Mixpanel Adds Mobile A/B Testing To Its Analytics Platform

Mixpanel, the analytics startup incubated at Y Combinator and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, is launching a new feature today for mobile developers who want to test out different variations of their app.

We’ve written about several startups that are focused on mobile A/B testing, such as Taplytics. Optimizely, the big player in desktop A/B testing, recently moved into mobile.

Co-founder Suhail Doshi argued that Mixpanel’s approach is unique in a couple of ways. For one thing, he demonstrated that making changes to the app is pretty simple, as you can see in the video at the end of the post. If you want to move a button, just drag the button. And doing something a little more sophisticated, namely changing in-game physics, was still relatively quick.

That simplicity is important, Doshi said, because “marketers and product managers and non-engineers want to be able to use these products, too” — if they have a promising idea, it’s easier if that don’t have to go through a developer to test it. (Apptimize is a mobile A/B startup that also says it’s aimed at non-developers.)

In addition, the A/B testing service ties into Mixpanel’s analytics platform, particularly the data that focuses on individual users. That makes it easier to test changes with specific groups of users, and also to answer broader questions — not just whether more people clicked on a button after you moved it, but also how that affected in-game purchases or usage of the app.

This isn’t the first time the company has gone beyond analytics — it added in-app surveys last fall. Oh, and the service will be free to customers paying for Mixpanel analytics. You can read more about it here.