Now more than ever, marketing analytics is essential to B2B organizations. A robust analytics framework is a must to better understand how prospects make decisions in the buying journey and plug gaps in the sales funnel.
However, B2B marketing teams rarely have the resources to build out this framework to collect, analyze, and present data in-house. This is where analytics software comes into play.
Heap is a product and web analytics tool that helps you visualize the buyer journey. But is tracking web analytics enough to get clarity on how prospects make buying decisions?
In this blog, we discuss everything you need to know about Heap and whether it's the right fit for your business needs.
What is Heap Analytics?
Heap was founded in 2013 in San Francisco and has since become one of the top product analytics software for brands across various niches.
Heap collects data from every part of your website and collates it into easy-to-grasp data analysis using line graphs and funnels. It focuses on customer engagement and activity, highlighting areas in the customer's journey that are not-so-smooth—actionable insights that every brand must own.
What does Heap do well?
- Real-time tracking
Perhaps Heap's most significant advantage is its real-time data collection and analysis, which allows marketers to view visitor activity reports in real time.
This feature can be particularly useful after a website's UI change or a new marketing campaign. Tracking activity in real time can provide immediate insights on what's going well, whether there are any glitches in the customer journey and quick updates on campaign performance across the website.
- Retroactive analysis
Heap performs retroactive analysis, which means it tracks every click and action your visitor takes on your website without you having to instruct it to do the same.
This feature saves an enormous amount of time and effort and provides a large data library for reference at any point in time. Once you integrate Heap with your website, you can examine all of your site's activity and derive insights accordingly—all of this without having to manually set up Heap to track each type of user activity!
- Multiple devices
It's no surprise that users interact differently with a website on a mobile phone than they do on a desktop or laptop. Optimizing one's website for various device types is a great way to ensure a good visitor experience without losing viewers to glitchy interfaces or incomplete website layouts.
Heap's software tracks website performance across various device types to help you understand where improvement is needed. Marketers can greatly benefit from this feature because solid insights guarantee an effective action plan, which in turn leads to better customer engagement.
- Events + Filters
Customizable building blocks are the greatest tool for any marketer, as each brand has unique goals it wishes to fulfill via an analytics tool. For example, while one brand might want to use Heap to identify friction in the sales funnel, another might want to understand its website heatmap after a marketing campaign and improve website traffic.
Heap offers features called "Events" and "Filters," which help you visualize your customer journey exactly as you want it, from Stage X to Stage Y, for example.
Why Heap May Not Be The Best Choice
While Heap offers many effective analytics features, there are a few disadvantages that every website owner must consider when choosing it or any other analytics tool.
Costs of Data Storage
Due to its size, storing all of this data can be a hassle for a tool that tracks every single movement across your website, including footer buttons, web page scrolls, hovers, etc. The more data you have in your store, the more complicated it can get to calculate data privacy and protection costs, storage and archiving, and backing up data after regular intervals. Heap may be a good option if you're prepared to store large amounts of website data.
Tricky UI
Not all marketers are tech wizards, and Heap's UI, although highly interactive and comprehensive, is difficult to master. The learning curve for anyone wanting to manage their site's Heap dashboard well is quite steep, which is why many marketers opt for analytics tools that are beginner-friendly, user-friendly, and easy to learn, such as Factors and Oribi.
Limited to website analytics
Website data is just one aspect of tracking analytics. If you truly want to know how prospects make buying decisions, you must capture intent signals from multiple sources, such as LinkedIn and review sites like G2. Only when you get the complete picture can you optimize your marketing campaigns and sales outreach, thereby growing your revenue.
Why Factors.ai over Heap?
Helps build overall GTM motion
While Heap is an excellent tool to uncover the customer journey, Factors gives your entire GTM team the insights it needs to build out its sales and marketing engine. Factors offers actionable insights through accurate attribution, making it the perfect tool for your sales and marketing teams to identify and optimize the channels contributing to revenue.
Comprehensive tracking and reporting
While your website plays a crucial role in attracting prospects, you need deeper insights into how you can turn website visitors into paying customers. Combined with account intelligence and attribution features, Factors allows you to track and consolidate data across your website, CRMs, and MAPs to get a full overview of how you can optimize your offering on your website – a feature currently unavailable in Heap.
Factors also has robust reporting capabilities, where you can track your KPIs for specific channels. Heap does not track any data beyond your website, so you’ll only get pieces of the puzzle and not the completed picture.
💡Learn how you can use Factors to measure the impact of your marketing campaigns
Cost Effectiveness
While Heap doesn’t reveal its pricing on its website, we’ve researched and found that its estimated price starts from $3600 per year. Factors offers a more cost-effective solution for companies looking to track their performance not just on their website but also in overall marketing efforts.
Invest in the right analytics tool
If you’re looking for a tool to track website analytics, Heap is a good place to start. However, if you want to go beyond the ordinary and grow pipeline for your business, your search ends with Factors. Speak to our team today to understand how Factors can help you turn intent signals into sales.
