Overview

We’ve put together a series of getting started videos that will get you up to speed with Heap’s features. If you haven’t installed Heap yet, jump to Before Installing first. Our Setting Up Heap guide will also take you through the steps to manage your data and organize your team.

Thanks to our lightning-fast product updates, the Heap interface shown in these videos may vary from what you see in your account.

For a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know to get started with Heap, we recommend reviewing this video series in sequential order.

If you’re already grounded in Heap, feel free to jump directly to the topics of this guide via the links below and take a look at our courses in Heap University.

Heap Walkthrough

First things first; get acquainted with Heap’s layout! This video will take you through all the features available to you in the left navigation bar in Heap.

Heap’s Data Model: Events vs. Properties

What are events and what are properties? Familiarizing yourself with these two concepts, in addition to Heap’s data model, will provide you with the foundation you need to understand how to use these data types in analysis. Watch this video for a visual overview.

Here is a handy chart of all of the different property types available within Heap:

In case it’s helpful, we’ve also provided this information in plain text.

Event – Metadata about the actions users are taking, such as the target text on the button they clicked, or what browser they used.
User – Metadata that we know about a user, such as where were they the first time they visited your homepage, or what city were they in during their most recent session. Other than “initial” properties, these can change.
Session – these roll up into the user and the events taken during a session (a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity). Unlike event and user properties, you are unable to create your own session properties.
Behavioral – Behavioral properties can be used to filter your reports by users who have or have not done something for more granularity. Examples include ‘users who have done a count of’, ‘users who have done’.
Active usage – Digging deeper into the concept of user behavior, active usage properties allow you to better understand engagement with your features. Filter your reports by users who have started or stopped doing an event, who are repeat users or are users who are re-engaging with the event.
Defined – You can define your own properties to create a new schema on top of existing properties in your account. This would be useful for grouping marketing content or blog pages into one property via a conditional definition; or creating an ‘if this than that’ property via a formula definition.
Enriched – If you are enriching your data with one of our source integrations, this property type refers to the information we are pulling from those sources. Check out Integrate With Your Warehouse & 3rd Party Tools for more details on source integrations.
API – For the custom stuff Heap is capturing via more traditional track calls, like addUserProperties, track or addEventProperties.

What is the difference between client-side and server-side properties? Client-side properties are all of the actions we are capturing on the app or site you have installed Heap onto. Server-side properties are what you are capturing on your backend.

Conducting Analysis

Heap allows you to analyze your data using a variety of different tools – see each section below to learn how you can use them to gather all of the information you need.

Query Modifiers

Query modifiers are a way to slice and dice your data to get the most out of Heap. They are not, strictly speaking, an analysis module, though they are an integral toolset for conducting analysis. Watch this video on query modifiers to learn how to use filters, group by, and compare users to unearth additional insights.

Users

The users module allows you to see all of the individual users interacting with your site or app at a given time. You can pull a list of specific users who have performed some action, create your own segments, or dig into the usage of a particular user. Check out the video below on how to navigate this analysis module.

Graphs

The graphs module allows you to graph counts of things and see how those counts trend and change over time. Some common question types you can answer in this analysis module are:

How many times has X happened?
How many users have done X?
What is the trend of interaction with X over time?
How many users are in the X segment?
How many users did X and Y?
On average, how long does it take a user to do X and then Y?