Event Tracking

Event tracking is the practice of recording specific user actions (a click, a purchase, a video play) as discrete, named events for analysis, rather than just counting pageviews.

A tracking plan — a documented spec of exactly which events get tracked, with what properties, and why — is the difference between analytics data that's usable six months later and analytics data that's an undocumented mess no one trusts. Without a plan, it's common for the same conceptual event (a purchase) to get logged under three different inconsistent names by three different engineers across a product's history, breaking historical comparisons.

Naming consistency matters more than most teams initially think — "Purchase Completed" vs. "purchase_complete" vs. "OrderFinished" logged for the same action fragments your data across multiple event names, none of which capture the full picture alone.