Unlocking your metrics: a comprehensive guide to Mixpanel reports

For many online businesses, success can feel like a moving target. You’re constantly trying to optimize your user experience and align your team on the problems to solve, the desired impact, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to improve—all while measuring and analyzing results.

In this case, what matters most about product analytics tools like Mixpanel is how they help you create an interactive and insightful report that meets your user and business needs.

In this chapter, we explore Mixpanel's reporting capabilities and show you how to create reports in the platform to get deeper product and customer insights that help you reach your goals faster.

What are Mixpanel reports?

Mixpanel reports are the platform’s interactive analysis features that let you quickly explore user data and visualize product, app, or website usage.

Mixpanel has several types of reports, such as Insights, Funnels, Flows, and Retention. Each serves a distinct purpose and helps you visually organize your metrics and data analytics reports into easy-to-read formats you can effortlessly share with your team and stakeholders.

Mixpanel’s reports help you decode your data and access actionable insights with ease

Why are Mixpanel reports important?

Mixpanel is an intuitive analytics platform that helps you quickly analyze user engagement, conversion, and retention. It lets you measure every step users take toward conversion so you understand how they interact with your business.

This includes events like users filling out a form, viewing content related to a specific topic, or installing an app, as well as in-product behaviors, such as sending messages, applying discount codes, or adding items to their cart.

As a business owner, product manager, or digital marketer, going through all this data manually and extracting key insights is one of your most challenging jobs to be done (JTBD). Mixpanel reports are the platform’s way of making this easier for you. 

By breaking down user behavior data into smaller, more specific sections, reports help you dig deeper into how users act across different platforms and time periods, so you can make data-driven decisions.

Specifically, Mixpanel reports allow you to

• Filter and visualize your data in seconds 

• Access your most important KPIs at a glance

• Get valuable insights from your customer journey—from awareness to acquisition through to retention

• Optimize budgets based on real-time campaign performance

• Quickly share updates with investors and other business partners

💡 Pro tip: build insightful stories around user behavior data by adding context to your metrics. 

Mixpanel analytics are great at telling you what’s going on with your customers, but they don’t give you much insight into why.

To get those answers, use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to fully understand your users and provide a better customer experience. Once you know what your data is telling you, there's no limit to what you can achieve.

Use experience intelligence software—like Contentsquare—alongside Mixpanel reports to capture qualitative data and learn the real motivation behind user behavior:

• Heatmaps visually represent where users click, move, and scroll on your site. With this context, you'll learn how users really behave.

• Surveys bring voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights to your decision-making. Gathering evidence for a new product or feature? Use a targeted survey to validate your ideas and better understand your users.

• Interviews let you recruit, schedule, and host user interviews, so you can focus on what matters most—connecting with customers and learning what they expect from you and your business 

Streamline user onboarding with Contentsquare’s Interviews tool—host calls, get AI transcripts, and recruit from 200,000+ participants

4 Mixpanel reports to help you measure and analyze user behavior

Exploring each type of Mixpanel report allows you to slice and dice user behavior trends to explore them from all angles. 

Here are 4 types of reports you should create and track in Mixpanel and how each of them helps you reach your specific business and user goals. 

1. Insights report

The Mixpanel Insights report lets you explore your data by segmenting and filtering essential Mixpanel data points—like events and user counts.

An example of a Mixpanel Insights report

What this report measures 

The Insights report tells you how your product, app, or website is being used. This includes showcasing data on how users are finding your business, how popular certain features are, how many users are signing up and adopting your product, where they’re based, how long it takes them to complete a desired action, how much they’re spending, and total revenue.

It helps you learn what people want or expect from your product—and how and when they'll use it—so you can deliver a delightful user experience.

How to use these insights

Mixpanel’s Insights report offers real-time analysis that lets you better understand customer attitudes and behavior to build a more successful business. For example:

• Marketers can analyze user behavior data for more effective campaign optimization

• Product managers can rapidly obtain data on user actions to inform the product roadmap

• Online store owners can compare the performance of different ecommerce activities, like spending amounts and the average unit price per user across different devices

2. Retention report

The Mixpanel Retention report assesses your product’s ‘stickiness’ by identifying how many users come back to it over time.

