Apart from marketing, one of the major use cases of a CDP is user tracking. Product managers need to understand how users are interacting with the features of their products. Understanding users helps product managers to refine and redesign product features.
We can track user behavior for our products through event tracking. Let us first understand what an event is. An event is any occurrence that can be identified by a program. Events can be user-generated or system- generated. We are interested in user-generated events, as those reveal how a user is interacting with a product. A user-generated event can be click a button or a keystroke. For us to successfully analyze how users are interacting with our products, we need to analyze where the user is landing on our app or website, where are they visiting, which features are most used by them and which are seldom used, and so on.
Before we start tracking events, we need to come up with a list of events that should be tracked. That list is called the tracking plan. Creating a tracking plan is strategic work where inputs from different stakeholders are required. So generally, different teams provide their tracking plans (usually spreadsheets, but there are tools available that help to create tracking plans) along with business justification for the same. After discussions, the list is consolidated, and then a final company-wide tracking plan is created.
The final tracking plan provides a codified single source of truth for the events that will be tracked and used for business and product use cases. It is recommended to always start implementation after you have a sound-tracking plan in place. Although the tracking plan is a living document and can change over time, it is essential to start the basic plan effectively.
Figure 2.12: A sample tracking plan
Here are the entities you can track:
Events: Events include any actions the user takes- like submit form, account created, and add to cart .
Event Properties: Event properties are also known as parameters. These describe the event and provide more contextual information about the tracked event. These are captured and passed as parameters. Examples of event properties are browser id, previous screen, device type, and so on.
User properties: These are also called attributes. They provide more contextual information about the user, for example, contact information, payment information, and so on.
Next, let’s talk briefly about how you can set up these events to stream the data to a CDP.
We need to stream event data to the CDP. Streaming data is the constant flow of data each containing information about an event or a change of state. Streaming data is processed in real-time.
Once you set up the CDP with different sources of customer data, the CDP will allow you to stream event data from the source to the destination. This is one of the main benefits of using a CDP platform.