Fantastic to implement, painful to report on
December 29, 2015
Fantastic to implement, painful to report on
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with Heap
We have many, many subdomains along with several top level domains that act as feeders, and frequently use single page applications. We're using Heap to track users across subdomains, track their activity within applications, and report. It has currently been implemented on a few of our sites and will be implemented throughout the enterprise soon. Our primary reason for using it is the ease of defining events, particularly on single page applications.
- Defining events. This really could not be simpler. It's point, click, name. There's absolutely zero need for dev help in the process, which is key. By switching from define to interactive mode and back, you can easily move through single page applications and define events on the fly, as well as define variables quickly and easily. This is by far the greatest strength of Heap.
- Retroactive reporting. Once you have the Heap code on your site, all activity is recorded, so you can go back and define an event from day one forward, even if you hadn't been recording it before. It makes the product both more useful and frees you from the pressure of needing to know everything to define at the time of implementation.
- Retention reporting. It's easy to use, well laid out so it can be understood, and will let you know which events have the greatest impact on retention.
- Reporting. The reporting is just atrociously bad. There are hard limits in the table view that result in many lines being grouped under "other." You must export the data into Excel to have this ungrouped. There are no default reports for basic web analytics, so every single report must be manually defined, and there are no dashboards. You can't drill down as deeply as needed (I want three layers minimum), and if you use more than one metric, you can't group by other variables. This limits the usefulness tremendously. My current plan is to export all data into our data warehouse and plug into Tableau.
- Default variables. The key virtue of Heap is ease of defining variables, but that falls flat when it comes to so many things I consider to be basic. If you'd like to know screen size or resolution, you need custom code. DMA is not included. Query parameters are not included. All of these things will require that custom code be written and added, which means I need dev resources. There should be an interface that lists variables and allows me to define them.
- Segmentation. This is a consequence of the lack of default variables. I tried defining paid search and after an hour of tweaking the logic, I gave up when I couldn't get it to register more than 70 visits in a month where there were 200,000 paid search visits. For our customer information drawn from first party cookies, I'll again need custom code and dev resources.
- Funnel optimization. We're much more easily able to determine fallout and not merely from page to page, but also through different actions that can be taken, and we have much greater understanding of our single page applications.
Alas, Heap was selected before I got here, but I will say that its chief virtue is ease of implementation. Adobe Analytics is the ultimate workhorse of web analytics and I could make it do absolutely anything I needed it to. Ad Hoc Analysis allowed me enough drill downs, groupings, and filters to understand data tremendously well and make it actionable. However, it requires so much dev work. Tealeaf had the ease of creating events on the fly (sort of; it's more art that science), but only going forward and not going back. Google Analytics has a great set of default metrics and variables, and I can create events through GTM. It also has the great virtue of being free, but doesn't work well with single page applications (neither does Adobe Analytics). I think Heap has tremendous potential, but is a very immature product compared with others I've used.