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Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

heapanalytics.com

11–20 of 213 posts

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#12
Poor man's analytics: events, client side, server side, whatever. Set up a separate DB with one big table, many columns for properties. One server call to write an event (a row), one ajax call to write from the client, throw it wherever you need. A bit of good old simple SQL for queries and reporting, and you are done.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#13
I suggest to test the text on orange button. From "Request an invite" to:

"Get exclusive access"

"Learn more"

"Take a better look"

"Find why N is for you"

"Join our FREE client club."

"Get a FREE account" Note that free account != free product. Just give then login details.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#14
post #11

Dumb question but how does this work? Since Heap captures everything from day 1, all analysis is automatically retroactive. There's no need to wait days for data to accumulate. So it studies my server's web logs? I'm confused about what this means.

It means that if you start tracking on day X, then on day Y you decide you want to generate a certain report, the data is already there, you don't have to start tracking anything new.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#15
post #11

Dumb question but how does this work? Since Heap captures everything from day 1, all analysis is automatically retroactive. There's no need to wait days for data to accumulate. So it studies my server's web logs? I'm confused about what this means.

I assume when you put the JS on the page, it tracks everything. Later, you define "symbols" and that gives you "retroactive" analysis.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#16
post #4
post #3

Looks very cool––what kind of performance hit is introduced by logging every event?

It's essentially imperceptible. We measured it, and our client-side script introduces a 0.1% CPU overhead.

I don't think anyone is concerned about the CPU overhead. (Also, let's not talk about measuring things without defining exactly what was measured. On a blank page I'm sure your JS runs great.)

How does it affect network performance? If I click a link and it takes me to another page, how do you track that?

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#17
post #11

Dumb question but how does this work? Since Heap captures everything from day 1, all analysis is automatically retroactive. There's no need to wait days for data to accumulate. So it studies my server's web logs? I'm confused about what this means.

It seems it just sends every single event to the server and lets you filter later.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#19

Yes! I've been doing this for awhile. If you feed the data into a Bayesian classifier, you can figure out what kind of user you're dealing with, too.

That sounds really interesting. Could you describe how you do that a bit more?

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#20

This seems really interesting, but starting at 250 users per month seems high. I notice the price/active user starts at a penny and falls 60% as the users climb to over 500,000. Would it be possible to create a price option for even smaller companies, demo sites, etc, at a higher rate? Say, what if the owner of a small blog wanted to use this to do really fine grained analysis of users actions but they average 250 hi…

pricing seems high to me, unless I'm thinking about it in the wrong way. Is Unique Users/month equivalent to the number google analytics reports for 'Unique Visitors' over a 30 day span? I guess the site I'd consider using this on isn't really in your target market (1.8M uniques in the past month, not enough revenue to make the idea of dropping $2k+/mo on analytics attractive)
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