Welcome to Heap and its data-driven approach to a better digital experience

In a digital world, understanding how your customers interact with you digitally is crucial — especially if mobile and web apps are a core part of your offering. But traditional methods of tracking those interactions miss much of what's going on, because they only track what the site or app owner has deliberately chosen to instrument.

Today, diginomica welcomes as our latest partner a company that turns that approach on its head. Heap automatically tracks every user interaction and provides analysis to help discover where the experience needs improvements.

Speaking to diginomica earlier this year, Ken Fine, CEO of Heap, described the approach as a "digital vacuum cleaner" that hoovers up every single click that each visitor or user performs. All of these actions are stored by Heap for later analysis. Product managers can then retrospectively label points of interest on a customer journey — for example, the product page might be Point A while a completed checkout is Point B — and discover what's been happening as people navigate that journey. Fine says:

Heap will look at every journey of every person who's ever tried to go from A to B successfully or unsuccessfully and over some interval. It's not just one journey; it can be over a minute, a week, or a year. We'll look at all of that and then go back to the marketer and say, ‘OK, here are your hotspots. Here's where people are getting stuck; people are doubling back here. Here's a cohort of people who are flying through the experience.’ And then you can start to understand better.

Tracking twice as much

Heap's own analysis of anonymized data from over 1,000 of its customers between 2019 and 2022 has found that automated data collection leads to teams tracking almost twice as many user actions as they were when they started using the tool — as many as 250 or more among the most active quartile.

It also shows that almost a third of the labels assigned to those points of interest have their definition changed within six months, either due to changes on the site or app, or because of changes in how it's being analyzed. This shows, the company says, just how much useful data organizations are missing out on when they only track the actions that they've chosen to track in advance — and also how much engineering effort the traditional manual approach eats up, simply maintaining the status quo as the site or app evolves over time.

Last year, the release of Heap Illuminate added a data science layer that automatically highlights events or behaviors that teams aren't tracking and which may need attention. This helps to pinpoint the most important moments of friction and opportunity in the digital experience, filling in incomplete or misleading data that otherwise hampers accurate analysis and refinement of customer journeys.

Going places

Heap joins the diginomica partner family at the same time as unveiling new branding and six months after achieving a $940 million valuation, when it closed a $110 million series D funding round to bring total funding to date to $205 million.

With over 9,000 customers including many well-known names, this is a clearly a company that's going places. But the fit with diginomica has other elements, too, including a strong commitment to diversity. In particular, its data-driven approach to improving the digital experience is in line with broader trends we've identified as enterprises harness digital connection to transform customer engagement.

So, welcome to Heap. We look forward to discovering more about how its customers are using the platform and its plans to continue expanding its capabilities in the months to come.