- Democratize access to product and customer data
- Bring more data into day-to-day decisions
- Turn raw numbers into digestible funnels and visualizations
Mixcloud
Eliminating bottlenecks to convert and retain more users
Indicative helps Mixcloud develop a deep understanding of customers and their journeys, enabling them to turn data into higher conversion, engagement, and retention.
Overview
Mixcloud was founded in 2008 as a way to help DJs, radio shows, festivals, and labels connect with their audiences. The online streaming service offers creators the ability to upload unlimited audio. Audiences listen for free while artists, songwriters, and other rights-holders get the royalties they’ve earned.
Today, the company competes against other online streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music.
To outcompete big operations like that, Mixcloud needs data. They need everyone in the company to have quick, easy access to product data—so they can develop a deeper understanding of customers and product usage and identify ways to improve the user experience.
Challenge
Prior to implementing Indicative, most of the Mixcloud team couldn’t use data on a regular basis. All of the company’s analyses were done using SQL, which meant only the data team could perform them.
That led to a few big challenges. For one, the questions they could answer were subject to the limitations of SQL, which has a tendency to break down as questions get more complex. Customer funnels, for example, are notoriously nightmarish to build with SQL. The modern buying journey isn’t straightforward—it involves many steps, multiple devices, and more. With that many data points, building with SQL becomes untenable.
Plus, most of the team doesn’t work with SQL, so the data strategist became a huge bottleneck—and non-technical team members simply couldn’t access data in a timely, effective way.
They needed to be able to ask and answer questions like:
- How do users interact with our product across devices?
- How do they interact with various features?
- How do conversion rates vary across our upload and Pro subscription funnels?
- Do users come back repeatedly and perform target actions?
- Where in the platform do most conversions come from?
- How do all of the above impact conversion, engagement, and retention overall?
But without any way to build out funnels or answer complex questions, teams like product and marketing simply couldn’t make data-led decisions on a day-to-day basis.
- Understand how users interact with the product across devices
- Pull granular insights around how users interact with new features
- Measure the conversion rates of core flows on the website
Solution
Keane Robinson—Data Strategist for Mixcloud—had seen Indicative implementations when he worked for Snowplow. “I saw how the tool was flexible and had the ability to help a wide range of organisations ask intelligent questions of their data,” Keane told us.
After considering a few other options—including Mixpanel and Looker—Keane and the Mixcloud team chose Indicative because of the intuitive user interface, codeless, non-technical analysis, and top-notch customer support, among other reasons.
Now, the whole team uses Indicative to better understand customers and their usage of the Mixcloud platform. Specifically, Keane notes that the team loves the Multipath Funnel tool because “we can’t build visualisations like this with any other tool.”
To date, they’ve used Indicative to run quick-hit tests. Some of the results have helped Mixcloud grow traffic to the statistics feature by 14 percent, increase traffic to their Pro page by 11 percent, and—ultimately—boost upgrade conversions to their Pro plan by 30 percent.
Plus now, they can quickly and easily analyze longer user lifecycles—helping them to reverse engineer customer retention—and get more granular with their funnel analyses—which helps them identify the impact each campaign, touchpoint, feature, and step of the journey has on conversion.
- Identify high-volume areas in the platform to convert users from
- Build complex, granular funnels and longer user lifecycle analyses to measure whether users come back to perform target actions
- Visualize the effectiveness of email campaigns
Results
Since implementing Indicative, Mixcloud’s data operation is leaps and bounds ahead of their prior operation.
Now, the whole team is now empowered to access the data and answer their own questions. When they first started using Indicative, Mixcloud only had one person regularly accessing data. Today, they have four people using more than 30 Indicative dashboards on a regular basis.
According to Keane, that’s completely changed the culture around data. The team is asking, not only more questions, but better ones because they know what’s possible—they know they can answer those questions with Indicative.
Now, they can quickly and easily find answers to questions around:
- High-traffic areas of the platform where they can convert more users
- Funnels and how each step of the user journey impacts conversion
- Product usage and engagement across devices
- Long-term user behavior and retention
Plus, Mixcloud can now use more data, more often. In the back half of 2021 alone, the number of queries run by the team grew by 32% and usage spanned 25 different team members.
While they’re still rolling Indicative out to the wider team, once everyone can use data autonomously, Keane foresees having a lot more time to focus on more complex and important data initiatives.
For example, they’re looking to model the full, long-term journey free users follow to Pro conversion—so they can more deeply understand customers and how they move from casual bedroom DJ to someone with a dedicated fanbase.
The difference is clear: Mixcloud, as a whole, has built a much deeper, well-rounded, more actionable understanding of customers and how they use the platform.
- Convert more users by prioritizing high-volume areas within the platform
- Identify the optimal paths to drive higher conversion, engagement, and retention
- Reverse-engineer the touchpoints, behavior, and features that correlate with retention
Don't get left behind in a data-driven world. Try Indicative for Free.