What I Wish I Knew My First Day in Heap - Heap Experts Reflect

Naman Agarwal, Director of Analytics at Ratehub

Less is more. When we first setup Heap, we went into a huge drive to tag each and every piece of the site that we were hoping to analyse in future. A lot of those analyses never happened because they didn’t ever become a priority and we ended up with a huge list of events that became outdated overtime.

Ty Cole, Digital Growth Lead at Carrier Global

I wish I obtained internal alignment before labeling all the events. I had to go back and change the titles on multiple occasions due to other departments labeling their events with a different naming convention.

Adam Cormack, Senior Product Analyst at Naked Wines

I would have spent more time working on having a tidy environment. Make use of user roles, validate new events and audit everything every few months to make sure everything is working correctly. Also make use of personal events and reports when you’re just exploring!

Milena Court, Senior Product Manager at Tails.com

My top tip would be to spend time learning how to use the platform on Heap University as well as having sessions with colleagues in your company also learning so you can share your best practices / insights you discovered along the way

Nicholas Drouet, Senior Lifecycle Marketing Manager at App Annie

I wish I had accessed Heap’s self-learning resources, https://learn.heap.io/ earlier. It really helped me decomplexify the product. 

Mahlon Duke, Product Manager at Accelo

I wish that we'd gone in with a more specific validation project in mind - using Heap to identify and track metrics for a specific piece of work to evaluate would have helped us get up to speed quicker.

Phillip Dworken, Product Manager at Splash Financial

I used Heap funnels wrong for almost a year and a half. The range is both the day the user must start AND end the funnel.
Example: If the date range is June 1-30th, and the average time through the funnel is say, 1 week, then the reporting of June traffic with that range is “missing” a full week of expected completions. 

Will Essilfie, Senior Product Manager at Teachers Pay Teachers

I wish I had started setting up Heap with a core team vs in silos. By working with a team, you can better ramp up on how to use the tool and create an early culture around how to leverage the tool to uncover new business insights. 

Neha Firodiya, Analytics and Business Intelligence Lead at Plymouth Rock Assurance Corp

I wish I started using playbooks and effort analysis sooner than later, gives great insights and gives you info out of the box.

Alli Hobbs, Senior Data Manager at Purple Carrot

When starting out with Heap, I wish we’d been more careful and disciplined with how we define and audit events. For a long time, many in the company found the number of disparate but overlapping events and attributes to be a barrier to adoption. We now allow very few people to create definitions, all must be verified, and we have a standard naming convention!

Jennifer Kulendran, Senior BI Analyst at Bloom & Wild

I wish we had set up documentation for Heap from the beginning;

• How to use heap guides / training videos for internal stakeholders to access reports and dashboards. 

• Documentation on events and properties

• Playbook of web analytics for heap - taxonomy of events, standardising reporting and naming conventions. 

Tyler Lane, Product Lead at OppFi

Heap University is hands down the best way to get started and be prepared to use Heap effectively. I also would have spent some time just reading through a bunch of User sessions and reading each event - understanding each definition, and defining new ones that haven’t been used before.

Anya Livshyts, Associate Product Manager at SS&C Advent

The Template for Uncomplicating Product Management and Heap University resources are awesome, use them! They are so helpful, and have so many examples. For questions - talk to your RM, they are all great and know everything. To get people comfortable in using Heap, have them create practice events, and help them build out their own dashboard. It gives them autonomy and helps them build their skills! 

Smiti Majumdar, Lead Data Analyst at Amway

We have a diverse ecosystem of digital properties globally, that supports the ecommerce, business management and information needs of customers. As a result we work with many different teams. I think it is important to have the following to ensure a good experience and drive adoption.  

• Identify the right stakeholders, provide in-depth training and continued support to them.

• Have a robust strategy to organize and prevent proliferation of redundant reports and definitions within the UI. This makes end users’ lives easy by ensuring that they can find the right information to look at when they need it.

Alex Wimbush, Head of Product at Sendwave

Get started with good data governance practices/processes from day 1, even if you are the only person using Heap at first. If you wait till you are 5 years old, it'll already be messy.