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Define combo event using "and" instead of "or"?

  • 3 May 2022
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Hey there! First day on the job as a PM and first day using Heap (during my last gig I strictly used Segment/Mixpanel).

Curious: is there a way to define a combo event using an “and” operator? I am trying to create a custom event definition in the Heap interface, which Heap calls “combo” events, and before asking an engineer to write in a custom event tracking call, I’m curious if I can define one myself using a combination of several Heap autocapture events that reliably fire off whenever a user performs a specific action.

(Don’t mind the silly placeholder event name)

Thanks! 

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Best answer by jonathan 7 May 2022, 02:43

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Hey @tntermini — first off, congrats on the new gig! We’re very happy you’re a Heap user now :) 

Quick answer is no, it’s not possible to do this. Longer answer to help explain why and offer a possible solution, depending on your use case.

In Heap, events are specific interactions at specific moments in time, and each of those interactions is a row in a database. So when you define an event, you’re saying “any time you see this pattern of data, label it X”. When you create a combo event, you’re saying “when you see any of these patterns of data, label it Y”. Usually this is done to either fix events (a button click before and after a code change, for example), or to aggregate, say, a collection of activation events as a single event.

Usually when I see requests like this the goal is to find users who have done some collection or sequence of events, as that sequence is what counts as activated or some other success metric. Generally the right approach to answering this question then is creating a Segment. Here’s a couple ways you might think about this:

 

You can then graph these out to see how the number of users doing both events has waxed or waned over time, or you can filter your reports to only look at these users, etc. 

Does that help? I’m curious to hear what your use case is if it is different, and pass it along to our product team.

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