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

heapanalytics.com

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

#51

Post by uptown »

matm wrote: post #21
raylu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Good point. In terms of network performance, we try to batch events and minimize server requests. For link tracking, our method is similar to how other analytics products track link clicks - we delay the page navigation the min of: 1) 250ms, 2) the time it takes for our server to respond to a click event.

>we delay the page navigation the max of: 1) 250ms, 2) the time it takes for our server to respond to a click event.

So if your server takes 10 seconds to respond to a click event, the user waits?

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

#52

Post by pc86 »

DodgyEggplant wrote: post #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.

I've often wondered about the efficacy of having a simple catch-all script that just tracks everything a user does on the site. I would think it would pound the database relentlessly under even modest load.

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

#53

Post by physcab »

I imagine that your event feed is going to get pretty unwieldy if you have a thousand events named like the following:

  div.star.empty
  button.btn.btn-primary
  button#nodisturb.muted
  a.bold-text.text
Do you have any ideas how you are going to overcome this? It seems unintuitive.

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

#54

Post by mbell »

dubcanada wrote: post #39
mbell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE8 is a complete mess in comparison to modern browsers. To support IE8 you often have to go through a lot of extra work after the site works in modern browsers to get it functional even if your not doing something particularly complex. At the very least its often a whole bunch of different CSS / replacing CSS with images to get the rendering to look decent. In addition a lot of 'Show HN' posts tend to use 'cool new…

IE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users. If you have an analytics software that doesn't work in IE8. You lost analytics for 20-30% of your users. And since array.prototype.slice.call is not supported in IE8, this analytics software is about 80-70% useful. And maybe even less if you have a large IE clientele. Seems strange to me that one would limit themselves that much.

> IE8 is perfectly fine,

No, its really not, its a huge pain in the ass to support unless you handcuff yourself to its limitations.

> and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users.

Those numbers are wildly skewed by market segment. IE8 is a relic that mostly only exists on corporate controlled laptops at this point. If they aren't your target user, you can pretty much ignore them. None of the sites I work on see over 5% IE8 usage.

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

#55

Post by kybernetyk »

raviparikh wrote: post #40
kybernetyk wrote: post #32

First: The service sounds great. Something I would sign up for. But I don't really get the pricing structure: What if I have less then 2500 unique users/month? Do I pay $25? Is it free? If it's $25 what then if I have more than 2500 but less than 20000 users? Is it $150 then?

Right now the way we price is pro-rate it for people who are between tiers. For example, if you have 3000 uniques per month, then you'll pay $28.75 ($25 for the first 2500 users, and then $3.75 pro-rated for 500 additional users on the next tier). If you have below 2500 users, you just pay for the portion of that $25 that you use (a site with 1000 users would pay $10). We're updating our pricing page to clarify this.

Thanks for the clarification. The pricing structure sounds fair.

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

#56

Post by k3n »

Anyone know of a decent user-tracking / analytics package that isn't SaaS? And isn't log-based, like Urchin (which I just discovered is yet another victim of Googlicide[1])?

My app is in dire need of user-tracking and analytics, but it's a self-hosted application and many of my clients run it on LAN segments that don't have WAN connectivity.

1. https://www.google.com/urchin/

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

#57

Post by matm »

physcab wrote: post #53

I imagine that your event feed is going to get pretty unwieldy if you have a thousand events named like the following: div.star.empty button.btn.btn-primary button#nodisturb.muted a.bold-text.text Do you have any ideas how you are going to overcome this? It seems unintuitive.

Very keen observation. There are a number of ways to solve this problem. Machine learning helps (there are a few simple heuristics we currently use to sort the Event Feed).

But the right interface for defining events helps even more.

Sorry for the frustratingly mum response.

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

#58

Post by ricardobeat »

dubcanada wrote: post #39
mbell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE8 is a complete mess in comparison to modern browsers. To support IE8 you often have to go through a lot of extra work after the site works in modern browsers to get it functional even if your not doing something particularly complex. At the very least its often a whole bunch of different CSS / replacing CSS with images to get the rendering to look decent. In addition a lot of 'Show HN' posts tend to use 'cool new…

IE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users. If you have an analytics software that doesn't work in IE8. You lost analytics for 20-30% of your users. And since array.prototype.slice.call is not supported in IE8, this analytics software is about 80-70% useful. And maybe even less if you have a large IE clientele. Seems strange to me that one would limit themselves that much.

No, it's not perfectly fine. It's terrible and takes a good amount of extra work to get working for any mildly complex website.

Around here IE8 is at < 7% market share; if your product is slightly related to tech that's more like 0%.

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

#59

Post by raviparikh »

pc86 wrote: post #50
raviparikh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now the way we price is pro-rate it for people who are between tiers. For example, if you have 3000 uniques per month, then you'll pay $28.75 ($25 for the first 2500 users, and then $3.75 pro-rated for 500 additional users on the next tier). If you have below 2500 users, you just pay for the portion of that $25 that you use (a site with 1000 users would pay $10). We're updating our pricing page to clarify this.

Thank you for explaining this. That's a huge difference that the impression of tiered pricing that I got. Any plans for either a free trial period or a very small (<50 users?) free plan?

Definitely - we offer a one month free trial of the lowest tier plan (2500 users/month).

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

#60

Post by revorad »

k3n wrote: post #56

Anyone know of a decent user-tracking / analytics package that isn't SaaS? And isn't log-based, like Urchin (which I just discovered is yet another victim of Googlicide[1])? My app is in dire need of user-tracking and analytics, but it's a self-hosted application and many of my clients run it on LAN segments that don't have WAN connectivity. 1. https://www.google.com/urchin/

http://piwik.org/

http://snowplowanalytics.com/

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