A guide to event design

“If you’re tracking too many things, you’re really not tracking anything”, I overheard someone at the office say. I thought about that comment over the next few weeks; I could relate considering my experience talking to app owners and working in Mobile MarTech for half a decade now. It’s true after all, even with the wave of modern data science, industry’s traditional obsession of tracking dozens of “Events” with event-centric tools like Google Analytics is unvarying. While the industry has pivoted around mobile first and multi-platform users, traditional events tracking strategy isn’t relevant anymore. Page views centric, event tracking must evolve to Person-centric, user actions tracking to capture micro-moments consumers experience today.

From which sources can you push data on CleverTap? Should it only be my app or website?

You can integrate the CleverTap SDK within their mobile and browser apps. Once integrated, you can define the events that you want CleverTap to capture under the ‘Event Design’ phase of integration.
For a holistic view of users, we recommend that you integrate CleverTap with mobile app and site.
Let’s move to how should you build your next Event Design considering the changing analytical landscape? We at CleverTap work with customers around the world to help them improve their analytics strategy and behavior tracking, so their brands can derive actionable insight from user analytics. Here are a few tips and tricks for analyzing your user behavior.
 

1. User Action Names

It’s important that you track user actions correctly, so it’s easy for you and just as easy for anyone else on your team to understand what the event name functionally denotes.
The best way is to use a Noun-Verb pair.
App Launched, Product Viewed, Article Shared, Item Added, User Registered and so on. Following a good nomenclature scheme to name user actions immediately makes more sense compared to something like “Initiated_Buy_Screen1”. It will help you keep your data sensible in the long run when your app/website goes through flow changes, “Buy_Screen1” may need to be changed to “Buy_Screen2” but “Item Bought” will functionally still mean and track the same.
 

2. Track User Actions Consistency Across Platforms

I recommend my customers to use a multi-platform presence, which is a growing list of people, to keep user actions they track consistent across Web & Mobile. There are two advantages to doing this;

• Data will be highly consistent when drawing multi-platform marketing reports.
• Your Data will be accurate and insightful when comparing the platform-wise analysis of certain Actions without any biases whatsoever. Having said that, if you still require platform specific actions(s), go ahead; name it well enough to be identified uniquely.

3. How to Find Out What You Should Track?

Here’s how you can move away from tracking traditional event metrics like Page views and track a user-centric metric like “Added to Cart”. The idea is to capture meaningful and actionable insight a user does over a generic event a cohort of people do. The best way to discover what Action you should track is to ask yourself these two golden questions, and then answer them yourselves or via your team.

• Question 1 – What are the three most frequent things people do inside my app?
• Question 2 – What are the three most important things I want people to do inside my app?

Emphasis on bold and underline if it’s already not clear enough. Now, imagine I were a marketing chap at a big e-commerce company, I’d probably answer them as follows:

• Top 3 things people do – Search, Visit Sale Pages & Apply Coupons
• Top 3 things I want people to do – Purchase, View Products & Register.

Kaboom! You’ve got yourself six key Actions you definitely should track.

4. Taking it to the Next Level With User Action Properties:

CleverTap not only allows you to track 512 Actions but also 256 Action Properties per User Action. That makes it a very extensive 608 data points you can track!
Think of user action properties as meta-information about your primary user action.
Eg. Your User Action “Added to Cart” can have properties such as Product Name, Product Category, Product ID, Cart Amount, Number of Item(s) and so on. We recommend marketers to begin with tracking 5-6 user actions when they begin using the test account and the sooner you are comfortable with your data flowing in, you can go on to add complexity with Action Properties.
I’ve taken the liberty to make a small sheet (download here) to help you design your events to track. I encourage you give it a shot, fill in all your user actions you want to track and we’ll be happy to review it for you, email us at support@clevertap.com with the subject ‘CleverTap is awesome’. Just kidding 🙂