Heap's new interface for analytics: clicking around your site | Hacker News Reader

Heap's new interface for analytics: clicking around your site

blog.heapanalytics.com

78 pointsraviparikh18 comments

This is awesome, and way more valuable than a heat map. I love how you give away the full suite of analytics tools in the freemium model, so you only pay when you scale.

Overall, a brilliant idea and something I'll be integrating very soon.

Agreed. Great idea - taking what can be a complex process and making it as simple as possible.

This seems like a great idea. A few questions.

How well does this play with dynamic content?

Can you define specific content types (eg. Article) and capture events specific to that type (eg. Share, Print, Save)?

How about integration with SPAs built on frameworks such Angular, are you accurately able to capture events?

Heap works great with dynamic content - in fact, we use it ourselves all the time on our own single-page app (built on Backbone).

As an added bonus of using Heap with Angular/Backbone, we automatically capture all pushState events, so you'll get accurate pageview tracking for free.

Not sure what you mean by your second point, but it sounds interesting. What sorts of use cases motivate this?

ha! cool! we've had our visualizer for quite some time at hublo (http://hublo.co). the demo is public so you can try it with your own website.

Cool. So are you trying to target a different market than MixPanel, Kissmetrics, etc.?

I love how the CSS and JS in the site cannot function without the HEAP JS lib. Huge fan of Ghostery, and if you use it, the site looks like a 'heap'. Similar problems with a lot of sites and Omniture, take USAir. You can't book a plane ticket without downloading Omniture's JS. Come on folks, let try for some graceful degradation.

Get off your high horse.

Sorry about that - Ghostery seems to wholesale block any JS requests from the heapanalytics.com domain, which will of course break our site.

This issue only applies to our domain (heapanalytics.com). Keep in mind that your own website will not break with Ghostery if it has Heap installed.

I'm not sure why you think websites should cater to you if you're using plugins that disable browser functionality.

If anything, because Ghostery blocking a request is indistinguishable from any number of connectivity issues that may occur outside of the user's control.

Touche on Ghostly blocking all Heap requests, didn't realize they did that. However, other sites still irk me like the Omniture cases. Is it so hard to confirm functionality before you use it? Plenty a corporate internet blocks lots of these JS libs/API's and if you're not writing fault tolerant code, folks are going to wonder why site X does not work and just use site Y instead.

It's mostly the same market. The disconnect thus far has been that many of the people in this market who use analytics (PMs/marketers) are not the same people who integrate analytics (devs).

Looking through MP/KM's docs is pretty telling. You'll notice that they put a lot of emphasis on catering their onboarding flow to non-technical people. For example, KM's onboarding flow lets you choose between "Asking for 5 min of your developer's time" or "Asking for 3+ hours of your developer's time", the former being a quick n' dirty way to get started (presumably because the dropoff for the latter is so high).

This is awesome. The video music was a little awkward. Can you build extensions of this say, for creating Automated tests that go through the funnel paths? Or guided product tours?

The guy talking (Ravi, one of the founders) is a DJ -- so that explains the techno music.

https://soundcloud.com/sexrayvision

Great new feature and video but yeah, the techno 'music' was totally out of place

Sincerely, I have chills. Can't wait to start using this!

All the sudden I'm super super happy I've been collecting heap analytics all this time! Huge update guys! Great job!

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