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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

#201

Post by anonfunction »

argonaut wrote: post #200
anonfunction wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/20294656.jpg Seriously though, for my purposes I'm much more interested in tracking events of my current users. Obviously for you conversion funnel analysis is important, and thats cool, but realize everyone has different needs (and budgets!)

Icelancer is right. Conversion analysis for landing pages is is a core, mandatory component. If I'm going to have to use something like Mixpanel for the landing page, then I might as well use Mixpanel for everything. "Obviously for you conversion funnel analysis is important, and thats cool, but realize everyone has different needs" is a severe understatement of how crippled an analytics platform would be without con…

Don't get it confused, no one is saying that conversion analysis isn't important or shouldn't be included in the featureset. All I was trying to point out that you don't have to include the code for everyone if you don't need or want to for whatever reasons.

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

#202

Post by TylerE »

physcab wrote: post #199
TylerE wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a misunderstanding of the industry, I think. While the website as a whole isn't very "appy", some smaller sections of it _are_, and it would be incredible to actually understand how our customers are interacting with it. P.S. We used to have Omniture, and switched to Google to save $.

Can you put your email in your signature? I'd like to ask you more questions about your analytics needs and have you check out a project I'm working on.

It's my username @ gmail

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

cheald wrote: post #122
huhtenberg wrote: post #48

Welcome to the blacklist. I, for one, very much object to all my clicks and "activity" on a page being captured and streamed down some black hole for god knows what purposes. Not to worry though - you are in a good company with all other analytics services out there. The only difference is that you are far more open (and proud?) about how obscenely intrusive your service is, so you get an honorary 2nd spot, right aft…

That "purpose" is generally to help service providers understand you better so that they can provide a product that better serves your wants and needs, as their customer.

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by fellowniusmonk »

pindi wrote: post #161
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 have a system exactly like this at my company, with a prettier UI on top of the SQL querying. I've been considering open sourcing it for a while; I wonder if there really is a demand for this, or if it's one of those things that everyone prefers to roll themselves.

Very interested.

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

#205

Post by orangethirty »

oijaf888 wrote: post #195
orangethirty wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here is that I'm sharing findings from my own data. This is not me making stuff up. I have actually used this very same button text to increase conversions (up by .04% on a site with thousands of visitors). It was not used to harvest emails. A practice that simply does not work, unless you plan on sending Viagra ads. I don't do such things. If you build a button that promises something for free, you need to…

Does that actually work on B2B products that are in the hundreds or thousands dollar range every month? I don't think that cost is really an issue in that world if its delivering value at a large multiple, its more integration/implementation worry. Perhaps I'm wrong though.

No answer would be prudent without knowing and understanding more facts about the product you refer to. But do test them. I have tested things that looked like they would not work (and did).

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

#206

Post by ukoki »

pc86 wrote: post #52
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.

AWS comes into its own for these kinds of use cases - make a lightweight autoscaling events API on Elastic Beanstalk pumping events into DynamoDB coupled with a bunch of workers running at the EC2 spot price sorting and processing these into a traditional RDBMS = massively horizontally scalable events handling for pennies an hour.

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

#207

Post by matm »

dropdownmenu wrote: post #38

Awesome idea to help make capturing data more easy, but how will you deal with the problem of the curse of dimensionality? As you start to capture more variables you data begins to appear far apart leading to less meaningful results. Also, while 'capturing everything' sounds like an awesome idea it can lead to worse performance if you don't take into account that your data now has more variables that can each introdu…

"Capture everything" need not imply "measure everything." It should imply "measure anything you need to, immediately and retroactively".

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

#208

Post by netvarun »

azov wrote: post #103

What happens if I'm a smallish site and suddenly get slashdotted / DDoSed? Will I be charged thousand dollars? Is there a way to cap monthly costs?

Being ddossed is not going to affect you. For Heap to kick in, the page needs to be rendered and their javascript snippet processed. A DDos attack is just going to send lots of traffic (eg: a gazillion wget requests made to your domain. Your apache or nginx logs are the ones that are going to explode.)

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

#210

Post by huhtenberg »

DanBC wrote: post #181
huhtenberg wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say, you have a desktop client-server app. Outlook, for example. How would you feel if it were uploading every click on the menu and every mouse move (in the confines of its window, of course) to the server. Strictly to help the developer improve the product and make it better for you , their customer. This should be totally OK with you, right?

I'm fine if they tell me they're doing it, and what they're collecting, and giving me an option to turn it off.

Bingo.
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