Hey there!
What are best practices for distinguishing “identical” events in amplitude? E.g. we have the same object and action (user-account-create) on several pages. We are currently seeing two options:
(1) naming convention: add prefix to event name to indicate where in app event happened
(2) track as property
What are best practices here, and why?
Best answer by JennRu
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+9
Very much depends on your use case/ scenario. Key thing to keep in mind is that the user pathing features in Amplitude (“Pathfinder”, “User Journeys”, etc) will display unique event names in the paths...so if you only have a common event name everywhere that’s what you will see in the pathing. If you have a good event schema, you’ll be able to see the page/ screen it occurred on in the path from the previous event (which might be something like “view sign-up screen”, etc).
For things like log-in, account creation, etc, you’ll likely find yourself having a single event name with an event property passed to grab the page/ screen it’s happening on. These articles are pretty useful to help you define your schema:
https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/206404618-Step-1-Instrumentation-pre-work
+8
Hey
Either option requires data education so everyone with access to your org knows how to properly use the data.
When I consider taxonomy naming conventions, I consider 2 things
Data ease of use is really important. The more concise your event naming conventions are, the less confusion you’ll likely cause downstream. Having multiple “identical” events with a different prefix might cause blindspots in how end users apply the data to their insights / targeting. Unless if your team plans to upkeep an “official” Custom Event that combines all the identical events into 1 aggregate event for analysis.
If you’re tracking the same exact action across multiple sources, I would recommend the simplicity of 1 consolidated event with some event properties to identify the source of the event. Sample spec below
"event_type": "account created",
"event_properties": {
"account name": "xxx",
"account id": "xxx",
"source page": "home page",
"source url": "homepage.com",
"source CTA": "Apply now" },
2 more considerations:
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