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Would renaming events combine them all under one event umbrella retroactively?

  • 25 January 2022
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Hi! I’m currently facing an issue with event type limits and it stems from the fact that when instrumenting page view event tracking, we didn’t account for some pages, so they all are the same type of page but since they’re going into Amplitude as unique URLs, they’re all logging as unique individual event types. I’m planning on going into the code to fix that so we account for that page and it all flows into Amplitude as one event type.

However, for the already logged events and to ensure that we can still track new types of events, is it an permissible practice to rename all of the unique URL events so that they’ll all be under one event type? And would this change the events so that in charts and in the future, they would still appear as one unified event type? I understand that in the raw data, the renaming would not change, but this is just to clean up any past errors. 

I hope this makes sense, but I can definitely elaborate more. Thank you!

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Best answer by Saish Redkar 25 January 2022, 22:57

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Userlevel 7
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Hey @carissa.mok 

I think it’s perfectly fine as long as you know the caveats between the changes you do in Govern and the actual code fix in your product. Depending on how you want to merge those events, the Merge events/properties feature under Transformations will be the best way to achieve this.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks @Saish Redkar for getting back to me. Just to confirm, the actual code fix would only affect any future tracked events going forward and the renaming would only affect the already-tracked events, so there would be no overlap? Also, we currently don’t have a Govern add-on, so without that the Transformations feature, would all of these events still remain as standalone events even after being renamed to the same event name? Thanks!

Userlevel 7
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I think I understand your use case better now after you mentioned that you don’t have the Govern Add-On. Assuming you have the different events named as Event-123, Event-234, etc , you want to just change the display name of each of them to just “Event-ABC” in the Govern UI so that they appear as one event?

If this is the case, then they would still appear in charts as separate events named under the name “Event-ABC” which would cause more confusion. Transformations would actually merges these events as one in the UI and also compute totals accordingly.

The actual code fix would only affect any future tracked events going forward as you correctly said. Can you try creating a custom event out of all those unique URL events and then hiding those individual events from the chart drop down? This might help in the short term in absence of the merge feature.

 

 

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Ok, yes I think that answers my question exactly. Creating the custom event is good to know, but this would only work for already tracked data correct? Thanks!

Userlevel 7
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Yes.That’s correct. All the unique url events can be interpreted as the custom event as long as the code fix updates the event to a different event name moving forward.

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Hi @Saish Redkar

So ideally, after the code fix, I’d like to combine all of the wrong already-tracked events with the new events that would come in after the code fix. Would I just have to add the new event name from the code fix to the custom event and use the custom event going forward? And if I do that, are there any cases in terms of making the charts where I wouldn’t be able to do something with the custom event that I would be able to do with normally tracked events? 

Thanks, 

Carissa

Userlevel 7
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You can do that, but sometimes it can get tricky after some point to manage such caveats and the resulting insights due to the very nature of custom events.

The doc says that Custom events are available in the following charts and reports: Event Segmentation, Funnel Analysis, Retention Analysis, Lifecycle, Stickiness, Impact Analysis, and Compass. So that pretty much covers the majority of the charts.

 

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Ok thank you! Also, one more question I had, would adding these unique URL events to a custom event solve my original problem of too many event types? Because I’m assuming that I would still have to keep those event types anyways in order for the custom event to work. 

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