Universal Analytics ends July 1. Here's a better way forward.

Last year Google announced the deprecation of Universal Analytics, mandating a transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for all users. As seasoned data professionals, we believe this is an opportune moment to evaluate your options - to find a solution that not only meets your current needs but also your future business goals.

We invite you to consider Heap: a powerful, intuitive, and interconnected platform that is a major upgrade from Google Analytics.

Deeper Granular Insights with Heap

Understanding user behavior forms the bedrock of successful digital marketing. Understanding what is driving attribution and improving conversion rates requires a deeper understanding of your customers’ actions. Unfortunately, Google Analytics 4 only provides a high-level view of broad web traffic statistics, making it difficult to delve deeper into the nuances of customer behavior.

Typically Google Analytics users find themselves settling for high-level analytics and needing to send their data downstream and rely on SQL to get deeper insights.  This hinders teams’ ability to be agile by blocking them from getting the answers they need from the data quickly. 

Heap focuses on user-centric data analysis that goes beyond surface-level insights. Heap's intuitive platform includes out-of-the-box templates, dashboards, heatmaps, session replay, and automated data science. Heap’s analysis modules include retention, complex journeys, user attribution, conversion, and engagement. All of this is built on a comprehensive and flexible data set. 

The platform democratizes the data analysis process, making even the most complex queries accessible and easy for anyone to use, regardless of their technical ability. Heap adopters find themselves being able to ask and answer ad hoc questions they never could when using Google Analytics. 

With Heap, complex questions are answered in seconds, allowing for a more dynamic, iterative process of exploration and discovery. Customers who switch to Heap from Google Analytics often find that they learn more in a few minutes of using Heap than they have in years of using Google Analytics. 

Heap Illuminate, Heap's automated data science model, automatically detects points of friction and gives users expert-level insights without any need for SQL knowledge or calling on their data science team. Heap users effortlessly gain a clear picture of customer behavior and can spot hidden opportunities in the customer journey that they might have otherwise missed.

A Broader Ecosystem of Interconnected Tools

Another significant advantage Heap offers is its extensive ecosystem of integrations. With GA4, users are primarily restricted to the Google ecosystem, with limited external integrations. Heap embraces the modern data stack and has integrations with many of the leading providers of storage, personalization, and activation tools.

The Heap platform seamlessly integrates with an array of services like HubSpot, Shopify, Redshift, S3, Snowflake, Braze, MailChimp, and many more, creating an interconnected platform of tools critical for all teams across your company.  

With Heap, your event data can flow in and out of various services, serving as the central hub for all your data needs. This interconnectedness enables teams to deploy rapidly, manage data on the fly, understand their customers deeply, segment them accurately, and take actionable steps to improve bottom-line KPIs.

Revolutionary Data Capture and Management

Heap stands apart in its approach to data capture and management. Gone are the days of only manual tagging and lengthy tracking plan creation. Heap's autocaptured dataset can be set up in minutes, offering access to live data in real-time that anyone can manage without code.

Heap is a more flexible solution, providing both autocapture and manual tracking options. Customers benefit from a structured and managed approach. Automatic capture reduces the number of hours required to set up and manage tracking code, and provides full retroactivity, ensuring that teams will never have gaps in their data. It also allows anyone across the company to manage and define events in minutes, without any code.

At the same time, customers can use manual tracking to ensure that very specific data is captured exactly how they need it. Together, these approaches give you a more complete dataset than any other tool on the market can provide.

Product analytics tools are only as good as the underlying data and a team's ability to understand what's there and what's happening. Heap's data is easily discoverable due to enforced naming conventions, verified events, and easy-to-use tools that surface what matters. The 'Explore Events' feature takes every event that's captured whether automatically defined or undefined and uses automation to provide a bird's-eye view of customer actions, allowing you to quickly understand your data and jump into insights.

Think about the future with a modern analytics tool

As the digital landscape evolves and the need for more comprehensive, user-friendly analytics tools becomes paramount, Heap is best positioned to fill this gap for you. With deeper, more granular insights, a broad ecosystem of interconnected tools, and revolutionary data capture and management features, Heap is the forward-thinking alternative to Google Analytics 4. 

We welcome you to experience Heap, where we're democratizing data, one click at a time.