Editor’s be aware: this text was initially printed on the Iteratively weblog on February 19, 2021.
Information assortment is the muse of your knowledge stack, however it’s typically missed—unloved even—and so many corporations don’t spend the time and sources wanted to get it proper.
Analytics monitoring pitfalls can simply occur when occasion monitoring shouldn’t 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 ideas shared under.
What’s occasion monitoring?
Earlier than we dive in, let’s rapidly get on the identical web page about what we’re protecting right here: Occasion monitoring is the method of capturing and gathering knowledge about your customers’ interactions with a digital product, resembling an internet site, internet or cellular app.
Any user-initiated motion may be encoded as an occasion, resembling 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 may have its personal set of consumer behaviors and the groups engaged on enhancing or promoting the product may have their very own analytics metrics and objectives. In the event you’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, consumer habits or buyer acquisition technique, there are 4 basic knowledge constructing blocks that you must contemplate:
Occasions
Any consumer or server-initiated motion is an occasion. This consists of every part from web page views and button clicks to account deletion and utility 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 resembling 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 internet guests, app customers or logged-in prospects.
Consumer properties
Consumer properties make it straightforward to report traits on a consumer. This might embrace knowledge like their subscription plan, geographic location, consumer ID, and browser or system kind.
Widespread occasion monitoring challenges and tricks to keep away from them
Now that we’ve lined the fundamentals, let’s have a look at the widespread pitfalls we expertise when speaking to many knowledge and product groups on the market.
Too many occasion sorts
Whereas you could have a considerable amount of occasions collected (might be billions a day relying in your firm measurement and enterprise mannequin) we suggest you restrict your whole variety of occasion sorts. Sprawling occasion dictionaries will go away you to search for a needle in a haystack and knowledge shoppers, resembling analysts and PMs, may have issue determining what occasions they should carry out their evaluation.
Tip: We suggest that your monitoring plan ought to include wherever between 10 to 200 occasion sorts. Clearly advanced multi-products might need a necessity for extra, however we regularly see that corporations can significantly slim down their knowledge mannequin by tidying up their occasion sorts.
Overcomplicating the info mannequin
Associated to the purpose above, we regularly see corporations get too particular with their knowledge mannequin, which makes it exhausting to maintain it constant and scalable (and subsequently leads to too many occasion sorts). For example, we’ve seen corporations utilizing a singular occasion for every of their touchdown pages, as a substitute of a catch-all occasion, “Web page View,” that accommodates 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 deal with the info you want at the moment.
Lacking properties
We see groups spending plenty of time on defining their occasions, however pondering much less about what properties ought to be related to them. Arguably occasion and consumer knowledge solely turn into actually helpful when you’ve got the context round them as properly—with out them your evaluation will likely be restricted.
Tip: Ensure 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 individuals to leverage: “If I’m firing this occasion, what properties may I ship together with the occasion?” You possibly can even specify which properties are required and that are non-obligatory. That is straightforward to do in Amplitude however you too can create these in a Google Sheet or Notion web page.
Occasions firing incorrectly
We frequently see downstream knowledge high quality points which might be associated to occasions not firing accurately, e.g. firing too typically, not firing in any respect or on the mistaken time. That is largely as a result of occasion monitoring is left untested and never handled just like the code it’s.
Tip: Greatest apply 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 present CI/CD and unit testing workflows.
ButtonClicked, button_clicked or Clicked Button?
Occasion naming conventions can flip into the wild west even at the very best corporations. You might need your iOS and Android groups following one conference, whereas your internet 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 info can be utilized for evaluation.
Tip: Use a framework like Object Motion as a greatest apply for governing the construction of your occasions (i.e. every occasion is related to an Object in your utility (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 problems
This one is tremendous easy, however time zones matter. Think about the complexity if you need to ebook a gathering with individuals throughout a number of time zones. You don’t need that complexity in your knowledge.
Tip: Don’t overthink this one, follow UTC.
Incorrect knowledge sorts on properties
This isn’t one thing we see typically, however it does occur to groups and it’s normally at all times when numbers are concerned. For instance, a consumer ID comprising six digits shouldn’t be truly a numerical worth however moderately a string worth.
Tip: Take note of what the property is describing and the way it will decide the right area kind. Hold documentation useful with examples of all property sorts so it’s straightforward to your groups to evolve the monitoring plan precisely.
Amplitude is right here that will help 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 resolve the info 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 aid you ditch the spreadsheet, schematize your occasion knowledge, and implement your monitoring plan so you’ve got prime quality knowledge to work with, no knowledge munging required. In the event you’re occupied with attempting out Amplitude’s knowledge administration capabilities, create a free account at the moment, or ebook a demo with our crew to be taught extra.
