Snapshot of subdomain on first page visit

Great questions:

1. How do I filter the initial events (e.g. get a count of how many users land by third party)

We autocapture a property on all pageviews, domain, that captures the entire subdomain. That can be used as a filter or group by for events in reporting to see users per subdomain. 

The one catch is if you want to analyze sessions you need to use a different property. Use the landing page property whenever analyzing sessions to see traffic by subdomain.

Note that the domain property captures the full domain (third-party-x.ourdomain.com), and landing page may be capturing some unique paths as well. If you want to see the data by just the third party name, you can create a defined property that uses a Regular Expression to pull out only the subdomain from either the domain or the landing page property values. The benefit of this approach is you get cleaner data. And this property is retroactively applied to historical data because it is built with autocaptured data! 

The defined property will look something like this! Let me know if you want some help with that or have questions about this.

2. How do I access the third party name in the hierarchy (I’ve read all the tutorials on snapshotting and can’t find the right form).

I first recommend seeing if you can use the Domain autocaptured property (or a defined property that extracts the third party name from the domain property) in your analysis. If that property is available in the drop downs and is the format you want, that’s all you need!

If you want to extract the third party name from the hierarchy, then you can create a defined property that uses a regular expression to take it out from the hierarchy property instead. The key here is there needs to be a consistent pattern from which the third-party name appears in the hierarchy (it appears that is true! [third-party=third-party-x]).

Again, I recommend first trying to use Domain since it’s a simpler approach. That said, I’m happy to help you with the specific hierarchy example if needed.  

You may already know regular expressions pretty well, but if this is new to you here are a few resources I recommend checking out to learn more:

1. Heap’s documentation on Regular Expressions in defined properties
2. https://regex101.com/ - I always use this when creating and testing out a regex before adding it to a defined property in Heap. Awesome validation tool.  
3. Datacamp’s RegEx Cheat Sheet - there are many of these floating around, here is one that looks good!

I’m also happy to workshop and provide some validation tips you can use in Heap for properties you create. :)