Mixpanel wants to bring its real-time analytics to the masses

Mixpanel, a company offering websites a way to track the details of user interaction in real-time, just announced a plan to expand its audience with what it calls a platform strategy.

The new platform allows customers to offer Mixpanel tools to their own customers. One of the initial partners, for example, is business social networking startup Yammer, which recently announced its own platform for outside developers to build Yammer applications. With Mixpanel, Yammer can offer analytics tools to all its developers. And it should only take a few hours to set-up, according to Mixpanel chief executive Suhail Doshi.

This isn’t just relevant to app developers, however. One of Mixpanel’s other customers is simple blogging service Posterous, and while Posterous isn’t one of the initial platform partners, Doshi used the company as an example of what the platform can do. He said that with Mixpanel, Posterous would be able to offer sophisticated analytics tools to all of its bloggers.

When I’ve covered Mixpanel in the past and asked about how it compares to Google Analytics, the company emphasized the way it can help startups track their “conversion funnel”, i.e. who’s actually registering on the site or purchasing a product. But Doshi said Mixpanel can actually help you track any information on your website that you want. So a blogging community could track pageviews, comments, subscribers, and “shares”. (In the Yammer example, Yammer chooses which data to show its developers.)

Mixpanel will charge its platform partners using its normal data pricing plan, then those partners can charge their users for the analytics tools (or they can offer the tools for free).

The Mountain View, Calif. company has raised $500,000 in funding. Doshi declined to offer exact customer numbers for Mixpanel’s existing tools, but he said “hundreds of people are paying us every month.”