Inspired by Derek Sivers and nudged on by my friend Ryan Martinsen, I’ve added a /now page to this site which I’ll try to keep up to date with what I’m up to. It was fun putting it together and I think it will help me stay focused.
Check out Derek’s guidance on how to create one of your own.
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
Three
Two
One
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.
In honor of the release of Star Wars The Force Awakens today I’d like to share with you all my flash talk from Automattic’s Grand Meetup this year.
Flash talks are short talks that every Automattician has to give at the Grand Meetup, a once a year gathering where the entire company gets together for a week to work and play. We can talk about anything we’d like so I showed off my childhood Stars Wars action figure collection.
Enjoy.
Related SNL clip from last week:
One thing I’d love to give up forever is unhealthy drinks. Between iced coffees from Dunkin Donuts, chai tea lattes from Starbucks, Diet Dr Peppers, and similar deliciously unhealthy drinks, I probably have about one per day. Not good.
In an attempt to remedy that, I’m going to try a little challenge in December where my goal is not to have any of those things for the entire month.
In order to hold myself accountable, I’d like to make you all an offer (that is, all ~5 of you who read this blog 😃): if you hit Like on this post or add a comment, I’ll PayPal you $20 if I fail the challenge.
I could cheat of course and you’d never know, but I won’t.
Wish me luck! Or don’t, depending on how badly you want that $20….
Matt Mazur 