Usually the smallest tips are the best ones, right? Here we go:

After the spring update of Adobe Analytics we can now have 1000 custom events, amazing!
The amount of events depends on the license you have, but at least everyone should have at least 100 which is enough.

There are times when it’s useful not to overuse events. If you have 50 different forms on your site and you want to track all of those, what to do? Populate the same event every time form is submitted and use custom (text) eVar where you can save unique form name. That way you can easily see how many form submissions you have by total and also using the form name eVar you can see what different forms have been submitted. Of course you could see form submission by pages, but what if you have 2 forms on the same page and if you save form names to eVar then you can do all kinds of segmentation based that information too. Yes, I already have mor detailed post about this in here.

How to name events?

Let’s again choose “form submission”. If that event would be event2, I would name it “form submission (e2)”. I use Adobe Analytics many hours in a day and tend to remember the event number better than the actual names. 😉 The “e2” would mean “event2” and this way I could use the search in AA to find my event. Ok, after the new UI and search AA automatically can find my “form submission” event if I search “event2” even without the addition of “e2”, although I would have to literally search the “event2” and not “e2”. Makes sense or are you thinking whatta hell I’m talking about? Forget it, just rename your normal event as you like.

Maybe the biggest note would be that if you use “once per visit” setting for event then it would be very important to add that to name of event = “Form Submission (e2 OPV)” and that way when you are analyzing data you always remember “ah, this is populated only once per visit”. I duplicate every critical KPI metric with “record once per visit” setting too. Of course there are situations where it would be stupid to analyze with “OPV event”, e.g. if you have ecommerce site and people are buying many times in the same session etc.

Sometimes I have used naming process like this “Form Submission (only frontpage, event4 OPV)”. Sure it’s very clear when this goal happens but try to add few of these metrics to same report or dashboard and you understand why long naming process sucks. However, there is a new sheriff in town… description!

The description field has been on the settings for a while, but I haven’t used it at all. Yes, I’m lazy, shame on me! I’m responsible for our tagging process so I know all the metrics and when those are populated etc. However, recently I have been noticed that it would be very helpful for other AA users If I had given description for every events and I’ll try to do that in the future. Sometimes I like to populate different events for same kind of actions and that way I can make calculated metrics easier etc. And if e.g. product owner or advertising agency are making own reports and they start to choose metrics for the report. They open the metrics menu and see something like this:

Form Submission (e2)
Form Submission (e3 OPV)
Form Submission Video (e4)
Form Submission XYZ (e5)

Even though there would be only one form submission there could be hundreds of other events too.
They have never said anything, but I know that they are screaming “WHY THERE ARE SO MANY METRICS!? WHAT DOES THIS METRIC MEAN!? WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY ANALYZE!?”

So add description in the settings and if AA user search events they can easily see the metric description in the search results too or if they are choosing metrics from metrics menu they can put mouse over for the metric and see the description. Very useful and this way they aren’t always asking from you that what does these diffrent metrics mean.

Btw, the metrics section in the metrics window should be much wider… maybe have to write to Adobe idea exchange.

Show me the mo… KPI Metrics!

But what could be help for the overload of events? We admins / analysts love to make all kinds of metrics that are not so important for the product owner or agencies using our data. I got an idea that it would be great if there would be one more setting in the admin panel. The possibility to click “KPI checkbox” if that metric is one of the most important metrics that everyone using AA should be aware off. And all the events that have been checked as KPI metric would be available as own metric type in here:

That way it would be easier to see only the most important metrics. If someone agree, I could again make a wish to Adobe idea exchange?

Maybe the detour for now could be just to manually add “KPI” to name of the event, e.g. “Form Submission (e2 KPI)”. This way you could also easily search only “KPI” metrics, again very useful for other users of Adobe Analytics aka AA.

Well, this is my process at the moment for custom events. I’m sure you could have better ideas, if so, please share.