I want to measure the number of downloads of my app using Mixpanel in order to use this measurement as a event in the Mixpanel dashboard.
The app is available in Android and iOS. Being Mixpanel a tool to measure and create funnels, there should be a way to get the information about downloads from Google Play Store and App Store, but I have read the docs and I didn´t find any helpful about it.
How can I watch the app downloads from Mixpanel?
After contacting [email protected], they kindly answered my question. I paste here the response in order to help those with the same doubt:
Tracking mobile app downloads can be crucial for giving you a starting point for measuring how users interact with your application - we can certainly help with that!
There's two ways to approach this:
The first way is through the first app open event. What we'll want to do is trigger an event called App Install on the very first application open. This is a proxy event for an install - it doesn't technically fire when the user downloads the application, but rather, when the user opens the app for the first time. A lot of our customers opt for this method for a couple of reasons, first, it's more seamless from a technical perspective to set up, and second, knowing the gap between users who install an application but never open it is non-actionable knowledge. Say you had 100 users install the application, but only 80 of them ever opened the app. There's nothing one can do to change it so that next time those 20 open the app. Thus, our customers opt for the App Install event on the first app open and don't spend data points unnecessarily.
The second option is to grab download data from the Google Play Store directly (https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/139628?hl=en). If Google allows you to export that data, you could reformat it into a Mixpanel event and utilize our import endpoint to send it to us: https://mixpanel.com/docs/api-documentation/importing-events-older-than-31-days. I think this format is harder, less realtime, and less actionable, so I wouldn't recommend it - but in case you wanted the hard download numbers from Google Play Store, Mixpanel can accept it.