How to create an Event Tracking Plan for your SaaS

When you want to analyze the behavior of your users and use this information in your analytics solution, or in Screeb to display your surveys at the right moment, tracking Events is key.

The most successful teams plan their tracking by creating a tracking and implementation plan. In this article, we'll share a really simple but powerful way of creating this plan to effectively start tracking events as soon as possible.

What is Event Tracking?

Event Tracking is the process of collecting and qualifying individual user usage of your app to use them in your analytics solution or to display Screeb surveys to your users.

For Screeb, you can implement our tracker in the code of your app to collect events in a matter of minutes. You could also use Customer Data Platforms like Segment, which also let you send your events to other solutions, like analytics or marketing automation software.

What is an Event Tracking Plan?

An Event Tracking Plan is a specification to list and clarify every events you want to track, how and where you'll track them in your app. An Event Tracking Plan will cover as many details as possible, like the precise place in the code base where we'll add the tracker or the business reasons that make us track them.

Planning event tracking will help every stakeholder to be on the same page during implementation but also to be sure that we track data for every product, tech, sales or customer sucess needs.

A complete tracking plan covers the following:

• The list of events you want to track, and their properties
• The justification of the need to be tracked
• Details where, in the code base, the tracking needs to be added
• Following of the actual implementation of trackers

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How to choose the right events to track?

Tracking events must help you to answer key questions, whether it be in an analytics solution or by displaying a Screeb survey to your users.

So you must think about what you need to learn to choose the right events to track.

For B2B SaaS companies, some events are nearly mandatory to track:

In addition, you'll also track core events specific to your business (for Screeb, for instance, we track the creation of a survey).

How to set properties for my events?

In Screeb (but that's also the case for CDP like Segment), you can add properties to each of your events. We recommend you to do so, because it will help you to filter your events and better analyze the behaviour of your users.

For example, at Screeb, for every survey created, we track the ID of the organisation so we know who created it. It's the best way to be able to learn from the events you track.

Even if you could send as many properties as you have with your events, we recommend that you choose the right ones. It will help you to be focused in your analysis, or to build your display rules in Screeb more easily.

Best practices

Before creating your Event Tracking Plan, here are some best practices we recommend you follow:

• Precisely choose the name of your events. Don't generate them dynamically and always use the same way of naming them. It will be easier to find them in Screeb.
• Don't create events to track properties. Use events to track actions and add properties to them.
• Make sure your events help you to answer questions, and make sure all the questions you have have at least one corresponding event to get you the answer.
• Start with your Core Events, the events that track the core feature of your product, the most important funnel your users have to go through.
• A tracking plan is never finished! Add events when you release a new feature or when you feel some are missing

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