Editor’s notice: this text was initially printed on the Iteratively weblog on February 19, 2021.
Knowledge assortment is the muse of your knowledge stack, nevertheless it’s usually missed—unloved even—and so many firms don’t spend the time and assets wanted to get it proper.
Analytics monitoring pitfalls can simply occur when occasion monitoring will not be getting the love and care it deserves. Fortunately, realizing what these pitfalls are, you’ll be able to extra simply keep away from them. Plus, you’ll be able to enhance your knowledge assortment technique and course of with a number of the concrete suggestions shared under.
What’s occasion monitoring?
Earlier than we dive in, let’s shortly get on the identical web page about what we’re protecting right here: Occasion monitoring is the method of capturing and accumulating knowledge about your customers’ interactions with a digital product, reminiscent of an internet site, net or cell app.
Any user-initiated motion might be encoded as an occasion, reminiscent of web page views, button clicks, type submissions and search. What occasions you need to seize relies upon closely in your product, enterprise mannequin and knowledge maturity. Each product could have its personal set of person behaviors and the groups engaged on enhancing or promoting the product could have their very own analytics metrics and objectives. If you happen to’re simply getting began with occasion monitoring, take a look at our information to making a monitoring plan.
The core constructing blocks of information
To get the insights you want about your product efficiency, person conduct or buyer acquisition technique, there are 4 elementary knowledge constructing blocks you have to think about:
Occasions
Any person or server-initiated motion is an occasion. This contains all the things from web page views and button clicks to account deletion and software crashing.
Occasion properties
Occasion properties additional describe the actual occasion and the context it was invoked in. You leverage properties to seize extra data across the occasion reminiscent of browser data or what data was submitted in a type area.
Customers
Customers are the people who carry out the occasions. They’re your unknown net guests, app customers or logged-in clients.
Person properties
Person properties make it straightforward to file traits on a person. This might embrace knowledge like their subscription plan, geographic location, person ID, and browser or machine sort.
Frequent occasion monitoring challenges and tricks to keep away from them
Now that we’ve coated the fundamentals, let’s have a look at the frequent pitfalls we expertise when speaking to many knowledge and product groups on the market.
Too many occasion varieties
Whereas you could have a considerable amount of occasions collected (could possibly be billions a day relying in your firm dimension and enterprise mannequin) we advocate you restrict your complete variety of occasion varieties. Sprawling occasion dictionaries will depart you to search for a needle in a haystack and knowledge shoppers, reminiscent of analysts and PMs, could have problem determining what occasions they should carry out their evaluation.
Tip: We advocate that your monitoring plan ought to include wherever between 10 to 200 occasion varieties. Clearly complicated multi-products may need a necessity for extra, however we frequently see that firms can tremendously slim down their knowledge mannequin by tidying up their occasion varieties.
Overcomplicating the information mannequin
Associated to the purpose above, we frequently see firms get too particular with their knowledge mannequin, which makes it arduous to maintain it constant and scalable (and subsequently ends in too many occasion varieties). For instance, we’ve seen firms utilizing a singular occasion for every of their touchdown pages, as an alternative of a catch-all occasion, “Web page View,” that comprises property values for context (e.g. UTM parameters and URLs).
Tip: Proactively make sure you’re making a construction that’s scalable as you develop and concentrate on the information you want immediately.
Lacking properties
We see groups spending numerous time on defining their occasions, however pondering much less about what properties needs to be related to them. Arguably occasion and person knowledge solely turn out to be actually helpful when you could have the context round them as effectively—with out them your evaluation will likely be restricted.
Tip: Make certain to deal with properties with the significance they deserve. To assist your groups make greatest use of properties you’ll be able to create property templates for folks to leverage: “If I’m firing this occasion, what properties may I ship together with the occasion?” You may even specify which properties are required and that are non-compulsory. That is straightforward to do in Amplitude however it’s also possible to create these in a Google Sheet or Notion web page.
Occasions firing incorrectly
We frequently see downstream knowledge high quality points which can be associated to occasions not firing appropriately, e.g. firing too usually, not firing in any respect or on the fallacious time. That is largely as a result of occasion monitoring is left untested and never handled just like the code it’s.
Tip: Finest observe is to deal with your monitoring like another code and take a look at it. Prolong your QA to incorporate occasion monitoring as part of your current CI/CD and unit testing workflows.
ButtonClicked, button_clicked or Clicked Button?
Occasion naming conventions can flip into the wild west even at one of the best firms. You may need your iOS and Android groups following one conference, whereas your net and product groups are following one other. Couple that with human error throughout instrumentation and your knowledge shoppers are left with tons of information munging earlier than the information can be utilized for evaluation.
Tip: Use a framework like Object Motion as a greatest observe for governing the construction of your occasions (i.e. every occasion is related to an Object in your software (e.g. Button) and an Motion (e.g. Clicked). And use a system like Amplitude to implement your naming conference throughout groups and through instrumentation.
Timestamp issues
This one is tremendous easy, however time zones matter. Contemplate the complexity if you wish to e-book a gathering with folks throughout a number of time zones. You don’t need that complexity in your knowledge.
Tip: Don’t overthink this one, stick with UTC.
Incorrect knowledge varieties on properties
This isn’t one thing we see usually, nevertheless it does occur to groups and it’s normally at all times when numbers are concerned. For instance, a person ID comprising six digits will not be truly a numerical worth however relatively a string worth.
Tip: Take note of what the property is describing and the way it will decide the proper area sort. Hold documentation helpful with examples of all property varieties so it’s straightforward to your groups to evolve the monitoring plan precisely.
Amplitude is right here that can assist you
Overwhelmed by all of the hazards and difficulties that include designing, instrumenting and evolving your occasion monitoring? Amplitude has your again.
Amplitude’s knowledge administration capabilities assist knowledge groups, product managers, and engineers outline, instrument, confirm, and collaborate on occasion monitoring. We proactively clear up the information high quality points that come up from inconsistent occasion naming and lacking monitoring and supply a workflow for managing the evolution of your monitoring.
We assist you ditch the spreadsheet, schematize your occasion knowledge, and implement your monitoring plan so you could have prime quality knowledge to work with, no knowledge munging required. If you happen to’re focused on attempting out Amplitude’s knowledge administration capabilities, create a free account immediately, or e-book a demo with our workforce to study extra.
