How much money can you save with Mixpanel’s self-serve analytics? We can tell you.

There are a lot of factors to weigh when choosing an analytics platform. But for startups and enterprise businesses alike, the choice all boils down to one, all-encompassing thing: What is my return on investment (ROI) for this tool?

We’ve built Mixpanel with this in mind by ensuring all the features we introduce promote team efficiency and the ability to make informed product, marketing, and even companywide decisions while avoiding costly missteps.

To show this, we’re now offering personalized Mixpanel ROI calculations for any team or company interested in trying us out. Book yours now right here, and if you want to nerd out, continue reading to learn more about how we calculate all the ways Mixpanel can save you $$$.

How does Mixpanel actually save you money?

Improve team efficiency

One of the biggest advantages Mixpanel brings is making your teams more productive. Whether your Mixpanel users are product managers, marketers, or engineers, Mixpanel allows them to collaborate and work together using a single source of truth. They can get answers more quickly than running a SQL query or waiting for an analytics team. They can share reports with peers to make cross-functional work even easier.

Though sometimes subtle, this type of collaboration and self-service ultimately saves a lot of time and resources. In fact, our customers at large have told us they’ve seen an average of 35.4% in time savings.

Improve decision-making

Mixpanel can also help you choose the best product or marketing direction. After launching a new product, feature, or campaign, you have to know what to track, how to track it, and how often to track it. Without the right plan in place, important insights can be delayed or missed entirely. One of the biggest risks is making costly decisions based on assumptions. Mixpanel helps you make informed decisions about what features to prioritize and which ones to deprioritize completely. This saves you time and resources by ensuring that you’re building the right features for your users.

How do we calculate your Mixpanel ROI?

We focus our ROI calculation on the increased productivity component you get when you bring Mixpanel into your workflow. While 90% of customers who responded to our customer value survey reported that they feel more confident making decisions after using Mixpanel, we didn’t feel quite comfortable predicting such a fluid concept.

So we broke down efficiency into three parts:

1. Improved efficiency for Mixpanel users looking for answers and insights
2. Time saved for data analysts who were previously bogged down by answering product questions
3. Cost savings compared to building a tool in-house

Improved efficiency for Mixpanel users

There are a few key variables here:

• Average salary for the Mixpanel user
• Impact percentage
• Efficiency metric

We used levels.fyi to approximate our average salary for each Mixpanel user (product manager, marketer, or engineer), picking the 25th percentile to calculate conservatively. For our impact percentage, we surveyed teams and found that Mixpanel impacts about a quarter of their day-to-day work. And finally, we risk-adjusted our customer-reported 35.4% efficiency metric down to lower aggressive, moderate, and conservative values to account for variability in experiences. Multiplying those variables by the number of Mixpanel users on a team or company us to their “productivity gained” figure.

Time saved for analysts

Our customers reported that when relying on teams of analysts, it could sometimes take weeks for answers. In fact, 79% said that they saw faster decision-making after implementing Mixpanel. How much faster? Almost 40%. That doesn’t mean companies should eliminate their team of analysts, though. After implementing Mixpanel, you can assign analysts to more strategic and impactful areas of work. But many of them still use Mixpanel to get the job done. So we applied the same formula above to calculate the time saved for analysts. (Analysts were included in the customer survey results.)

Data infrastructure costs

The age-old question: build or buy? Building may seem like an efficient option, but the costs can really add up. In addition to engineer salaries, you have to consider the costs of queries and cloud storage. We do some of that math for you in our calculator.

The cost of Google Cloud storage starts at $.02 per gigabyte (GB) of data stored. Each month, as you continue to add more data to be stored, the cost will increase based on that total. Think of it like renting storage space: The more space you need, the more you pay, even if you start at a low price point.

The cost of running queries in BigQuery is based on the amount of data processed during the query execution, also measured in GBs. Rather than charging a fixed fee, you pay for the resources consumed while running your queries. This means that the more complex a query is, the more it costs to run it. You are charged per GB of data processed, with the first terabyte (TB) of data processed per month being free. We did some analysis of Mixpanel customers to determine an average cost per query and number of queries per event bucket to incorporate in our ROI calculations.

While we don’t actually include the cost of an engineer or two in our calculation, it’s an important consideration. Someone has to maintain the infrastructure, and it’s not always that straightforward.

Investment in Mixpanel

This was the easiest part. We broke it into two components:

• Platform fees
• Internal onboarding and ramp-up

With Mixpanel’s flexible pricing, it’s easy for us to determine your price based on your expected event volume. You can even check it here yourself. And with experts from our Customer Success teams weighing in, we were able to estimate an internal onboarding cost for your users to learn Mixpanel. Formal onboarding costs are included in our Enterprise pricing, but we know onboarding can be an involved process. Think of this number more as “time spent away from the job” for your users learning Mixpanel.

Results

ROI doesn’t need to be this hand-wavy, smoke-and-mirrors show. Our team can provide you with an estimate of what your ROI could be with Mixpanel with real numbers:

• ROI %
• ROI $
• Number of hours saved for Mixpanel users
• Number of hours saved for analysts
• Productivity gained for Mixpanel users (in $)
• Time saved for analysts (in $)
• Savings from data infrastructure costs
• Cost of Mixpanel (including internal onboarding and ramp-up)

If you’d like to see what this could look like for your team or company, contact us and let’s get started 📄

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