Overview

Reports are saved analysis results, which can be added to dashboards to create a birds-eye view of your most important metrics. For example, as a documentation writer, I have reports set up to track engagement with this very Help Center.

Read on or click the sections to the left for deep dives into both of these features.

Reports

Reports are saved analysis results that you can continually re-run to monitor your analytics. The reports page gives you an overview of all of the reports available in your Heap account. You can search by report name or by category to filter down to specific reports.

You can also click on the filter icon to filter reports by which analysis module they use, whether or not they are verified, and when the report was created or last modified, and more.

You can also re-sort the reports list by clicking on the headers below the filters, which are as follows:

• Last Modified: The most recent date where new changes were saved to the report.
• Created by: The email address of the team member who created the report.
• Dashboards: The number of dashboards this report is currently pinned to.
• Views: The total amount of views of the report over the past 90 days. Note that this does not include counts of views of any dashboards the report may be pinned to.

Creating Reports

To create a new report in Heap, simply run an analysis module by navigating to Analyze and clicking through the options to select the type of analysis you want to run. Once you have your analysis set up, at the top, click the Save as Report button.

A pop-up will appear where you can name your new report. You can also choose to make it a personal report. Personal reports are only visible on your dashboard, though they can be published to a shared space later.

When creating multiple new reports at once, after saving a report, you can click More, then select the Create New Query option in the top-right to set the workspace back to a blank slate so you can set up a new report.

If you’re looking to create a new report that’s a slight modification of an existing report, there’s no need to manually set up that report all over again – simply make a copy of the report by clicking More, then selecting Copy to Personal Space. Once the copy has been created, you can modify the copy and update the name of the report.

Starring Reports

You can star reports you view frequently to make it easier to view them all in one place.

To star reports from the reports page, click the star icon that appears next to each report name.

To star reports from the individual reports page, click the star icon in the top navigation menu.

Once you have a few reports starred, you can view them by navigating to Reports > Starred.

Adding Footnotes to Reports

Once a report has been saved, you can add footnotes to graph reports by clicking on any data point, clicking the Add Footnote button, and providing the text of your footnote.

Once the footnote is added, all viewers of this report will see a line on the graph indicating a footnote is present. Hover the line to see the text of the footnote.

You can delete a footnote by clicking the line, clicking the footnote, and then clicking the trashcan icon when it appears.

Organizing Reports

Once you have enough reports, you’ll want to categorize them. New categories can be only be created during the act of creating a new report.

To categorize a report, on the Save as Report pop-up, simply type the name of the new category into the ‘Select category’ box.

To categorize several reports at once, select the checkmark next to them where they are listed on the Reports page, then click Move at the top.

A pop-up will appear where you can select an existing category or create a new one by simply typing the new category name.

For best practices on naming reports and categories to benefit your team, see the Reports section of our article on Categories.

Renaming Report Categories

To rename a report category, just click the pencil icon next to the category from the Reports page. A pop-up will appear where you can update the category name.

Scheduling Emailed Reports

Heap allows you to schedule daily, weekly, and monthly emails to yourself and others based on existing reports you’ve saved. For full steps to set this up, see Schedule email reports for you & your team.

Archiving Unused Reports

Archiving unused reports lets you declutter your reports view. Unused reports are reports that meet the following criteria:

• Are not used in any dashboards
• Have not been viewed in the last 90 days
• Have no scheduled email reports set
• Have no threshold alerts set

To archive a report, click on the report where it is listed on the reports page.

From the report page, click More in the top right.

In the menu that appears, click Archive Report.

You’ll be prompted to confirm this action, after which Archived Report will appear at the top to confirm this report is now archived.

Deleting Reports

To delete a report, from the Reports page, click on the report to open it up, click More in the top-right corner to open additional options, then click Delete Report.

Dashboards

Dashboards are the main hub of your Heap account, which is why this page is the default when you log into Heap. They are used to organize relevant reports in the same space to review all of the analytics your team needs at a birds-eye view. You can create as many dashboards as you need, and organize them into categories by team, feature, release, and more.

We recommend building out high-level dashboards that span multiple teams to get a summary of how the needles are moving, and building focused dashboards to understand the depth of analysis.

Building Dashboards

There are two ways to build a dashboard of your own. The first way is to click the New button from the Dashboards tab.

The second way to create a new Dashboard is to click the Add to Dashboard button from the report pinning menu.

You’ll be prompted to either select an existing report, or create a new one by clicking the + Add to new Dashboard button.

On your new Dashboard, you’ll see options to give your dashboard a name, categorize it, and toggle the visibility in your workspace. Click save and you’re done!

Adding Reports to Dashboards

You can add multiple reports to a dashboard by selecting the checkbox next to the reports on the reports page and clicking the Add to Dashboard button.

Note: If a selected report already belongs on a dashboard, it will not be added to that dashboard again. Only selected reports that don’t already belong on the dashboard will be added.

Dashboards can hold a maximum of 100 reports. You can add graph, funnel, retention, and influence reports to dashboards.

Managing Dashboards

Once you have several reports in a dashboard, you can drag the report cards to rearrange them to your liking.

You can also resize the dashboard cards to make certain reports more prominent than others. Click the ellipses (three vertical dots) icon in the top-right of the report card you wish to resize, then select the option for the size you want the report to have.

Dashboard queries are cached for 24 hours from the time the dashboard was last visited. If you need up-to-date data, you can always click the Refresh button in the dashboard toolbar.

Within a dashboard, you can click the report title to be taken to the corresponding report and analysis module.

You can organize your dashboards using the same categories you use across your account to keep things neat and tidy. Dashboards can also be created, copied, and moved between personal spaces and shared spaces.

Playbooks

Playbooks automate the creation of dashboards by pre-populating useful reports based on your use case. For example, if you’re a Product Owner interested in measuring feature adoption after a release, selecting Product > Feature Adoption will create a dashboard with the following reports:

• What is my feature completion rate?
• How many users have adopted my feature?
• Count vs. Count Unique of Feature Usage
• How long does it take to use my feature? 
• Which marketing channels drive adoption of my feature?

Individual Playbooks are known as Plays. To see the full set of Plays offered as part of these Playbooks, see our collection of corresponding Heap Plays documentation.

Using Plays

To create a dashboard via a Play, complete the following steps: 

1. Navigate to Dashboards and click the New button at the top of the Dashboards tab.

2. From here, select one of the categories under Playbooks then on the right, select the use case, which is the type of activity you’d like to understand. Per our example, we’ll select Product, then Feature Adoption.

3. After you’ve selected the use case, you’ll be prompted to select definitions that correspond to your use case. For our example, to measure feature adoption, we’ll need to select what events we define as active usage of the feature, the start of that feature usage, and the end of feature usage, as well as a marketing property to see how our marketing efforts impacted feature adoption.

If you don’t have an existing event for these fields, you can define a new event by clicking Define new… For certain properties, you can select the default property that comes out-of-the-box when you install Heap.

4. Once you’ve made your selections, click Preview for a preview of what your dashboard will look like. You can make adjustments to the definitions used by clicking the Back button. If you’re satisfied with the definitions as measured in these reports, click Create to set up your new dashboard!

With your new dashboard in place, you can add reports, customize individual report settings, recategorize it to align with your organization’s categories, and more. The steps for doing so are the same as for any other dashboard, so see the Dashboards section above for more info.