Heap Analytics, a startup with a clever approach to tracking interactions on websites and in iOS apps, is today rolling out a new feature that makes it easy for anyone to harness this power, no matter how non-technical they may be.
Once installed, Heap Analytics records every single interaction that occurs on your website or in your app – every page load, button click, form submission and the like. Then when you decide you want to start tracking, say, how many people are clicking a particular button, you can set it up and immediately see historical data as well as fresh information as it comes in.
Until now, you needed to have some technical knowledge and access to your website’s back-end to set up tracking for specific events, but the new Event Visualizer is designed to let anyone in the company do it via a simple point-and-click interface.
The startup’s video explains it well, demonstrating how Dropbox could use the feature to track drop-offs in the user sign-up flow:
Heap Analytics co-founder Matin Movassate says that the idea for the service came from his experiences as a product manager at Facebook. “Any time we needed new metrics, we’d go through an annoying feedback loop: 1) find an engineer; 2) get engineer to write logging code (begrudgingly, since they have better things to build); 3) wait until next release cycle for the code to ship; 4) wait a few more days for data to trickle in; 5) have a data analyst fetch the data and prepare a report.”
That personal frustration translated into a much wider gap in the analytics market. “We found that non-technical folks were increasingly dependent on analytics to make decisions,” says Movassate. “Marketers need to measure engagement across traffic sources, product managers need to quantify feature use, salespeople need to identify promising leads. But they were constantly bottlenecked on engineers to manually instrument and target the right events for them.”
The new Event Visualiser is a slick solution to a real problem.
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