Heap vs. Google Analytics

A good analytics platform helps you do more than look at vanity metrics. Analytics infrastructure—data capture, information organization, raw data warehousing and management, integrations—is central to insightful analysis.

Heap and Google Analytics have some similarities, but significant differences under the hood.

Learn how the two compare using Heap's Analytics Pyramid as your guide.

Data: Capture Everything

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Data

Capture Everything

(No strings attached.)

Google Analytics (GA) and Heap are built on two fundamentally different data collection models: Google's is pageview-centric while Heap's is event-based. Pageview-centric analytics are best suited for content-heavy sites (reflective of the era GA was developed in), while event-based analytics are better for today's complex mobile/web apps.

Some other areas of differentiation include:

 

GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GA)

Data Capture

GA automatically captures pageviews and sessions, but for anything else, you'll need a developer to instrument tracking code. GA also pulls in some related data from other Google sources like AdWords and search.

Heap automatically captures all event data for you, which you can query retroactively—no manual event tracking or tracking plan.

Mobile

GA has iOS SDKs for event tracking, and additionally serves Android.

Heap offers automatic data capture on mobile for iOS.

Pricing

Google Analytics is free up to 10M hits. GA offers expanded service at enterprise pricing (~150K) with Google Analytics 360.

With Heap, everything you need to build analytics infrastructure is included in one simple price—autotrack, every analysis feature, Heap SQL, open access to consultants, and more—so you can explore your data freely.

Data Integrity

GA samples data, which makes deeper analysis impossible, and its 24h data latency period keeps you from getting instant insights. Data processing can take up to 2 days if you exceed 200K sessions. Out of the box, GA also doesn't account for referral spam, bots, and spiders and inflates Adwords session counts.

Heap captures all event data seamlessly.

Users

With GA, no user data is available beyond a numeric and non-intuitive device identity, and you can't add additional user properties or send personally identifiable information.

Using Heap's APIs, you can attach any unique identifier (to also capture cross-device behavior) or user properties that you'd like.

Using Google Analytics to track specific user interactions for every new feature took a lot of forethought and developer time.
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Charlotte Weiskittel Sr. Director of Product Management at DonorsChoose
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Information: Flexible Event Definition

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Information

Flexible Event Definition

Knowing how events are defined is central to being confident in your data. Heap lets anyone define events using the Event Visualizer for both web and iOS, which makes it easy to organize and trust your dataset. In GA, event definitions are less flexible—everything depends on your implementation.

 

GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GA)

Event Definition

In GA, event definitions require a tracking plan and must be manually implemented by engineers.

Heap's Event Visualizer lets you define events and add custom event-level properties by simply pointing and clicking on website or app elements, on both web and iOS. Events can be defined retroactively in Heap for web and iOS.

Organization

GA doesn't offer event, segment, or property management—you can't see it all at once and manage definitions easily.

Heap gives you more confidence in your event data by providing social context (who defined it, how many reports have that event, etc.) and event/user property management, which doesn’t exist in Google Analytics. You can organize your events into specific folders for easy categorization as well. Heap also lets you define events based off of other events (Event Combos).

User Segment Definition

Heap and GA both let you define groups of users. Many of GA's user cohorts come predefined based on Google's criteria (i.e. users coming in via organic search, referral, etc.) out of the box.

In Heap, you're able to define groups of users based on whatever specific behaviors matter most to you.

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Knowledge: Slice and dice

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Knowledge

Slice and dice

In Heap, you can intuitively compare and filter the same events and cohorts across all analysis modules retroactively — Graph, Funnel, Retention. While GA offers a few limited views that aren't in Heap, like pageview-based path analysis and more powerful built-in attribution modeling, slicing and dicing data in GA is more awkward; for example, you'll need to specify “goals” before you analyzing conversion behavior. GA offers some analytical flexibility with calculated metrics (user-defined metrics computed from existing metrics).

