Mixpanel’s 2019 Product Benchmarks Report Provides Companies a Roadmap to Product Innovation

How many people have used your product recently? How many of your users keep coming back? 

These are the key questions we help our clients answer every day. Building and marketing innovative, best-in-class products that customers want to use again and again is core to what we do at DAP.

One of the fastest ways to get quick, accurate answers — and define what success looks like for your business — is by tracking the right customer metrics using powerful analytics tools. As a certified Mixpanel partner, we couldn’t agree more.

But how do you choose the best product metrics?

Mixpanel’s 2019 Product Benchmarks Report sets out to help you do just that.

One of the world’s leading product analytics platforms, Mixpanel analyzed aggregated data from 1.2 billion users performing 78 billion events and found average and best-in-class benchmarks on web and mobile in five strategic areas:

1. Reach
2. Activation
3. Active usage
4. Engagement
5. Retention 

The in-depth report from Mixpanel includes 25 pages of charts and graphs highlighting stats from top industries driving product innovation, including Media, Finance, eCommerce, and SaaS.

The goal is to offer companies a guide to product metrics and help them drive innovation by measuring their offerings against the best in their industry. Here are some key takeaways from the report:

Average is not good enough

Best-in-class (90th percentile) products grow 18 times faster than average ones. This means that the top few companies dominate the market. And they do so by leveraging mobile apps to reach more people. 

Reach is one of the most important metrics to growth teams; it represents the total number of people who have used your product in a recent time period.

According to Mixpanel, “compared to other verticals, SaaS products show the biggest increase in reach for mobile app users. As more people travel for work and stay connected after business hours, SaaS mobile apps provide a convenient way for people to keep working while on the go.”

Make sure you wow your audience

Customers convert the moment they realize the value of your product, referred to as activation. It’s a measure of how many users get value from your product within the first week, meaning they performed a key action within the first seven days.

Activation (or the first “key action”) is different for every industry. Media companies, for example, consider “play/view media” meaningful, while eCommerce businesses look at “add to cart.”

SaaS and Media see a higher on-average activation rate (17% and 16%, respectively). If you’re in eCommerce, however, it might take you a little more time to convert users. The good news is, for online retailers, mobile apps enjoy almost 10 times the activation rates of desktop and mobile web in the first week.

Reach out to customers when they are most engaged

Engagement is essential to track product performance simply because most people engage more with products they love. It’s one thing to grow a great product and another to keep people interested in it.

A measure of how frequently users interact with your product while performing key actions, engagement can be boosted by sending users emails or push notifications.

Many companies use analytics platforms like Mixpanel to build targeted campaigns and identify customers when and where they’re active. 

The 2019 Product Benchmarks Report contains a chart that shows the best (and the worst) days of the week to reach out to users. For instance, in Finance, user activity spikes on Tuesdays, when people are ready to think about budgeting and money, while media products see an increase in usage early in the week on Mondays.

Read the full report to learn more about the product metrics with the most impact for your business —  and how the best in your industry are using them to innovate and grow.