Tracking Rules & Event Manager

The Event Manager is where you can create new events (Tracking Rules), see which events and properties have gotten recorded (Tracked Events and Properties), and modify the events and properties that show up in your Kissmetrics app.

Tracking Rules

Tracking Rules are essentially the conditions necessary for an event to trigger. In other words, Tracking Rules determine how an event gets triggered and what that event should be called (in addition to corresponding properties, should you choose to add them).

To use a simplified example, let’s say you want to track a sign-up form. You might have a tracking rule that basically says, “If a user submits the sign-up form, record an event called ‘Signed up’ “ (note that I’m paraphrasing the tracking rule to read like plain English).

Again, Tracking Rules are the conditions or rules that end up recording events and properties; they’re not the events and properties themselves. So in the example above, once the “Signed up” event gets triggered, the event itself would not show up in the “Tracking Rules” section; it would show up in the “Tracked Events” section. To further clarify, here’s the distinction between the two:

Tracking Rule: “If a user submits the sign-up form, record an event called ‘Signed up’ “
Tracked Event: “Signed up”

Create New Tracking Rule

There are three kinds of tracking rules you can create:

When someone Visits the page, meaning they saw a particular page. Simply enter the URL of the page you’re hoping to track.
When someone Submits the form to provide you information. This could be a form for collecting lead-gens, subscribing to your newsletter, or something else. This particular event is designed to track the form’s inputs as properties as well.
When someone Clicks on this element in your site: a particular button, a link, or something else.

When creating any of these events, you can also add properties to be recorded along with the event. If you choose to “Get text from page” as the property value, just use the CSS selector of the element on the page that you want to use as the property value.

Turning Tracking Rules ON or OFF

If you want to suspend a tracking rule and temporarily prevent it from tracking, you can turn it off. On the other hand, if you’re certain that you permanently want to remove this rule, you can go ahead and delete it. To view any Tracking Rules that have been turned off, just check the box at the top that says, “Show tracking rules that have been turned OFF”.

Tracked Events and Properties

When an event or property has been recorded at least once, it will show up in this section. For each tracked event or property, you’ll also see the total number of times it has been tracked, when it was first tracked, and when it was last tracked.

Clicking on a specific event or property will show you more information about it as well. For example, it will show you the event’s “Unique Identifier” and “Display Name”. The Unique Identifier is essentially how the event/property is recorded in the database. The Display Name is how the event/property will appear in the app (i.e., in reports, metrics, or elsewhere).

Note: the events and properties that show up in this section are all the ones that have been recorded -- not necessarily just the ones you’ve set up with tracking rules. For example, you may have events and properties that were set up to record with API calls in the code (as opposed to via Tracking Rules). Or perhaps you’ve imported some events/properties. These would all show up in this section.

Turning Tracked Events/Properties ON or OFF

Turning an event or property ON/OFF ultimately determines whether or not that event or property shows up in the app. It does not, however, determine whether or not the event/property will continue to track. For example, if you turn an event OFF, it just means that the event will no longer show up in reports or metrics or anywhere else in the app. The event will continue to record until you turn off/delete the tracking rule or remove the code that’s recording the event/property (if you’ve manually added code to your site that records events/properties).