 

GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GA)

Funnel

While you can create funnels in both Heap and GA, funnels in GA aren't retroactive, and you can't drill down to see more data, set conversion windows, or view advanced aggregations like size of segment or average time between. GA enables you to create multipath funnels, while you Heap does not offer this from the main dashboard.

Heap's funnels are retroactive: you're able to analyze any event in any order at any time.

Graph

GA offers report and graph annotations and the ability to graph formulas and functions, but doesn't allow for different metric types on the same graph (i.e. events and user cohorts).

Heap is more flexible in defining graph aggregates like segment size, conversion rate, average time, and more.

Retention

GA offers cohort analysis similar to Heap, but also includes the ability to specify other metrics beyond event data (total revenue per user, etc.).

Heap’s also offers first-time retention in addition to recurring/returning retention cohort analysis.

List

GA offers individual exploration with User Explorer, but this feature omits actual user identity (email, etc.), making it more limited. GA has a real-time view of all activity (not individuals) based on canned reports, as well as quick, per-user revenue analysis.

In Heap, you can explore all actions, both defined and undefined, that individual users take by using List View.

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Insights: Communication and collaboration

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Insights

Communication and collaboration

Heap has an intuitive and consistent UI designed to help you derive meaningful insights quickly. GA's inflexible, canned reporting around sessions and pageviews makes it hard to find the information that actually matters most to you.

 

GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GA)

Alerts

GA has custom alerts based on report data, but this pulls from its predefined conditions or goals—you can't use your own segments.

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Email

With both Heap and GA, you can send regular or one-off emailed reports.

Send regular or one-off emailed reports based on reports you've created.

App

GA offers a mobile app to view key metrics on iOS and Android.

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Platform: Raw access to data

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Platform

Raw access to data

Unlike GA, Heap was designed from the bottom-up to be developer-friendly analytics infrastructure that integrates with best-in-class tools. GA is developer-unfriendly, but integrates with other tools in the Google ecosystem and has several third-party integrations available.

 

GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GA)

Raw Data Access

GA by default offers data-out APIs for reporting (used in many integrations like Google Sheets) and provides raw-data access via BigQuery for GA Premium customers.

Heap is developer-friendly when it comes to raw data access and extraction. With Heap, you have raw access to your retroactive data via Heap SQL, which lets you join Heap data with other sources and build predictive user models and visualizations using familiar SQL.

Webhooks

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Heap uses event-based webhooks.

Integrations

GA offers several integrations with third parties to bring GA data into other tools.

Heap integrates with many third-parties via web hooks and Heap SQL, but does not offer any one-click data-out integrations with third party tools.

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Security & Permissions: Flexible and secure

GA and Heap offer similar administrative and team customizability.

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Security & Permissions

Flexible and secure

Heap and GA offer similar administrative and team customizability.

 

GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GA)

Security

2FA, SSO (GA via Google in general)

2FA, SSO

Users

Both have similar levels of granularity in user roles learn more

Both have similar levels of granularity in user roles. learn more

Privacy

GA offers the ability to create data filters (hide specific pieces of data from certain users, like revenue data). You can exclude activity based on IP address in both. GA has very flexible data ingress filtering (more flexibility around blacklisting data).

Heap has a similar heap-ignore functionality upon implementation. IP blacklisting for privacy purposes is available in Heap.

Time Zones

GA's time zone settings are per-user and zone changes apply to all changes onward (after changing time zone settings).

In Heap, time zone setting are also per-user, and zone changes apply to everything retroactively and from any change onward.

The Verdict

Heap and Google Analytics take two fundamentally different approaches to analytics—retroactive and automatic vs. manual and traditional. See for yourself—try Heap for free for 14 days.



Heap automates the annoying parts of user analytics. No more manual anything. Just insights.

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alerts data capture data email funnel data integrity graph integrations mobile organization performance pricing retention security timezones data trustworthiness users webhooks