Beta Feature
This feature is in beta. Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or Sales if you’re interested in participating or if you have any feedback.
Overview
Acquisition analysis helps you quickly understand how new users are reaching your site or app.
This can help you answer questions like:
- Which campaigns (UTMs) are performing the best?
- What is the bounce rate and conversion rate across all our product description pages (PDPs), grouped by marketing campaign?
Set up an acquisition chart
Navigate to Analyze > Acquisition (this may be behind the More menu).
By default, the chart will show you new user acquisition over the Past 7 days, grouped by Initial Marketing Channel.
Advanced options
Click Advanced to access additional options, such as multiple group bys, filtering, and the option to pick a specific conversion event.
Grouping by multiple properties can help you further refine your analysis. For example, you may want to group by Initial Marketing Channel and Initial Landing Page to see exactly where users are coming from and where they are landing on your site.
In the Conversion drop-down you can pick the conversion event that’s meaningful to your business. Picking a conversion event will add Conversion rate, Converting users, and Number of conversions columns to your chart.
You can also add filters to only see results for certain segments of users. For example, you may want to filter out your company’s users from your results. At Heap, we have a segment that represents all Heap employees so that we can exclude ourselves from analysis. To learn more about creating a segment that represents your company’s users, see the Segments overview guide.
Understanding your results
When looking at an acquisition chart, you can use the table to easily find outliers in your new user acquisition that might merit more exploration or follow-up analysis. In the example below, we can see the Direct group has lower first session duration but the lowest Bounce rate.
This could be a good starting point to look into that group more and see if one Referrer was contributing to this, and why.
To see how Bounce rate, Sessions per user, and Pages per session are calculated, hover over the number.
How are results calculated?
New users
Number of new users who are visiting your site for the first time. Each row shown represents how many new users are in each group.
First session duration
Median session duration of the first session of new users.
This excludes first sessions that were bounced sessions. If all the sessions are bounced sessions, this metric will display as “–” in the chart.
To find a single session’s duration, Heap looks at the timestamps of the pageviews, clicks, and touches within a session and computes the difference between the last and first timestamps seen.
For example, if a user first views a page at 3:00pm and then has their last interaction at 3:02pm, then the first session duration will be 2 minutes.
Bounce rate (all sessions)
Number of bounced sessions divided by the number of sessions.
A bounced session is defined as a session with a single pageview and no clicks. A single user can have multiple sessions in which they bounced. Bounced sessions have 0 duration when calculating session duration.
To set up a Heap Connect query equivalent to a bounce rate acquisition chart, see Bounce Rate.
Time engaged
Median time engaged of all sessions. Time is considered “engaged” when there’s at least one pageview, click, or touch within 60 seconds. Time spent away from the computer is not counted (ex: if they step away from the computer for an hour in between clicks).
Sessions with 0 time engaged are not included when we calculate the median time engaged.
Total pageviews
Number of pageviews from new users who are part of the group specified.
Sessions per user
Number of sessions divided by the number of new users.
What is a session?
A session in Heap is a period of activity from a single user in your app or website. It can include many pageviews or events. On web, a session ends after 30 minutes of pageview inactivity from the user. On mobile, a session ends after 5 minutes of inactivity, regardless of whether the app’s background or foreground state.
Total sessions
Number of sessions from new users who are part of the group you are filtering for.
First session bounce rate
Number of first sessions that were bounced sessions, divided by the number of first sessions.
A bounced session is defined as a session with a single pageview and no clicks. Bounced sessions have 0 duration when calculating session duration.
Time engaged (initial landing)
Median time engaged during the first session. Time is considered “engaged” when there’s at least one pageview, click, or touch within 60 seconds. Time spent away from the computer is not counted (ex: if they step away from the computer for an hour in between clicks).
Sessions with 0 time engaged are not included when we calculate the median time engaged for initial landings.
Pages per session
Number of pageviews divided by the number of sessions.
In our example, there were 2,760 pageviews and 975 sessions. 2,760 divided by 975 = 2.83 pages per session (rounded to two decimal places).
Session duration
Median session duration of all sessions.
Sessions with 0 duration are not included when we calculate the median session duration.
Conversion metrics
If you have a conversion event, your chart will have columns for the following values:
Conversion rate
Number of new users who have done the conversion event divided by the overall number of new users.
Converting users
Number of users who have done the conversion event.
Number of conversions
Number of conversion events done by new users.