In Heap, many properties have both a standard and an initial property. For example, there are properties for Marketing Channel and Initial Marketing Channel.
- A property is set at the session level and is recorded for each session a user has.
- An initial property is set at the user level and is only based on a user’s first recorded session, so it will be consistent for a user across all time.
For example, let’s look at the Which pages are landed on the most? dashboard template.
We grouped by Landing Page because we’re interested in where our users landed on our site during the past 7 days.
The standard property (Landing Page) is associated with a user’s given session, while the initial property is tied to the user and will not change.
If you’re interested in the first page of a user’s very first session, you can group by Initial Landing Page.