An example of a Mixpanel Retention report

What this report measures 

A retention report helps you measure the rate at which your users are re-engaging in specific actions over a fixed period of time, and clearly displays each feature’s ‘stickiness’.

These insights show you the number of users who return (after signing up or making a purchase), what percentage of users are lost (aka customer churn), whether users who perform specific actions are more likely to return, and which channels promote the best retention.

Tracking these metrics helps you get answers to questions like “Which Mixpanel cohorts have the highest retention rate?” and “What are the root causes of attrition of other users?”

How to use these insights

This report helps you track the likelihood of different users revisiting your product so you can analyze their retention over time, enabling you to insert customer incentives and stimuli in the user path that give you an edge in a highly competitive ecommerce market, such as

• Offering discounts

• Recommending preferred items

• Sending push notifications to boost interaction and consumption

💡 Pro tip: combine Mixpanel with Contentsquare to uncover insights about where, how, and why your customers churn.

Traditional metrics like customer retention rate (CRR) and customer lifetime value (CLTV) are good to know, but they don't tell you the whole story of customer churn. To really make a difference in your retention rate, you need to know why customers stop using your product, app, or website—and how you can get them to stick with it.

So, how do you do that? With a combination of traditional analytics data and user behavior insights.

Mixpanel’s quantitative metrics help highlight issues and opportunities, but they're limited: you still don’t know what the user wants. To make customer-centric changes, you need to combine this data with more personal and specific user behavior insights.

For example, use Session Replay to see individual user actions, so you can uncover specific issues or blockers they experience with your product and understand why they churn.

See how individual users interact with and experience your site or product with Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool

3. Funnels report

The Mixpanel Funnels report enables you to analyze user actions at each step of the funnel, and the paths they take, to identify when and why users may be dropping off. 

An example of a Mixpanel Funnels report

What this report measures

This report helps you understand the conversion and drop-off rates of critical sequences by measuring user progress at each step—from the moment they enter your product until they exit, including button clicks and session duration.

How to use these insights

With more insights on the full user journey—from accessing the website to checking out—teams rely on the Mixpanel Funnels report to understand user behaviors and learn key insights such as

• Which features are popular

• Who their power users are

• The behaviors tied to long-term retention

This informs design and UX decisions by helping you zero in on these pain points, so you can work with your team to identify and test ways to reduce friction for your users.

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis helps you measure user progression through key steps—click by click, screen by screen—so you can spot where engagement drops, which actions drive momentum, and where to focus your UX efforts to keep users moving forward.

Track every step that leads to conversion—or drop-off—with Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis tool

4. Flows report

The Mixpanel Flows report lets you analyze how users move through your product by exploring paths between key actions.

An example of a Mixpanel Flows report

What this report measures

This Mixpanel report allows you to identify the most frequent paths users take from or to any event. It measures how your customers sequentially perform events in your product, which of their behaviors are successful, and where in the process they drop off.

While the Funnels report depends on you to build a path by selecting each step of the funnel manually, the Flows report extracts data directly from your product, app, or website to highlight the existing user flow. Analyzing this flow helps you identify the user path with the highest conversion rates and reorient product optimization toward the most successful path.

How to use these insights

Use the Mixpanel Flows report to track user activity and understand how different users interact with your product, app, or website. For example, you can

• Test your product team’s planned conversion flow and see whether reality veers dramatically from your initial purchasing path

• Identify the optimal paths your users are taking that end in conversions and identify new opportunities to improve

• Clear the roadblocks that dampen your potential customers’ chances of successful conversions

Next steps to Mixpanel

Tools like Mixpanel simplify the process of collecting, visualizing, and reporting data, allowing product and marketing teams to focus on key user actions and speed up decision-making to meet customer needs.

The Mixpanel reports above help you benchmark and track how well you acquire, convert, and retain customers. But to actually improve your metrics, you need to see (and hear) what’s really causing users to stay—or leave.

Start with Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to see what your customers see and include Surveys to collect customer feedback. Soon, you’ll have a list of optimizations to turn casual users into long-term fans of your business.

FAQs about Mixpanel Reports