Since we started Heap, we’ve relied on the assumption that having a complete, automatically-captured set of user behavior made it easier for teams to make decisions. But it’s only been until recently that we’ve been able to examine our own data to see exactly how this happened.
In our first Digital Experience Insights Report we quantified the blindspots in most user funnels. In the second report we dug deep into how funnels mislead teams (84% of funnels deliver misleading or incorrect data!)
This time we examined something even more fundamental: how teams respond to change. How does their data use change as new information comes in? What does that say about what other teams are missing?
After examining millions of behavioral events and queries, here’s what our new Digital Experience Insights Report discovered … and what it all means.
49% of automatically-captured events are defined AFTER year one.
What does this mean? That when we looked at the data, nearly half of the events teams were defining were things they DIDN’T define in the first year of using Heap. It turns out that what teams were interested in tracking in year one turns out to not be what they thought was important in year two and beyond.
This suggests that the set of questions teams are asking and the behaviors they’re tracking is always growing. When teams have Autocapture, not only can they ask new questions and examine new behaviors whenever they need — they actually are doing both of those things!
While we’ve long been saying this is how teams should work with their data, it turns out to be … how teams are working.
So what does this mean for teams who aren’t using Autocapture? It means they are quite literally missing out on questions and insights their competitors with Autocapture can see. Teams that rely solely on manual data capture aren’t able to analyze events retroactively. So unless they have a super robust engineering team that can constantly get them data (unlikely), they’re not able to answer questions on the fly or follow analysis with different queries.
Nearly 30% of automatically-captured events have their definitions changed within six months of being defined.
What does this mean? Because Heap makes event governance easy to do, teams are redefining events as their website changes, or as they need to look at new things.
Again, we’ve long held that being able to quickly modify your data is key to being able to keep up with changing user behaviors and evolving websites. Turns out … it’s true! Nearly 30% of the time the initial definition doesn’t quite suffice.
What about teams that lack the ability to quickly update their data? Well, many of them will end up making decisions based on user behavior from the past, not the present.
Nearly 94% of defined events are analyzed multiple times in the first year after creation.
What does this mean? That teams are not only defining lots of events — they are actually using them!
The story that manual capture-based solutions tell is that automatic data capture will leave you with a huge mess of events. A mess of events you’ll never end up looking at.
Our data suggests that this story simply isn’t true.
When teams have access to a complete set of data, they end up analyzing and iterating on far more events than they would otherwise have been able to. Autocapture provides visibility not just for visibility’s sake. It gives teams visibility that actually gets put to use.
Check out the full report to dig into why automatic data capture and event redefinition are transforming the ways in which teams are using data to drive business impact.
