Now Analyzing More Than 15 Billion Actions A Month, Mixpanel Launches A Big Marketing Campaign And A Conference About Analytics

Andreessen Horowitz-backed analytics startup Mixpanel has been growing quickly over the last year, adding new customers and rapidly expanding the amount of data it tracks. Now it's looking to grab more customers and help them better understand their users, with a big marketing push in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, as well as the launch of a conference about data-driven decision making.

If you haven't been paying much attention to Mixpanel, that's probably because analytics are pretty boring. I mean, analytics are boring but important to understanding where your growth and users are coming from and ultimately how you can get more users.

But if you are in the guru/ninja/growth-hacking business, you probably have at least one of your four displays tuned to Mixpanel all day long while you sip $5 locally roasted fair trade coffee and rub your beard and say to yourself, "Hrm, interesting." Maybe you'll call one of your coworkers over and point at your screen and say, "Hey, look at this. I had no idea our conversion rate on that campaign was so strong."

That's because Mixpanel is, like, an ultra-customizable version of Google Analytics (or, insert any other boring analytics engine you can think of) that allows you to really dig deep and get in there and find out what your users are doing. Last summer it launched a user-analytics module, which it extended out to kind of creepily track what they're doing with a user activity feed. That, of course, helps with customer support. Not only do you know what users are doing and where they're coming from, but you can also send them messages and interact with them and get feedback.

That's got a lot of gurus and ninjas and growth hackers scratching their beards and pointing at their screens and bugging their coworkers. In fact, Mixpanel now has more than 1,300 mobile apps and websites paying to use its platform, and together, they're analyzing more than 15 billion actions each month. Revenue is growing 10 percent each month, and it's adding about a billion more interactions each month.

Ok, so it's gotten this far with basically no marketing whatsoever. Which means it's an awesome time to move from online marketing, which it can track, to offline marketing, which exists in a world that no one truly understands and leads to people to say they don't know which half of their advertising budget is wasted. Now Mixpanel wants to wonder the same thing.

So if you're one of the poor souls who drives up and down Highway 101 every day you'll probably start noticing billboards with various pieces of interesting, trivial data points it has lifted from Mixpanel Trends, a free data set that it recently released to anyone who wants to know what people are doing with those 15 billion actions and on which devices or whatnot. Or if you're in the Caltrain station, or basically if you find yourself near any location where a startup exists in SOMA, you'll probably also see a Mixpanel ad through the month of August.

Mixpanel has also succumbed to the inevitable desire to launch a startup conference… because, well, startup conferences. But more than just an advertisement for its own products or a thinly veiled excuse to have a has-been rock band play a nearby local venue, Mixpanel's DDC2013 conference (which stands for data-driven conference, I think) is all about bringing together smart people to make analytics sound interesting for an afternoon. It's enlisted 21 speakers to take on that task, most of whom you've probably heard of. They'll talk about how analytics is affecting everything startups do, from product design to marketing to whatever.

Still with me? Mixpanel has raised $12 million from investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Square COO Keith Rabois, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and Yammer CEO David Sacks.