The Amplitude Professional Services team has compiled this Mixpanel to Amplitude Implementation Guide to help you implement Amplitude and start getting insights right out of the gate.
The Batch Event Upload API: Best for sending historical data, including events and user profile properties, at scale.
Mixpanel import tool
With just your Mixpanel project's API key or service account credentials, this tool uses Mixpanel's Export API to export event data from Mixpanel, and import it to your Amplitude project.
Limitations
This tool processes about 160,000 events per batch.
The tool doesn't support User Profile imports. If you need to import user profile information, use one of the following options:
If you don't have the username and password for your Mixpanel project's service account, create a new service account associated with your project, and copy the values.
Ensure your Mixpanel service account has the necessary permissions to access the information you need. Test your credentials with Mixpanel's Download Data page. If the page responds with a 200 status, your service account has the necessary permissions.
If the import tool doesn't complete or responds with a generic error:
The data set may be too large to process. Try again with a more narrow time range, aiming for no more than ~160,000 events per batch.
If the tool imports fewer transactions than it should:
Amplitude detects and excludes duplicate events. If your data contains a large number of duplicates, the events that Amplitude imports may be fewer than expected.
Some Mixpanel events may not be compatible with Amplitude events due to missing information. If your Mixpanel instrumentation doesn't capture fields like name, date, or device ID, Amplitude may not import them.
Amplitude Batch Event Upload API
Export your data directly out of Mixpanel through the API and upload it into Amplitude with the Batch Event Upload API. If you host your data in another external source, you can also use the batch endpoint to upload data into Amplitude.
Professional Services
To get custom services from the Amplitude Professional Services team, contact your Amplitude account manager.
Plan new Amplitude tracking from Mixpanel
Set product goals
Before you dive into implementation, ensure all stakeholders and team members agree on what you want to get out of the data. What use cases would the team like to focus on?
Common use cases by industry
Goal: Understand product engagement.
Key points:
See how your users convert through critical funnels: acquisition (free trial, sales, partner, POC), onboarding, activation, workflow, cross-sell/upsell funnels.
Target the right customers at the right time to move them through a critical funnel.
Find patterns in the way your customers move through key milestones (acquisition, onboarding, activation, renewal).
Understand different customer segments’ use and adoption to define key personas based on use cases and needs.
Optimize your product experience to target different customers personas needs and make them more successful.
Goal: Understand what makes your users purchase.
Key questions:
What's the efficiency of marketing channels?
How many users complete sign-up and money transfer in one session?
How do users engage with product features?
What impacts user retention?
What's the % of users that have used accounts with > 2 currencies in the last 30 days?
How much revenue do we get from a customer?
What impacts referrals?
Goal: Understand revenue and conversion drivers.
Key questions:
How often do users look at products?
What's our purchase conversion rate?
And what's the falloff in each step? (rates of- click to category page, click to product, add to cart, view cart, start checkout, order conversion)
What features do users interact with that lead to conversions?
What are the drivers that lead from user registration to first purchase?
How many purchases include more than one item?
Does the ATC (add to cart) decreased by user or device type?
Goal: Understand the acquisition and subscription drivers of your users' engagement with your product.
Key questions:
What's the total length of time from content consumption in the Free Trial for churned trials vs. subscription converters?
What activities are common between users who convert vs don't convert after the Free Trial expires?
How do users interact with our site and how do they consume content?
What is the percentage of content consumed per genre?
For broader taxonomy guidance, see the Data Taxonomy Playbook and the sample taxonomy below for best practices.
Choose an instrumentation method
You can send data to Amplitude client-side, server-side, or through a third party. Amplitude's recommendation depends on the method you use to track events.
For client-side event tracking:
Amplitude’s SDK Catalog. Use your existing instrumentation method and reference Amplitude mapping to replace instrumentation.
The way you map tracking and identification methods from Mixpanel to Amplitude depends on the type of data.
Event tracking
Mixpanel track events with the 'mixpanel.track()' method, which takes an event name and sets of properties.
Amplitude tracks events with the 'amplitude.getinstance().logEvent()' method. This also takes an event name and set of properties as a JSON object.
Property tracking
Super properties in Mixpanel are properties that attach to all subsequent events. Amplitude's User Properties function similarly. After you set these properties, they attach to all subsequent events that Amplitude ingests.
In Mixpanel, super properties are set with the 'mixpanel.register()' method.
In Amplitude, update user properties with the 'amplitude.identify()' method.
User identification
Mixpanel uses a combination of distinct_id (a randomly generated identifier on a specific platform) and user_id (explicitly set by the instrumenting teams) to identify a user with the 'mixpanel.identify()' method.
Amplitude uses a combination of device_id (a randomly generated id on a specific platform) and user_id (explicitly set by the instrumenting teams) to identify a user with the 'amplitude.identify()' method.
For more on how Amplitude resolves user identifies, see Track unique users.
Data privacy considerations
Along with the ingestion methods above, here are some features or areas to consider when managing your customer data:
Time to Live (TTL) - Feature within Amplitude to control how long event data lives in your Amplitude instance.
How to manage Opt-Outs - SDK settings to allow your website visitors to disable activity tracking on your website.
IP Address - Amplitude captures IP address and location-based details by default with client-side tracking. For information about disabling this tracking, see Browser SDK | Optional Tracking.
User Privacy API - API to delete all data for a set of known Amplitude IDs or User IDs.