Heap Marketing Analytics: Product Usage, Activation, and Funnel Data in Your Daily Briefing
Connect Heap to Prooflytics and see activation rates, funnel conversion, and Time to Value by acquisition channel - so you can optimize paid spend for users who actually activate, not just users who sign up.
Heap Marketing Analytics: Product Usage and Activation Data
The Heap integration in Prooflytics connects your product usage data to your paid channel performance in one daily briefing. Once connected, you can see activation rates, funnel conversion, and Time to Value broken down by the campaign or channel that acquired each user - giving Heap marketing analytics a direct line into acquisition budget decisions.
Most SaaS marketing teams optimize for signup cost. The problem is that signup cost and activation quality are almost entirely uncorrelated. A LinkedIn Ads campaign generating $80 CPL may bring in users who activate at 45% and reach the value moment within 2 hours. A Google Ads campaign generating $35 CPL may bring in users who activate at 9% and churn at day 7. Without product analytics data connected to your acquisition data, the cheaper campaign looks better - and the budget flows the wrong direction.
Activation event: A specific in-product action that correlates strongly with a user's likelihood to retain and eventually pay. Typically defined as completing a core workflow that delivers the product's primary value promise - not just logging in. Heap auto-captures all potential activation events; teams define which events qualify as the activation threshold.
Time to Value (TtV): The elapsed time between a user's first session and their first activation event. According to PLG benchmarks, the average TtV is approximately 1 day and 12 hours; top-performing products deliver value in minutes to hours. Each 10-minute increase in TtV correlates with an approximately 8% decrease in eventual paid conversion.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL): A free or trial user who has demonstrated activation behavior in the product - reaching the value moment - and is therefore statistically more likely to convert to paid. PQLs convert 5-6× higher than MQLs generated from forms alone.
What data Prooflytics pulls from Heap
Heap auto-captures every user interaction on your web and mobile product without requiring manual event instrumentation. Prooflytics maps Heap's behavioral data into the acquisition and funnel layer of your daily briefing.
Key data objects available through the Heap integration:
- User event stream - auto-captured clicks, form submissions, page views, and custom events, attributed back to the acquisition source where your Heap and ad platform data can be joined on user ID or email
- Funnel conversion rates - the percentage of users completing each step in a defined sequence (e.g., signup to onboarding step 1 to activation event to paid conversion), broken down by cohort
- Activation rate by cohort - the percentage of users who reach your defined activation event within a specified window (24 hours, 7 days), segmented by acquisition channel where join keys are available
- Retention curves - D1, D7, D30 retention by signup cohort, showing which acquisition sources bring in users who return to the product
- User paths - the most common navigation sequences between key product events, revealing where users who eventually churn diverge from users who activate
- Account-level engagement - where Heap is configured with company/account data (e.g., via HubSpot or Salesforce identity resolution), Prooflytics can aggregate individual user behavior to the account level
Key Heap metrics to track in your marketing briefing
Connecting Heap adds three metrics that paid-channel reporting cannot supply:
Activation rate by acquisition source - the percentage of users who complete your product's activation event, broken down by the campaign or channel that brought them in. A campaign with a lower cost-per-signup but a 9% activation rate is generating more unactivated signups per dollar than a campaign with a higher CPL and 40% activation. Optimizing for activation rate instead of signup rate fundamentally changes which campaigns receive budget.
Funnel drop-off by cohort - where in the onboarding funnel users from each acquisition source abandon. Users from high-intent search queries may drop off at a later funnel stage than users from broad social ads, indicating that the product's value communication is working but the onboarding UX is blocking conversion. Heap identifies where the drop-off happens; Prooflytics surfaces it alongside the acquisition data that explains which sources send users most likely to reach that point.
Time to Value by channel - how long users from each acquisition source take to reach the activation event. Longer TtV correlates with lower paid conversion. If users from a specific campaign take 3× longer to activate than users from another channel, that's a targeting signal (wrong audience) or an expectation-setting signal (campaign promise doesn't match product reality) - not a product problem.
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The activation gap: what the PLG data shows
The ICP problem this creates for PLG marketing teams: teams optimize paid acquisition for signup cost, but the metric that predicts whether a free user will become a paying customer is activation - and only 34% of PLG companies consistently track activation, according to industry research across product-led SaaS companies.
OpenView's PLG benchmarks across their portfolio show that the median SaaS activation rate is 17% - meaning that more than 8 in 10 signups never reach the product's core value moment. Best-in-class activation sits at 33%, and top performers reach 50%+. The gap between median and best-in-class is not primarily a product quality gap - it's a targeting and onboarding infrastructure gap. Teams that bring in the right users (channel targeting) and get them to value quickly (TtV optimization) operate in a structurally different acquisition economics universe than teams that optimize for CPL alone.
Product-Qualified Leads - users who have reached the activation threshold - convert to paid at 5-6× the rate of MQLs generated from form submissions. This multiplier means that a program generating 100 PQLs is typically worth more in eventual revenue than a program generating 500 MQLs, even if the MQL program has a lower cost per lead.
The practical implication for Prooflytics users: connecting Heap replaces CPL as the primary acquisition efficiency metric with cost-per-activated-user - the metric that actually predicts revenue. When Google Search campaigns deliver a 42% activation rate and paid social delivers 11%, that's a budget allocation decision with a direct dollar value. Prooflytics surfaces the activation layer alongside the acquisition cost layer in the daily briefing so the comparison is visible without a manual data join.
