Oh mixpanel.

After looking for far too long for a way in the Mixpanel docs to find a way to track session-end events with the Mixpanel JS library, I tried all the usual tricks to get the tracking event to fire correctly, beforeunload, unload and similar. Nothing was firing correctly. Having heard fairly recently about the beacon API, I thought “Yeah, there’s no way there’s support for that in recent stuff yet”.

I was thankfully incorrect;

Unfortunately, this feature is documented in a series of pull requests, github issues and similar, so tracking down how you can use it was annoying, so I thought I’d document it here instead.

This has more information than I could find on any of the Mixpanel official docs. I realize it’s a new PR, but the JS lib docs also mention Bower, probably not the most up to date.

// for an individual track() call
mixpanel.track('my event', {my: 'props'}, {transport: 'sendBeacon'});

// turn on for every Mixpanel call when page is unloading
// (you would use this to use sendBeacon for everything, including
// mixpanel.people calls)
window.addEventListener(`beforeunload`, function() {
  mixpanel.set_config({api_transport: 'sendBeacon'});
  mixpanel.track('my event');
  mixpanel.people.set({foo: 'bar'});
});

// initialize for all tracking; not recommended as it will prevent any
// request-retry facilities
mixpanel.init('my token', {api_transport: 'sendBeacon'});
mixpanel.track('my event');

After pulling my own hair out trying to track page exit or session_end events, this is the right way to do it (as of today, released 9 days ago). Thankfully, this actually exists and appears to be working properly, not having this feature was going to require intricate timer events and silly stuff.

If you have a choice though and you just need a couple stats, stop with this Mixpanel nonsense and get some respectful tracking with Fathom instead. You can capture session duration without having to code it by hand.

Like a neanderthal.