In this blog
A couple of weeks ago Michiel Sikkes of Firmhouse wrote a great blogpost on how to create Custom Queries to extract data from Mixpanel and do your own calculations. Michiel wanted to know how many active users he really had, but wanted ‘active’ to be something else than a vanity metric. Just showing up once in a month is not enough to be considered active, instead he defines an active user as:
A monthly active user is someone that uses [our app] at least twice a month, with at least seven days between usage moments.
That way a retention component is also taken into account. It is important to note that ‘use’ is performing the key activity, not just opening the app!
Unfortunately, Mixpanel can not provide you with this data by default, but they introduced JQL a few weeks ago. JQL stands for Javascript Query Language and lets you create custom queries and fire them at Mixpanel to get any data out of Mixpanel. Michiel explains how that works in his
Michiel extracts the data and displays it in their own Dashboard. However, a lot of startups do not (yet) have their own dashboard and use Mixpanel for that. That is why I dove into Mixpanel Applications to have a look how I could use Michiels custom query to show a graph in Mixpanel instead.
It is surprisingly easy to create your own Application. Within a couple of hours I had the following graph, showing our active users, or ‘happy customers’ as we like to call them:
A Happy Customiser is a user that performs the key activity at least twice a month, with at least three days between the events (Has to come back twice). As you can see we have some work to do on creating more Happy Customers for this app ?
If you also want to display your Happy Customers inside Mixpanel, create a new Mixpanel application and copy/paste the code from this Github repository. Don’t forget to change the eventName variable to the event tracking your key metric. Commit and Run!