Add Standard Events to Your Plan

If you’re just getting started with your tracking plan, it can be tough to know what data to collect. With our new event catalog, you don’t have to start from scratch. You can add common events to your plan super quickly.

The event catalog is the latest addition to the Tracking Plan, a new workflow that lets you see and manage the events you’re sending to Segment. Past feature ships include disabling, counting, and filtering events.

The Basics

When you’re on the Tracking Plan page, click “Plan New Event”, and you’ll see the list of standard events you can add.

We continue to collect best practices and popular use cases from our customers and make them available here. Along with our customers, we’ve spent a ton of time experimenting to find the best events to track in your product, so that you can use them without reinventing the wheel.

Ecommerce Events

For example, say you’re running an ecommerce business selling t-shirts and want to see how well your store is doing and how you can sell more. All you need to do is add our Viewed Product, Added Product to Cart, and Completed Order events to your Tracking Plan and copy-paste the code snippets onto your site.

Then, boom, you have a standard ecommerce funnel and can see exactly which part of the process needs to be improved. You can also send the same events to other tools, like marketing automation, to reenage people who’ve Added to Cartbut haven’t Completed Order.

And since these events are standardized, we can give them special treatment—we’ll intelligently map all of these product events to whatever end tools you’re using. So your Completed Order event would show up in Google Analytics as a Transaction, in Bronto in their “Orders” section, etc.

All of implementation details get taken care of for you automatically.

To make this all work, when you implement a standard event, just send along the standard properties listed with the event in the Spec. For example, with Viewed Product, send the product’s id, sku, price and category.

You can send any additional properties you want as well, but including the standard properties makes sure your integrations have everything they need to visualize these events correctly. Learn about all of the standard ecommerce events and properties.

Standardizing Event Tracking

In addition to ecommerce tracking, we’re working on standardizing collections of events for other industries and integration categories. It’s a work-in-progress, so keep an eye out for the new ones in your tracking plan, or directly in the Spec :)