Naming Revenue-Related Events and Properties

The Optimal Naming Convention

Tracking e-commerce business requires a slightly tailored setup that will allow you to report on data in a manner specific to e-commerce reporting.

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Note:

This can also be applicable for SaaS companies, but it is imperative for e-commerce!

Let’s say you are a soap retailer and you want to track how people flow through your checkout process. You will have events for actions, like Added to Cart, Purchased, Returned, etc. You will also have properties firing along with these events like Item, Price, Quantity, etc. So a user’s journey could look like this:

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User ABC123 did the

Event Added to cart along with the

Properties of item = bar of soap; price = $10; quantity = 12

then,

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User BC123 did the

Event Purchased along with the

Properties of item = bar of soap; price = $10; quantity = 12

Seems like a simple setup for a simple funnel, right? Wrong.

Explanation of the Reporting Logic

The way Kissmetrics tracks and reports data, the properties that fire with the Added to cart event and the properties that fire with the purchased event are indistinguishable because they are named the same.

If I ran a report asking for people who did the event Purchased, I would get “1”. 1 user did that event.

If I were interested in the quantity of soap this user was purchasing, I could segment by the property quantity, and I would see a property value of “24”.

24??? Here’s what’s happening internally when we run this query:

The system looks and sees that this user did the event Purchased - so it counts him in the report. It then looks and sees what he registered for the quantity property - 12….but 12 two times….so a total of 24.

My report will ultimately tell me that I had 1 user who purchased 24 bars of soap. Which is a wrongful indictment of that poor user’s body odor, and more importantly, an incorrect calculation of your performance.

The way around this is to append the event name to the property.

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User ABC123 did the

Event Added to cart along with the

Properties of added to cart - item = bar of soap; added to cart - price = $10; added to cart - quantity = 12

then,

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User ABC123 did the

Event Purchased along with the

Properties of purchased - item = bar of soap; purchased - price = $10; purchased - quantity = 12

Now if I ran a report asking for people who did the event Purchased, I would again get “1”. 1 user did that event.

But if I were again interested in the quantity of soap this user was purchasing, I would segment by the property purchased - quantity, and I would see a property value of “12”.

Now I have 1 user who purchased 12 bars of soap - a perfectly reasonable level of soap consumption, and....accurate data!

Appending your event names to the properties associated with your checkout funnel will allow you to accurately track this flow without over or under reporting.