As a follow-up to my post about analytics event naming conventions, I want to share a few thoughts about event name cardinality aka how many distinct event names to track in your analytics tools.

Consider four events that a user can perform: signing up for an account, publishing a post, publishing a page, and publishing an image.

How many analytics events should this be? We have a few options:

Four

1. Sign Up
2. Publish Post
3. Publish Page
4. Publish Image

Three

1. Sign Up
2. Publish Post with an Image property set to true or false depending on whether the post consists of only an image
3. Publish Page

Two

1. Sign Up
2. Publish with a Type property set to Post, or Page, or Image

One

1. Perform Event with a Name property set to Sign Up or Publish with an additional Type property when the name is Publish set to Post, or Page, or Image

If you use a robust analytics tool like Mixpanel, Amplitude, KISSmetrics, or Tracks (Automattic’s internal analytics tool), you should in theory be able to perform any type of analysis using any of the options above.

For me, it comes down to what type of analysis you want to perform on the data, the types of properties on the event, and convenience.

Using the single event option will be a pain because you’ll constantly have to be specifying the Name property in the analytics tools to get the data you really want.

The decision between two, three, and four is close in this example. I think it comes down to whether you’re going to need a single Publish event in the types of analysis you’re performing. If knowing that the user published anything is important and each type publishing is conceptually similar, then having a single event might make sense. However, if your analysis is frequently going to focus on whether the user just published a post or just published a page or just published an image, having distinct Publish Post/Publish Page/Publish Image events is more convenient because you won’t constantly have to specify that you want the Publish event where the Type is Post. If publishing an image is similar to publishing a normal post, then maybe the three-event option is best.

At Automattic we went with three (Sign Up, Publish Post, Publish Page) and then added a feature to some of our tools (like our funnel builder) that let you specify a step can be one of several events (like publishing a post or publishing a page).

Hopefully this gives you a few things to think about next time you go to name new analytics events. If you can’t decide which route to go, feel free to reach out over email and I’d be happy brainstorm with you.