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Comment by matm | Hacker News Reader

Analytics tracking code is a serious headache. You rarely know upfront what events you'll care about later, it's a pain to setup and maintain, and there's a principal-agent problem where the person implementing tracking (a dev) isn't the one getting value from it (a non-dev).

I think we'll start seeing teams adopt more automated approaches to analytics tracking over time.

Disclaimer: I founded Heap (https://heapanalytics.com/) with the idea that manual instrumentation should be the exception, not the norm.

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I've looked at Heap before but the lack of pricing between free and “custom” has turned me off trying it.

Really hard to recommend it to anyone else either since there's no information about what it would end up costing (assuming that adding the Heap badge is out of the question).

Hey MatM. Big fan of Heap right here. In fact, just did a new install for a new project yesterday. Heap definitely makes life much much easier, but when there's a need to collect data from multiple sources, ie not just the website but lets say FB ads, Intercom etc to create a 360-degree customer view, it becomes harder to rely solely on Heap. Now, ordinarily we use Segment and pipe the data to a data warehouse but sending Heap data to a data warehouse is a very pricey option. I wish it wasnt so pricey.

Happy to hear that!

Could you email me at matin@heapanalytics.com? We're cooking up some features you might find useful.

Email sent (from kam [at] stratagem[.]io

+1 for manual instrumentation should be the exception, not the norm. However many time there is instinct to log everything that you don't pay enough attention to what one metric is most valuable to your business. And when you need it, its just too tough to get it + system slows down because of logging everything (if building inhouse).

Btw Autotrack is direct competitor to heap. How are you going to maintain differentiation? Or something for which heap gives 10x that autotrack doesn't?

You alluded to some of this already, but automatically capturing everything isn't just a feature you can tack on to an existing analytics system. You have to rethink everything from the ground-up in order to support it (the client-side SDKs, the infrastructure, the tools to organize the data, the analysis interface, etc).

This becomes obvious when you try both products side-by-side (and I encourage you to do so!). I haven't come across a single customer who sees this as a viable substitute for Heap.

Also, collecting everything doesn't mean you should pay attention to every possible metric all the time. It just makes it 1000x easier to hone in on the right metric at the right time.

That said, this is an awesome GA extension, and philipwalton deserves a lot of credit for building it.

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