In the age of data-driven decision-making, product teams can’t afford to fly blind. Whether you’re building an app, an eCommerce store, or a SaaS platform, your ability to understand user behavior hinges on one thing: what you track.
Yet, not all data is created equal. While it might be tempting to track everything, the smartest teams focus on a recommended set of events, event properties, and user properties—because these are the signals that tell the real story of your product’s performance.
Let’s break down why this level of structured tracking is so important and what it means for product analytics.
1. Events: Capturing the What
Events are the backbone of behavioral analytics. They answer the core question: What did the user do?
Examples include:
- Signed Up
- Added to Cart
- Completed Purchase
- Clicked Feature
- Upgraded Plan
Tracking these events lets you understand usage patterns, friction points, and conversion behavior. But without a consistent, intentional set of events, you risk drowning in noise.
Why it matters:
Recommended event tracking ensures you’re aligned across teams, tools, and time. It makes analytics reliable, actionable, and easy to scale.
2. Event Properties: Capturing the Context
While events show what happened, event properties explain how and why it happened.
Take this example:
- Event: Completed Purchase
- Properties: cart_value, payment_method, coupon_applied, delivery_option
These properties unlock far richer analysis. Now, you can see not just how many people purchased—but which payment methods convert best, what impact discounts have, and whether same-day delivery drives higher AOV.
Why it matters:
Without event properties, your data lacks depth. With them, you can segment, personalize, and optimize in ways that transform product outcomes.
3. User Properties: Capturing the Who
User properties are persistent attributes tied to individual users. Think:
- Plan Type
- Signup Source
- Location
- Device
- Lifetime Value
These aren’t tied to individual actions, but to the person behind the actions. Combined with events and event properties, they allow powerful cohort analysis—so you can answer questions like:
- Do users from organic search convert better than paid?
- Are mobile users engaging with key features as much as desktop?
- Which user types churn fastest?
Why it matters:
User properties let you personalize the experience, predict behaviors, and build better segmentation models. It’s the difference between tracking users and understanding them.
4. Consistency Is King
Ad hoc tracking leads to messy data, inconsistent reporting, and team misalignment. That’s why smart companies invest in tracking plans—a shared source of truth that defines:
- Which events to track
- Which properties to attach
- Where and when to capture them
This structure isn’t just helpful for analytics. It powers onboarding flows, A/B testing, personalization engines, and automated messaging.
5. Better Decisions, Faster
With a recommended set of events and properties in place, your product analytics becomes a powerful decision-making engine. You’ll be able to:
- Pinpoint why users drop off
- Optimize conversion funnels
- Personalize the user journey
- Validate features with real behavior data
- Communicate findings clearly across stakeholders
No more guesswork. No more waiting for an analyst to piece together the story. Just clarity, speed, and insight.