Trackingplan | Events

An event is triggered by a user interaction on your website or mobile application. Any action a user takes is considered an event, like clicking a button or outbound link, creating an account, watching a video, downloading a file, or submitting a form.

Trackingplan automatically checks to ensure your trackers and pixels are tracking your events correctly and allows your teams to collaborate on events by adding or editing their descriptions.

Moreover, Trackingplan also supports different types of events to facilitate the way you navigate through your data. Let’s see them all:

Standard Events: Automatically uncover your actual digital analytics schema

These are all the events that Trackingplan automatically discovers from all the traffic that your apps and websites are sending to third-party integrations like Google Analytics, Segment, or MixPanel.

Merged Events: Navigate your data more smoothly

For those events that share the same behavior and specifications on different pages, but are presented as hundreds of unique events that make it difficult to analyze them together or visualize them at a glance, you have the option to merge them.

That’s it; Trackingplan will automatically merge those events that share the same behavior but can be found on different pages or use cases into a single event.

This means you’ll be able to navigate your data more smoothly and analyze them together every time you access your panel, gaining deeper insights with ease. If you want to see your events merged differently, contact support and we’ll do it for you.

Merged events will be presented on your dashboard in green and, by hovering over them, the following tooltip will appear.

By clicking on “view definition”, you’ll be able to see the list of events that have been merged.

Custom Events & Metrics: Data validation with maximum precision

On the other way around, if you want to track and validate any of your events with more granularity, Trackingplan allows you to create custom events and metrics based on existing events, their properties, and your tags.

This is the modal where you’ll be able to create custom events or metrics depending on your needs.

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Moreover, to ensure you’re not sending tracks to events whose consent for storing information has been denied or is unknown, you can also create custom events or metrics to track them with maximum precision and effortlessly stay on top of them in case these start receiving tracks. Learn more about Google’s Consent Mode & Trackingplan here.

Let’s see the differences between a custom event and a metric in more detail:

Custom Events

Custom events will be monitored as any other event you have implemented and will provide you with separate traffic analysis and specification validation for your properties and traffic warnings.

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For example, you could create a custom event called premium_user_search to track the search event closely when this is triggered by a user of premium segmentation. That way, once Trackingplan starts detecting hits that correspond to the premium_user_search, it will automatically start sending traffic to this new event so that you can monitor its behavior directly from your Trackingplan’s events tab.

As with merged events, Trackingplan will mark the names of your custom events in green so that you can spot them easily.

Moreover, you will be able to add your custom events to your starred items list, customize their warnings to adjust them to your specs, create validation rules, or view them through Trackingplan’s Digests like any of your other standard events.

To learn more about Custom Events, check out this video to see them in action.

Metrics

However, at Trackingplan, we also know there are complex scenarios that are important to measure (even if all we care about is being able to correctly view their traffic and any potential anomalies but not necessarily their properties):

An event Add_to_Cart on the Search Page…
The Log_in in Version 12.4…
The Purchase_Confirmed with Visa…

That is why metrics won’t include properties so that you can monitor certain events without the noise of potential errors in these properties.

You can create metrics directly in Trackingplan’s Data Explorer. If you need to create multiple metrics at once, click on the "Save X Metrics" button to save several metrics in a single click. You also have the possibility to create separate metrics for each unique value of a property by clicking on the "Save as Metric" button.

Once you've created your metrics, you’ll be able to see them on your Metrics Tab. As with custom events, you’ll be able to add them to your starred items list, add notes, or view them through Trackingplan’s Digests.

Additionally, in case you need to delete a metric, just click on the three dots that appear to the right of the metric you wish to remove.

Draft Events: Set your expectations in advance

You can create new events and define their specification in advance with the Draft Event button you’ll find in the top right of your Dashboard.

You can also add which properties these new events will include and adjust the type and required constraints you expect from them.

Once an event appears for the first time, Trackingplan will automatically show it in the draft created and will validate it according to the specification you had already set up, generating warnings if applicable. As long as no hits are detected, the event will appear as OFF.

We will also send you an alert once this event goes live in each of your environments, like staging or production, so that the person in charge of defining its specification can easily check if the dev team implemented the event correctly or vice versa. In case it’s not, you can immediately alert about the issue and get it fixed, instead of noticing when it’s too late and the data is missing.

Offline Events

Trackingplan also captures and informs you about Offline events. These are events that have stopped receiving traffic for at least a few days, allowing you to stay on top of the status of all the events that are no longer actively receiving data.

Moreover, Trackingplan allows you to take action by offering you the option to delete or hide these events if they are not going to be used anymore. This is helpful to keep your event tracking environment clutter-free, ensuring that all the data you work with is relevant.

Filtering Event Types

In case you want to spot only a specific type of event in your dashboard, you also have the option to filter them through the search bar.

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For more information, you can read the following blog post on how to optimize data validation within your actual analytics schema with event types.

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