Email teams should beware of stale data, judging by a new study from Heap: How To Miss Everything Your Customers Do (And How Not To). 

Nearly 30% of automatically captured events change their definition in the first six months. This means marketers are making decisions based on past customer behavior, the study says. 

And 49% of all actions are not even defined until year two — a process that takes 19-24 months for 20% of marketers. So teams can analyze only half of user actions they could see with autocapture. 

The purpose of the report seems to be to promote automation of the process. 

Heap reports that half of its customers actively follow and analyze more than 127 user actions, and that 25% follow 253. 

In addition, 93.5% of autocaptured defined events are analyzed multiple times in the first year after being created. 

Heap examined data from over 1,000 anonymized customers collected from 2019 to 2022. 

Almost a third of captured events change their definition within six months, Heap reports.