage API. We also have a handy Mixpanel-utils Python module that hits the APIs directly.Alternatively, you can purchase the Data Pipelines add-on to export data directly to cloud storage or a data warehouse.Learn more about exporting data here.
If you have the Data Pipelines add on, data will automatically be synced to your warehouse at the scheduled cadence (daily or hourly).At a board level, you can set up a board subscription to automatically receive a snapshot of a board sent as an email or a Slack message. It isn’t possible to schedule a CSV delivery of a specific report within the UI. However, the Query API can be used by paid plans to export report data on your end.
It depends on how you want to export the data! All plans can access the Export API to export event data at no additional cost. Profile data can be exported from the Engage API at no cost as well.The Query API is included for Growth and Enterprise plans. If you want to use Data Pipelines to export the data, you would need to purchase it as an add-on.

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Managing Projects

It’s recommended to set up at least two separate projects: one for Development data and another for Production data. This separation ensures that test data doesn’t mix with your live user data. The Setup guide has more information.Organizations on an enterprise plan can also use Data Views within a single Mixpanel project. Data Views allow you to create focused “mini-projects” that display only the events and properties relevant to a specific team, function, or use case.
The first step is giving them access to Mixpanel. The Roles & Permissions doc has information about how to invite additional users. They can check out the Launch guide for a guided walkthrough of the Mixpanel features and reports.We also have a training template that can be set up in the project. This will walk the user through the reports in Mixpanel itself. You can set it up as a pinned board so its visible to all users.
Need more help? Contact Mixpanel Support

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