Heap

Heap is a powerful digital insights platform, now part of the Contentsquare group, designed to provide a complete and retroactive understanding of user behavior on websites and applications. Its core philosophy revolves around 'autocapture,' a technology that automatically collects every user interaction—clicks, taps, swipes, form submissions, and page views—without requiring manual tagging or engineering intervention. This creates a comprehensive dataset that eliminates blind spots and allows teams to analyze user behavior, both past and present, with unparalleled depth.

The platform is enhanced with advanced AI and data science capabilities. 'Chat with Sense' acts as an AI-powered analyst, allowing users of all technical levels to ask questions in natural language and receive instant insights, summaries, and relevant follow-up questions. Furthermore, Heap Illuminate proactively surfaces key moments of friction and opportunity in the user journey, alerting teams to issues they might not have known to look for.

How to use Heap

Getting started with Heap is designed to be straightforward and fast, minimizing the reliance on engineering resources.

1. Installation: Sign up for a plan (including the free tier) and install a single, small JavaScript snippet into your website's header or integrate the relevant SDK into your mobile application.
2. Automatic Data Capture: Once the snippet is live, Heap immediately begins to autocapture every user action across your digital properties. There is no need to pre-define events or write tracking code.
3. Define Events Visually: Use Heap's intuitive visual labeling interface to define events by simply pointing and clicking on elements on your site. Since all data is already captured, these definitions can be applied retroactively to historical data.
4. Analyze and Gain Insights: Dive into the analytics suite. Build funnels, analyze user journeys, and monitor retention. Use 'Chat with Sense' to ask direct questions like "Show me the top user paths to conversion" or "Why did sign-ups drop last week?".
5. Understand the 'Why': For deeper context, use integrated Session Replay to watch recordings of specific user sessions, pinpointing exact moments of confusion or friction identified in your quantitative analysis.

Core Features of Heap

• Autocapture: Automatically captures every user interaction on your site or app, creating a complete and retroactive dataset.
• Chat with Sense (AI Analyst): An AI-powered conversational interface that allows anyone to get answers from their data by asking questions in plain English.
• Session Replay: Provides qualitative context by allowing you to watch video-like recordings of user sessions, integrated directly with your analytics.
• Heap Illuminate: A data science layer that automatically uncovers hidden insights, such as high-effort user flows, top correlated events for conversion, and significant behavioral differences.
• Comprehensive Analytics Suite: Includes tools for building funnels, journey maps, retention curves, influence analysis, and engagement matrices.
• Data Governance: Features like visual event labeling, definition history, and personal/shared spaces ensure data is organized, consistent, and trustworthy.
• Integrations: Over 100 integrations with data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery), marketing automation tools, and A/B testing platforms.
• Heatmaps and Error Analysis: Add-on features to visualize on-page engagement and diagnose JavaScript errors that impact user experience.

Use Cases for Heap

Heap is versatile and valuable for various teams within an organization:

• Product Teams: To understand feature adoption, identify friction points in user flows, validate hypotheses, and prioritize the product roadmap with quantitative data.
• Marketing Teams: To optimize conversion funnels, measure the true impact of campaigns, and understand the end-to-end customer journey from acquisition to retention.
• E-commerce Businesses: To analyze and reduce cart abandonment, improve the checkout process, and understand which user behaviors correlate with higher lifetime value.
• SaaS Companies: To improve user onboarding, increase activation rates by identifying 'aha!' moments, and reduce churn by understanding where users drop off.

Advantages of Heap

Heap offers several distinct advantages over traditional analytics tools:

• Complete and Retroactive Data: Never miss an insight. Autocapture ensures you have the data you need, even for questions you didn't know you would ask.
• Reduced Engineering Dependency: Frees up developer time from implementing and maintaining tracking code, allowing them to focus on building the product.
• Speed to Insight: The combination of autocapture and AI allows teams to get answers in minutes, not weeks.
• Unified Quantitative and Qualitative Insights: Bridges the gap between what users do (analytics) and why they do it (session replay).
• Proactive Discovery: Data science features automatically highlight opportunities for improvement, moving teams from reactive to proactive decision-making.

Pricing and Plans

Heap offers a freemium model with several tiers to suit different needs:

• Free: Designed for finding product-market fit. Includes up to 10,000 monthly sessions, core analytics charts, and 6 months of data history.
• Growth: For scaling start-ups. Includes all Free features plus 'Chat with Sense' AI, unlimited users, 12 months of data history, and email support.
• Pro: For supercharging analytics. Includes all Growth features plus account analytics, engagement matrix, and options for add-ons like Session Replay and Heap Connect (data warehouse sync). Pricing is custom.
• Premier: For large organizations. Includes all Pro features plus unlimited projects, advanced permissions, a dedicated Customer Success Manager, and premium support. Pricing is custom.

Add-ons for Pro and Premier plans include Session Replay, Heatmaps, Error Analysis, Heap Connect, and extended data history.