Now that you’ve got your Heap account set up with data streaming in, you’re ready to start conducting analysis. Charts allow you to unearth and visualize insights that are critical to your business, such as conversion rate, user engagement with key features, and so much more.

We recommend taking the following steps before setting up your first few charts in Heap.

Decide what charts to build, and why

Before getting into the nuts and bolts of charts, you’ll want to think through your strategy.

Ask yourself, what do you want to know?

First, it’s important to step back and clarify what you want to learn about your users, and why. This will help you decide which chart type to use and which features will be most useful for you. Though this step may seem obvious, this will help guide you in building out charts that are impactful for your business. 

The more specific you can be with your goals, the better. For example, instead of saying “I want to know about my conversion flow”, dig into what you want to know about conversion. Where dropoff is occurring? Which channels drove the most conversion? Which types of users had the highest or lowest conversion? By being as specific as possible, you’ll be able to determine where to go in Heap to get your answer.

We recommend starting off by writing these out as questions. We have a handy list of example questions in the Business Questions section of our Getting Started guide.

Determine the data points you need to answer these questions

The questions you’ve come up with likely involve specific data points you want to analyze, such as views of your homepage, clicks on “place order”, touches on the login button, and more. Identifying which data points are most important to you is key to getting your analysis right.

Take a moment to note what these data points are for each of your business questions. Many of these will already be available in your Heap account as autocaptured events or properties. In the case of those that aren’t available yet, you can always add them via snapshots, integrations, or our APIs.

Consider the cadence

Next, for each of these questions, think about what time frame you want to apply to them. 

For example, if one of your questions is “Which are our top performing marketing channels?” ask yourself if you’d like to look at the top channels from over the past week, month, quarter, or even farther back.

In addition to how far back to look, you can use Heap to see how these results fluctuate over certain time frames. For example, if you want to see how often users login, you can create a chart to visualize logins by hour, day, or week, to unearth interesting insight into spikes and dips during certain time frames.

Take a moment to write out the ideal time frames for each of your questions. If you’re not sure, try starting off with weekly or monthly, then adjust as needed. Doing this will directly inform the time frame that you’ll select when you’re setting up the chart.

Building your charts

At this point, you likely have a sense of what chart results you’re most interested in. Read about each chart type in the sections below so you can determine which one will best answer the questions you’ve outlined above. 

Try a chart template

To quickstart your analysis, we recommend reviewing our list of chart templates. These are pre-populated charts designed to answer our customers’ most common questions, so they may help quickly answer your burning questions. 

To do so, navigate to Charts, click Templates in the second nav, then search for templates. You can also filter these templates by your goals, industry, or any sources you are pulling in data from. 

Explore our dashboard templates

Dashboards in Heap are groupings of related charts on the same screen. Our dashboard templates allow you to quickly spin up a complete suite of metrics related to your core business questions.

To check out our dashboard templates, navigate to Dashboards and search the list of dashboard templates under the “Create a new dashboard from a template” header.

Build a chart from scratch

For questions beyond what our templates cover, you can build your own chart. 

To start off, you’ll need to determine which chart type aligns with the business question you’re looking to answer. Here’s a quick overview of each of our chart types and what it can be used for.

Usage over time is great for visualizing comparisons of data in formats like bar charts, donut charts, tables, and more.

You can use this chart type to answer questions like these (linked to chart templates to help you quickly answer these questions):

• Have the most viewed product categories changed since last week?
• Which marketing channels are driving my conversions?
• Which pages are landed on the most?

Funnel charts allow you to dig into your conversion rate numbers, including points of dropoff, other steps users took instead, and more.

You can use this chart type to answer questions like these (linked to chart templates to help you quickly answer these questions):

• Do users returning after a break convert at a higher rate than new users?
• How does use of a particular feature influence conversion and dropoff rates?
• How has my conversion rate changed since last month?

Journeys lets you visualize and measure the different paths that users take through your product.

You can use this chart type to answer questions like these:

• Do users convert at a higher or lower rate if they do [x]?
• Where did users come from before doing [x]?
• Where are most users going, and where are conversion rates the lowest?

Engagement charts allow you to compare events in multiple ways on a scatter plot to measure the success of product changes.

You can use this chart type to answer questions like these:

• How are different demographics of users engaging with our new feature?
• What are my most and least-used features across all types of users?

Acquisition analysis helps you quickly understand how new users are reaching your site or app.

You can use this chart type to answer questions like these:

• 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?

Retention charts are useful for tracking the number of users that continue to return to your app over a period of time, such as daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

You can use this chart type to answer questions like these (linked to chart templates to help you quickly answer these questions):

• Does a given user action drive higher retention?
• How often should I expect users to complete a given action?
• What is my daily user retention?

Influence charts allows you to analyze what behaviors or marketing channels have influenced behavior of interest.

You can use this chart type to answer questions like these:

• Should I invest more in my email marketing efforts, my ad campaigns, or my website content?
• Which user actions have the biggest impact on my marketing efforts?

Each of these charts have different features to customize your results based on what you want to know. For instructions and best practices, see our guides on each chart type.

• Usage over time analysis overview
• Funnel analysis overview
• Journeys overview
• Engagement analysis overview
• Acquisition analysis overview
• Retention analysis overview
• Influence analysis overview

Group charts together into dashboards

Once you’ve created a few charts, you may find it helpful to group related charts together into your own custom dashboard. This allows you to view all of your metrics together in a birds-eye view. 

Some best practices for setting up dashboards:

• Keep each dashboard focused on a theme. Some examples of Dashboard themes include a Q3 KPI tracker, Marketing New Years campaign, or Help Center search engagement.
• To make it easier to review, we recommend adding a max of 6-8 charts to each dashboard. If you find yourself tempted to add more, consider breaking down this set of charts into two or more dashboards.
• Keep the metrics you care about most at the top. This ensures they will catch your and your team members’ attention first. 

We also have dashboard templates that pre-populate with charts based on your use case. Our Acquisition analysis overview and Site overview dashboard templates are a great place to start.

To learn more about all you can do with dashboards, see our Dashboards overview guide.