Mixpanel
Mixpanel is an analytics platform that helps you to track user actions with your application. It also provides specific tools for targeted business communication and engagement with your customers. In-app A/B testing, user survey forms, and custom reports to measure customer retention are some of the other features offered by Mixpanel.
RudderStack supports Mixpanel as a destination to send your event data through our APIs.
Find the open-source transformer code for this destination in our GitHub repo.
Before configuring your source and destination on the RudderStack, please verify if the source platform is supported by Mixpanel by referring to the table below:
Connection Mode | Web | Mobile | Server |
Device mode | - | - | - |
Cloud mode | Supported | Supported | Supported |
To know more about the difference between Cloud mode and Device mode in RudderStack, read the RudderStack connection modes guide.
Once you have confirmed that the platform supports sending events to Mixpanel, perform the steps below:
From your RudderStack dashboard, add the source. From the list of destinations, select Mixpanel.
Please follow our guide on How to Add a Source and Destination in RudderStack to add a source and destination in RudderStack.
Give a name to the destination and click on Next. You should then see the following screen:
We need your Mixpanel’s Token, please provide it into the Connection Settings in Rudder. Currently, we do not support sending events through the native SDK.
Choose EU in Data Residency settings to send your event data to the Mixpanel EU server.
We pass all the page properties that you provide through our page call along with the properties that we auto collect through our SDK to Mixpanel. The event name would be Page for page call and Screen for a screen call. A sample page call is:
rudderanalytics.page();
To identify a user to Mixpanel, you need to call the identify API. Mixpanel needs a unique identifier to identify a user. So, if you provide userId in your identify call, RudderStack will pass it as that distinct_id . Otherwise, it will send an anonymousId if userId is not present, and set the traits that you have provided as the properties corresponding to the distinct ID.
After making this request, RudderStack makes a $merge of anonymousId and userId as a distinct_id and the new userId is mapped to alias so that both of these users are mapped to a single entity in the Mixpanel dashboard.
A sample identify call is as shown:
rudderanalytics.identify("12345",{firstname: "Tintin",city: "Brussels",country: "Belgium",phone: "1234567890",email: "[email protected]"})
Mixpanel has some reserved properties:
$first_name$last_name$name$username$created$email$phone$avatar
You may also create custom properties but you should not create properties that begin with a $ sign.
To track users' actions, you can use our track API. You can call track with eventname and properties. A sample track call is:
rudderanalytics.track("track event", {test_prop1: 50,test_prop2: "prop_value"});
As Mixpanel also tracks revenue, if you send revenue as a key in properties in track call, then RudderStack will track it as a revenue event.
Revenue tracking is done with distinct_id (that is userId that you provide in your identify call, if userId is not present then it will be associated with anonymousId.)
A sample revenue track call is as shown:
rudderanalytics.track("Purchase", {revenue: 30,currency: "USD"});
For more information on how group call works in Mixpanel, check out Mixpanel's Group Analytics documentation.
RudderStack allows you to record the custom traits associated with the group such as name of the organization, number of employees, etc., and send this information to Mixpanel.
A sample group call is as shown:
{"userId": "user123","traits": {"name": "Company","industry": "Industry","employees": 123},"context": {"traits": {"trait1": "new-val"},"library": {"name": "http"}},"timestamp": "2020-01-21T00:21:34.208Z"}
RudderStack sends group calls to Mixpanel only if one or more group keys are specified during the destination configuration in RudderStack, as shown:
You should also have created the group key/s of the same name in Mixpanel's project settings. To administer group keys, simply navigate to your project settings and click on Add Group Key under the Group Keys section.
Mixpanel supports historical event data import. But the timestamp of the event should be within the last 5 years. Mixpanel rejects any data older than this duration. To send historic events, you need to provide the timestamp at the timestamp field in the message. RudderStack will then send the event with the same timestamp to Mixpanel.
Below is the mapping of some of Mixpanel properties with the RudderStack properties that we send over their HTTP API.
We map these fields only in identify requests.
Mixpanel properties | RudderStack properties |
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If you come across any issues while configuring Mixpanel with RudderStack, please feel free to contact us. You can also start a conversation on our Slack channel; we will be happy to talk to you!