How to connect Heap to Prooflytics
Connecting Heap takes under five minutes:
- Open Settings to Data Sources to Heap in your Prooflytics account
- Click Connect - you'll be prompted to authorize Heap API access using your Heap App ID and API credentials, available in your Heap account under Settings to Integrations
- Define your activation event - select which Heap event represents your product's core value moment. This becomes the activation threshold used for all Heap metrics in your briefing
- Wait for the first sync - 90 days of historical event data loads within 24 hours; new events sync to your briefing each morning
The most common setup issue: Heap's API requires that the account connecting has Admin-level access. If you see an "insufficient permissions" error, ask your Heap workspace admin to generate the API credentials and complete the connection step.
Using Heap data to optimize paid acquisition for PLG
The standard PLG marketing analytics question is: which channels bring in users who activate?
With Heap connected in Prooflytics, the chain becomes:
Campaign (Google Ads / LinkedIn Ads / Content) to Signup (Heap first session) to Activation (Heap target event) to PQL status (Heap threshold met) to Paid conversion (Heap account or CRM)
This chain makes it possible to calculate cost-per-PQL - the metric that maps most closely to eventual revenue in a PLG motion. Two acquisition campaigns that both cost $10,000 per month and both generate 200 signups are producing identical results by standard metrics. If one produces 20 PQLs at a 10% activation rate and the other produces 80 PQLs at a 40% activation rate, the second campaign is generating 4× more qualified pipeline at the same budget.
For teams that also use Amplitude or Mixpanel for product analytics, the same activation-to-acquisition connection applies - the specific event instrumentation approach differs but the Prooflytics briefing structure is identical. The marketing analytics for B2B SaaS guide covers the full analytics stack for growth teams running PLG and sales-assisted motions in parallel.
You can read independent reviews of Prooflytics on G2 and compare it to alternatives in the marketing analytics category.
Pendo occupies a complementary position to Heap in the product analytics stack. Where Heap specializes in retroactive behavioral analysis and funnel tracking, Pendo adds in-app guidance (tooltips, walkthroughs) and NPS feedback collection - the layer that explains why users fail to adopt certain features. For B2B SaaS teams running both tools, the Pendo marketing analytics guide covers how feature adoption rates, Product Engagement Score, and NPS sentiment from Pendo connect to acquisition channel data in Prooflytics.
For teams needing visual session replay alongside product event analytics, FullStory is the enterprise-focused alternative to Hotjar in the behavioral intelligence category. While Heap specializes in retroactive event analysis and funnel tracking, FullStory adds session-level visual replay, frustration signal detection (rage clicks, dead clicks, error clicks), and complete 100% session capture - making it the standard for enterprise product and UX teams running high-volume campaigns. The FullStory marketing analytics guide covers how session engagement and frustration signals connect to acquisition channel data in Prooflytics.
Bottom line
- Heap holds the product behavior data your ROAS report doesn't: activation rate, funnel conversion by cohort, Time to Value, and retention by acquisition source
- The activation gap is the core PLG analytics problem: median SaaS activation is 17%; only 34% of PLG teams consistently track it - and PQLs convert 5-6× better than form MQLs
- Cost-per-activated-user beats CPL as a paid acquisition efficiency metric for PLG - Heap data is what makes that calculation possible
- Connection takes under five minutes via Settings to Data Sources to Heap; behavioral data syncs to your briefing daily
- Explore the full integrations catalog or contact the team if you need help configuring activation event definitions or UTM join logic
Frequently asked questions
How often does Heap data sync in Prooflytics?+
Heap data syncs daily. New user events, funnel conversions, and activation records from the previous 24 hours appear in your next morning's briefing. Historical event data from the past 90 days loads during the initial sync when you first connect.
Which Heap metrics are available in Prooflytics?+
Prooflytics pulls user event counts, funnel step conversion rates, activation rates by cohort, D1/D7/D30 retention curves, and Time to Value data. The specific breakdowns available depend on how your Heap workspace is configured - particularly whether acquisition source data is passed as a user property or joined from an external source.
Does Prooflytics require manual event tagging in Heap?+
No. Heap's core value proposition is auto-capture - all interactions are recorded without manual tagging. Prooflytics works with Heap's auto-captured events and any custom events your team has defined. You will need to identify which existing Heap event represents your activation threshold during the connection setup.
How does Prooflytics join Heap data with ad platform data?+
Prooflytics joins Heap user data with paid campaign data using acquisition source identifiers - UTM parameters passed through Heap's user properties, or email-level joins where your ad platform and Heap share a common identifier. The join quality depends on how consistently UTM parameters are captured in your Heap implementation.
Can I see which Heap events correlate with paid conversion?+
Yes. Prooflytics can surface which events - from Heap's auto-captured stream - are most strongly associated with users who eventually convert to paid, within the data available through the Heap API. This gives you an evidence-based activation event definition rather than a hypothesis-based one.
Heap and Hotjar are complementary tools that answer different questions. Heap tracks what users do at the event level - funnel drop-off, feature adoption, cohort retention. Hotjar shows how users behave visually on individual pages: where they click, how far they scroll, and what they say in exit-intent polls. For teams running both, connecting Hotjar to Prooflytics adds the heatmap and session replay layer to your acquisition channel reporting. The Hotjar marketing analytics guide covers the specific behavioral metrics available and how they map to paid traffic performance.
Stop stitching platform exports together
Every channel in one brief — plus the memory of what each one actually drove.
14 days free · no credit card