Tracking Events and Properties Naming Conventions and Best Practice

Tracking has 2 parts, the event and the properties of the event and captured together will tell you what users are doing.

Data Step 1

Event Naming Best Practice: Object & Action in past tense with "Title Casing" and spacing, eg "Product Added" where Product is the Object and Added is the Action

Data Step 2

Event Property: Be consistency, use nouns and use snake_case (just stay that way), and do not nest properties, most downstream providers can use nested properties. This is what tells us what people are doing on the event. 

Data Step 3

As a further clarity and to avoid having hundreds of events, the event names should be generalized and then the properties should be used for specificity, else you could end up with lets say 

  • Product Added from Contact Page
  • Product Added from List Page
  • Product Added from Recommendation

Or  just "Product Added", with a property of say "source"


Think an example like this: 

Event Name

"Product Added"

Property

{

    "product_id" : "1AB", 

    "price" : "99.00", 

    "source" : "Product Page"

}



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

cf_sql_timestamp vs cf_sql_date vs getdate()

If there's one thing I don't like it is people confusing a date with a timestamp, and how a lazy bit of development can ruin a load of data. Here is a simple query inserting data to a timestamp I found in a system where all the created dates were truncated because of the incorrect syntax. Bad one which was in use: insert into testdate values (<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_date" value="#createodbcdatetime(now())#">); Result :  2015-09-29 00:00:00.000 Best One (easiest to read) insert into testdate values(getdate() ); Result : 2015-09-29 10:10:09.880 Not great (no binding) insert into testdate values(#createodbcdatetime(now())#); Result :  2015-09-29 10:14:44.000 What the bad one should have been insert into testdate values(<cfqueryparam cfsqltype=" cf_sql_timestamp " value="#createodbcdatetime(now())#">)
Read more

Global SQL Procedure, System Objects and sp_ms_marksystemobject

You may come across a need to have a database of utils full of generic procedures which work on indvidual databases (say client databases). You can't pass the database name into the procedure as a parameter and say "use @dbname" in the procedure and dynamic sql sucks. One workaround is to create the procedure in the master database and then mark it as a system object. eg use [master] create procedure sp_doThis // note the sp_ prefix is required begin // etc etc end go exec sp_ms_marksystemobject 'sp_doThis' // second note, this procedure is undocumented, so I wouldn't be relying on this for life or death. use [myotherdb] exec sp_doThis go All done!
Read more

Ghost Records, Card Recon and PCI Compliance

As part of a PCI Compliance audit, I recently ran a scan on a database using software call Card Recon. A little odd thing occurred. At a point in the past, a row of data in a column, which had been dropped from the database schema, contained a single test credit card number. However, the Card Recon software showed that the data was still there in the database file (this was a SQL Database) in the form of a SQL Ghost Record. A Ghost Record can appear when running a delete or insert command and when running delete and insert in different queries but related by the same indexed data, you can read all about it over at Ghost "Rows" Buster in  SQL Server on Technet. It's basically a record somewhere in the database file, but not directly in a database table and is living in a bit of spare fragmented space somewhere and this needs to be cleaned up. Following this procedure managed to remove the Ghost Record: Convert the database to Simple (only so the transactio
Read more