Why Marketers Should Choose Mixpanel for Analytics

A recent development in Europe further amplifies the case for diversifying analytics tools. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) faced a ban in Europe over rising privacy concerns, underscoring the fragility of relying on a single analytics solution.

Especially for businesses operating in the financial sector, this sends a clear signal about the shifting landscape of data privacy. As European regulators become increasingly stringent, it may well become an industry standard to adopt alternative and more compliant analytical tools.

Marketers should be prepared for such shifts, ensuring that their data strategies remain resilient amidst these regulatory changes. By considering platforms like Mixpanel, companies can ensure continuity in data insights and stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing digital environment.

While Google Analytics 4 (GA4) allows users to measure traffic and engagement across websites and apps for free, Mixpanel might be the better platform to fully match your company’s unique goals, needs, and plans for growth. In this blog, we explore the added benefits of choosing Mixpanel Marketing Analytics.

Leveraging the right data for your marketing

In order to build better user experiences and drive higher conversions, you need to fully understand customer behavior. Mixpanel’s powerful marketing analysis tool allows you to measure what valuable acquisition really looks like, with customizable features, advanced capabilities, and end-to-end integration.

• Access greater insights from your website traffic. With Mixpanel, users can customize session definitions and even segment user demographics. In comparison, GA4 has limited flexibility, only offering time-out based sessions and pre-defining which metrics get computed.
• Explore conversion rates with advanced analysis. Mixpanel allows users to customize conversion funnels, calculate time-to-convert, and even review funnel drop-offs. As a marketer, you can also draw insights from data trend visualizations and in-depth analysis. Although GA4 does offer event-based data modeling, its capabilities lack this same depth and custom comparisons to understand the factors driving or preventing conversion. 

• Ensure quality insights with quality data. While GA4 only offers a debug view, Mixpanel provides a range of data governance features. This includes the ability to hide and drop bad data, debug implementation, and even supplement user attributes from your own CRM system or data warehouse. 

Greater cross-departmental collaboration on data

Businesses always do better when they empower data accessibility and literacy across all departments. That’s why it’s good to find a marketing analysis tool that is user-friendly and enables collaboration. When comparing platforms, Mixpanel is better suited to improve accessibility and avoiding data silos than GA4. 

• Empower teams with accessible data exploration. While GA4 is good at displaying the standard metrics, it suffers from hard-to-learn UI and lacks intuitive UI. Meanwhile, Mixpanel is far more user-friendly. With intuitive UI/UX and workflows, Mixpanel allows you to unlock core reports and pre-populated templates with just a few clicks.
• Have more meaningful discussions on performance and data. With Mixpanel’s features, your marketing and product teams can pool analysis, communicate through text and media cards, set alerts, and even collaborate on embedded tools like Slack, Figma and Notion. On the other hand, non-admin team members using GA4 are usually limited to view only, and any teamwork has to happen outside the platform.
• Seamlessly shift from analysis to experimentation. Unlike GA4, Mixpanel enables audience targeting with over 100 integrations, from ad networks like Facebook Ads to engagement tools like Twilio. Mixpanel also works with leading experimentation platforms like LaunchDarkly, ABTasty, and more. 

Stay abreast of shifting marketing data demands

Marketing analytics are subject to shifting requirements that can be challenging to keep up with. Data protection regulations and policies are always changing, and new iOS 17 updates have increased user data privacy and limited the way we can track traffic. Businesses need a data analytics platform that not only keeps up with these demands, but can also grow and adapt with them.

• Adapt your data tracking to iOS 17. One of the main effects of iOS 17 is the Link Tracking Protection feature, which is automatically activated in Messages and Safari under Private Browsing Mode. This new feature detects user-identifiable parameters in link URLs, like GCLID parameters for Google, and removes them. This dulls the edge that GA4 would normally have over other analytics. With pageview tracking and insights from UTM tracking, Mixpanel takes the competitive edge.
• Stay ahead of data compliance requirements. While Google Analytics and GA4 have talked about improving GDPR compliance, Mixpanel continuously works to keep up with new data protection regulations. With Mixpanel, your insights draw from first-party behavioral data and third-party cookies, and data collection that is both GDPR- and HIPAA-compliant.  On the other hand, Google will be phasing out third party cookies next year, eliminating cross-site tracking from their services. 
• Scale up your analytics with your business. Mixpanel allows real time, detailed data analytics from up to five years of historical data, while GA4 only stores your data for 14 months (far less than what was possible with Universal Analytics). MIxpanel’s data query system also enables retroactive data modification, and supports high cardinality limits of up to 10,000 segments for each dimension. Furthermore, Mixpanel’s capacities and pricing adapts to the needs and size of your team, growing with your business while remaining accessible to startups and founders.

On the other hand, GA4 is a far less powerful marketing analysis tool for scaling. With at least four hours minimum wait time to process data, lower cardinality limits, and significantly limited data retention period, GA4 is far less suited to larger queries and bigger campaigns. 

Powerful marketing data analysis

The right marketing analytics tool can save your company time, resources, and can produce the insights you need to drive conversion and power engagement. As a user-friendly, customizable, adaptable, and powerful tool, Mixpanel is a better tool for marketers than GA4’s free platform. Plus, you can get started with Mixpanel in a matter of minutes, or follow a simple, fully-guided process to migrate from Google Analytics.

Need help identifying the right analytics to give you a clear picture of your marketing performance? Find out how Seven Peaks Software can help your business here.

Bo Lund Pedersen, Head of Marketing at Seven Peaks

Bo is a Digital Marketing Innovator with IT Expertise & Leadership. Bo is a tech-savvy leader with a decade's experience working across Europe and Asia. Adept at scaling teams, he has driven growth and pioneered strategies for global brands. He has a proven track record of conceiving and executing high-impact MarTech solutions, enriching customer experiences and propelling revenue expansion.