This week, I'm drawing from my time as an analyst to talk about a website analytics tool that I have a love-hate relationship with: Heap.
If your analytics team is fairly new but you want to be data driven, have no fear. I'm going to totally break down the pros and cons of Heap, particularly compared to the free website analytics tool: Google Analytics.
What's good
Heap takes you many steps further from what GA can (even the paid version of GA). For starters, Heap is constantly storing data about your site so it can pull retroactive insights for events that aren't yet defined. It's also way more adjustable/intuitive than GA, which I personally think looks like the UI hasn't been updated since 2015. It's easy to create funnel analyses and analyze user paths.
What's meh
But it's very easy to misinterpret data in Heap. For example when you track CVR over time, you can't specify that you want CVR "within a session" or "within an hour"-- and if you want to see the average in-session CVR grouped by week, you have to download the data and manipulate it in excel. Simple insights like this are just impossible in Heap, and the dashboarding capabilities are some of the worst I've seen. The best option is to use Heap Connect to connect Heap data to a more sophisticated BI tool where you can manipulate and visualize the data much more easily.
Take it from me
I think Heap is better than GA or Adobe Analytics, by far. But it is still an extremely complex and at times confusing tool that leaves a lot to be desired. Have a product analytics tool you love? Pleeeease let me know below.
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