Cohort Sync

Overview

Cohort Sync is a feature in Mixpanel that allows you to export dynamic groups of users (called Cohorts) who meet specific behavioral or property-based criteria, to external tools and platforms. This enables you to seamlessly connect your analytics insights with marketing automation, engagement, and advertising platforms such as Braze, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and more.

With Cohort Sync, you can:

• Automatically and continuously sync user cohorts to third-party destinations, ensuring that your external tools always have the most up-to-date audience segments.
• Choose from various sync cadences, including one-time, scheduled (hourly or daily), and real-time syncs, depending on your use case and the requirements of the destination platform.
• Use these synced cohorts for targeted messaging, re-engagement campaigns, lookalike audience creation, and personalized user experiences in downstream platforms.
• Reduce manual effort and maintenance, as the sync process is automated and updates as users enter or exit the cohort in Mixpanel.

The value of Cohort Sync lies in its ability to bridge analytics and action: you can quickly act on user insights by targeting the right users in the right channels, improving campaign effectiveness and operational efficiency. This integration is especially useful for marketing, product, and growth teams who want to leverage behavioral data for personalized outreach and engagement without manual data exports or engineering support

Using Cohort Sync

Establishing Connection

Before you can use Cohort Sync to export Mixpanel cohorts, you must establish a connection between Mixpanel and your Cohort Sync destination. Mixpanel integrates natively with several third-party destinations (such as Segment and Braze). If you need to sync cohorts to a different destination, you can use Custom Webhooks to export cohort payloads to any destination of your choice.

Refer to the Cohort Sync Integration Directory below for partner-specific setup guides, or use the Custom Webhooks guide to export cohorts to destinations without a native integration.

Cohort Sync Integrations Directory

Custom Webhooks

Initialize Cohort Sync

Once a connection has been established between your Mixpanel project and your Cohort Sync destination/Webhooks, you can initialize a cohort sync export.

1. Navigate to Lexicon and select 'Cohorts' in the left-hand sidebar
2. Click the "..." button next to the Cohort you want to sync, and select "Export to..."
3. Select one of your connections to open the export modal
4. Choose a one-time export or a recurring export

   Learn more about the types of syncs.

Limits

Only customers on a paid plan can save cohorts; therefore, the cohort sync feature is available exclusively to paid plan customers.

Each project is limited to 60 dynamic (recurring) cohort syncs across all destinations. This limit helps ensure that syncs are fast and reliable. We recommend pruning older unused syncs to stay within the limit. There are no limit on the number of cohorts for static, or 1-time, syncs.

When exporting, each cohort is limited to 10 million users. We do this to keep syncs real-time and to avoid overloading downstream tools. If you exceed the limit, we recommend that you add a filter to the cohort to narrow the criteria, or break up the cohort into multiple cohorts and create multiple syncs.

The exported user data is limited to the following properties:

$distinct_id
$first_name
$last_name
$partner_user_id
$email
$phone

If these properties are not present in your project, users might not be matched in the systems. If an integration partner doesn’t use a property to match, it is dropped before ingestion. Please refer to the individual Cohort Sync Help Center pages for the behavior for specific partners.

The email address and phone number properties will only show in the manual CSV exports for Google Ads and Facebook integrations.

Exporting group-level cohorts (Group Analytics) is not currently supported.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes, you may find that the number of users shown in your cohort in Mixpanel does not reflect the number of users in the integration partner’s interface. Please see below what could be causing this and how you can find out which users were successfully exported from Mixpanel.

Discrepancies in user count

If you see a discrepancy between the count of your users in a Mixpanel cohort and in the integration partner, the first thing to check is if all your users were eligible to be exported. To match users in both systems, we require a partner ID, e.g. $braze_external_id for Braze cohort exports. You can easily confirm this by querying for your cohort in the User report, then adding the filter $braze_external_id is set. This will show all eligible users that can be exported from Mixpanel to Braze.

When accessing the “View in Explore” option, you will see the required partner ID added by default for the following integrations:

ABTasty, Airship, Blitzllama, Braze, Clevertap, Flagship, Insider, Iterable, Kameleoon, LaunchDarkly, Leanplum, Moengage, OneSignal, Optimize, Pushwoosh, SalesforceMC, Segment, VWO, Xtremepush

It is also added by default to any integration where the join key is not the $distinct_id. The added partner ID filter will show up as a custom property called “Defined Properties Required for Cohort Selection” whose properties will appear when hovering over the property:

Inspect exported cohorts via CSV download

To find out which and how many users have been exported from your cohort to the integration partner, you can now download a CSV containing all users that have been exported. When accessing the cohort export overview by navigating to the integration in your Integrations tab, then clicking on the cohort, you will be navigated to this overview:

You will find a summary of the total count of users exported and removed and a CSV download button. In the CSV, you can find the list of distinct_ids of the users in the export and an operation column. This operation column can contain one of three values; add when the user profile was newly added to the cohort, remove when the user was removed from the cohort and no-op when the user remains in the cohort. In the column next to the distinct_id, you will see the partner ID for that user. If the numbers between Mixpanel and the integration partner mismatch, you can confirm if a user has been exported by looking at the CSV file.

Export is paused

If you notice your cohorts are not being exported, you can view the reason for the pause in your Integrations tab. When accessing the integration, you will see the status (either Active or Paused). If the status says Paused, you can hover over the Paused text to see the reason for the pause:

Some integrations have common pause reasons (e.g. Facebook’s authentication pause). You can usually resolve the paused reason on your side by confirming the authorization for the integration is still valid, and dis- and reconnecting.

View sync error

To find more details on Failure errors, you can click in the Cohort within the Integrations page to display errors.

1. Under the integration section, select the cohort:

2. If an error is available, you will see the “View Error” button:

3. Click on the “View Error” button to get more details.

Currently the “View Error” button will only display if there is an error available. In the case that you do not see a “View Error” button but the sync did not finish successfully, you can reach out to the Support team to help get more details on the error.

Delay in Sync

If your recurring cohort syncs are taking more time than expected, we recommend creating multiple connections and spreading your syncs across them. Cohort syncs under one connection are executed in a sequential order; to increase parallelism, you should create multiple connections covering different types of sync.

In general, if you see the cumulative user count of all cohorts synced under a connection breach ~5 million, we would recommend that you create a new connection.