Session and Screen visit filters VS. Heatmap filters - what’s the difference?
Please keep in mind that the filters applied on top are based on sessions or screen visits and fitler the data for the screen and heatmaps based on those selected properties. Whilst the filter on the right side filters only the visualization of gestures on the heatmap.
For example, if you want to analyze the behavior of users that were frustrated (had rage taps) when interacting with the screen you should select Filter on the top-bar > gesture > screen visits with gesture > add condition > is rage > true
If you look at the heatmap, it is showing ALL the interactions on the screen, when on that screen visit there was at least one rage tap (frustration signal).
You can see that users that were frustrated also had unresponsive gestures, swiped down, etc.
However, if you want to focus your analysis on only those rage gestures, you can additionally filter the Heatmap gestures by using the filter on the right hand side and selecting ‘Rage taps’
If you look at the heatmap, this is showing ONLY the rage taps on the screen, when on that screen visit there was at least one rage tap (frustration signal), but all the other gestures are left out of the analysis.
Session vs Screen visit filters - what’s the difference?
Now that we clarified the difference between the gesture filters and the data filters we can dig deeper into sessions and screen visits filters.
You’re familiar with session filters available throughout our dashboard. Session filters are based on session properties (as a reminder a session starts once the user opens the app and ends once the user sends the app to the background). This means that by using a session filter the query considers all the session data for all the screens, not exclusively the screen you’re analyzing.
For instance, if you filter by gesture count then you’re filtering the count of gestures on the whole session, not only during the visit to that screen.
However, if you filter by Screen visit gesture count on screen, you’re filtering by gestures that happened on this screen only.
Why is this important?
Let’s take a look at the event filters.
When you filter by Custom Events > Screen visit with events > with at least/at most (n) events where event name = xyz. You’re filtering by unique screen visits, not the screen in general.
For instance, if you have an ecommerce app, a very likely behavior is that users will go to the product screen > add an item to the cart > go back to the product screen > go to the product list screen > go back to a product screen > don’t add an item to the cart > go back to the cart screen > complete the purchase.
This behavioral pattern might be repeated over and over again until the user has a list of items added to the cart.
Following the previous example, if you filter the Product page heatmap by
Events > Screen visit with events > with at least 1 event where event name = ‘Add to cart’ you will see the heatmap for the screen visits (not sessions) where the users added an item to the cart, and you’re excluding those interactions that happened on the same session where the user visited the Product page but didn’t add the item to the cart.
That means that if you replay those screen visits, you will see at least 1 visit to the product page screen where an item was added to the cart, but you might see more screen visits on the same session where the item was not added to the cart.
