We’ve seen some paid tools earlier such as KISSmetrics and Mixpanel; the tracking mechanism of them is very similar: you define an ‘event’ that represents an user (or system) interaction that is of your interest to track (such as when user clicks a button); you then implement tracking code and data regarding the defined events will come in. Today we will look at another paid tool in the market which behaves very differently – Heap Analytics.
How Heap Analytics works?
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If you remember when we work with KISSmetrics and Mixpanel, you have to declare your events upfront or otherwise you will see nothing in your dashboard. Heap Analytics, however, works in completely opposite way.
First, you don’t have to define anything upfront: Heap Analytics tracks EVERY SINGLE CLICK within your pages. So after you’ve installed the default snippet of Heap Analytics, users’ clickstream data will be already collected in Heap, just like Google Analytics – but even more powerful since it won’t just capture your page views, but also clicks.
Second, you don’t have to write your own code to track the events (in most of the cases): YES, you don’t even have to do anything in tag manager – Heap Analytics allows you to define event based on the clicks being captured via their user interface.
Pricing Scheme
Heap Analytics charges you based on monthly visits, but not event – sounds like it will allows more data point to be collected as you may have lots of events within a visit:
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Detailed pricing can be found in their pricing page.
Installing Heap Analytics
Go to Heap Analytics and register an account. Then again you will be brought to the welcome page with the default JavaScript snippet:
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If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I will just simply put this snippet in Google Tag Manager. Installation time? 2 minutes.
Defining events in Heap Analytics
Now this is the fun part. If you remember when we are setting up Mixpanel, we have to create our own GTM event and also corresponding Mixpanel JavaScript tag to fire event to Mixpanel. In Heap Analytics, you just have to define event in the interface right away.
There’s a ‘Event Feed‘ available in the interface that shows every single clicks Heap Analytics collects, together with the elements’ DOM properties (e.g. element type, ID or CSS class name):
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If it looks a bit like alien to you, I recommend you to check with your programmer friend (WHAT??? Still don’t have one up till now?) or search for basic HTML / CSS tutorial online. Here’s a good one.
So now you know what it’s all about, you can simply click on the + Define button, and define that captured click as an event:
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The best part of Heap Analytics is: once you’ve defined the event, it applies to your historical data!! So you don’t need to worry if the system will only report events that happened after you’ve defined them – it reports all, starting from the moment you’ve installed the default snippet. OMG!
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Of course, if you want to call some custom events that is not just about a click, or you want to pass some custom data to an event which is not captured within a click (e.g. the amount of a purchase), you can always do that by using their JavaScript API, just like they way you did for Mixpanel:
heap.track('Purchase', {dollars: 5000, currency: 'HKD'});
Results
Heap Analytics allows you to navigate your and display data by defining cohorts, funnels, graphs or lists. I won’t go into details in this post, but one interesting feature I want to mention is the list query interface. Here you can see what each individual user has done on your site (really the exact journey), in a real time basis:
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If your site allows user to login, you can even identify that particular user from this list (i.e. it will show that user name instead of user 164334403197196). You can really see the journey taken by your individual user which is not available in Google Analytics.
Summary
So this is the short introduction of Heap Analytics. Have any of you been using Heap Analytics for some time? How would you compare Heap Analytics with other paid tools (or even free one like GA)? Share with us your experiences or questions!