Get an overview of your website, including top pages and audience demographics. We recommend this as your first Heap dashboard, as it works with even a few hours of automatically captured data.
Step 1: Create your Dashboard in Heap
Report Breakdown
Report 1: Today’s Visitors
What does it tell you?
This report shows you how many unique users had a visit (session) on your site today.
How to interpret?
When you first create this report it’s really about getting a baseline, but we recommend you monitor this overtime to ensure that your traffic is growing.
Report 2: Top Viewed Pages
What does it tell you?
This will show you the specific pages on your site that are getting the most traffic.
If the Title results aren’t descriptive enough you can switch the Group By to use the Path property which will give you the URL of the page instead.
How to interpret?
Understanding what content is getting used is key to understanding what your visitors find interesting and or helpful.
Report 3: Highest Engagement Pages (Views per Viewer)
What does it tell you?
Which pages have the highest visit rate per user. Use this to determine which parts of your product or site are drawing the most engagement.
How to interpret?
If the Title results aren’t descriptive enough you can switch the Group By to use the Path property which will give you the URL of the page instead
Report 4: Visitors by Marketing Channel
What does it tell you?
Which of your marketing channels is driving the majority of your traffic?
How to interpret?
Are there certain channels that are performing above the rest? Do you notice a difference between paid channels and organic channels? Is there any clear winner between email, search or social channels? Was there a spike in any of these? Before you jump to investing in the channels that are driving the most traffic you’ll also want to understand which Channels lead to highest conversion as well.
Report 5: Visitor’s First Landing Page
What does it tell you?
This report is going to tell you which of your landing pages are getting the most traffic. Where are users starting their session?
How to interpret?
It is important to know where your traffic is coming from and in this case you’ll want to investigate where they are landing. Keep in mind it’s not enough to just drive traffic to a particular landing page, you’ll want to compare this to landing pages with this highest conversion rate to fully understand what’s working, and what’s not.
Report 6: Visitors per Day
What does it tell you?
This report will show you how many unique visits (sessions) you’ve had to your site on a daily basis in the last 7 days.
How to interpret?
If this number is going up, then great, it means you are getting more traffic. If you see a spike try to figure out what caused it. Being able to replicate this success in the future can have a meaningful impact on your business. Try grouping by Referrer, Landing Page, or a behavioral segment to see if you can uncover the cause of the change.
Report 7: Visitors by Country
What does it tell you?
This report is going to tell you which countries your users are visiting from.
How to interpret?
Any surprises here can uncover some untapped markets that you may want to try advertising to.
Report 8: Visitors by Device Type
What does it tell you?
This report will show you which devices your users are using to access your site (Desktop, Mobile Web, or Tablet).
How to interpret?
If you see that a high percentage of your users are visiting from any of these device types you’ll want to make sure that you spend some time optimizing the user experience for each of them.
Report 9: Visitors by Browser
What does it tell you?
This report is going to tell you which browsers your users are visiting from.
How to interpret?
Similar to the previous report, this report is about understanding where you need to optimize for performance reasons. Do you see a high number of users visiting your site who are using IE 11…then you’ll want to make sure that your site performs well in that Browser.
Taking Action
This dashboard contains the metrics you’ll want to look at to decide where you want to focus. While most of this data is high level it can give you a good overview of your traffic. Did you notice that your blog pages aren’t getting viewed? Maybe it’s time to retire that portion of your site, change your content strategy, or try some campaigns that advertise it. Where do you think you can find the most leverage with acquiring new users? Experiment with changing your spend between different channels, augmenting your content strategy and learning from the insights here. Try to uncover what caused the change as replicating that could be key to your success. Then, keep measuring! This is an iterative process. Get the data, look for insights, take action, then go back to the data to measure the results of your work!
In Conclusion
If you’re just starting out with analytics you’ll want to understand your audience demographics and this Play will help you to do just that.