Business event data

Let’s talk business

Dear Data-Traveller, please note that this is a Linkedin-Remix.

I posted this content already on Linkedin in August 2022, but I want to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the social network abyss.

For your accessibility-experience and also for our own content backup, we repost the original text here.

Have a look, leave a like if you like it, and join the conversation in the comments if this sparks a thought!

I like to divide my event data into three categories: business, product, and UX events.

Today, let’s talk business.

Business event data is still my favorite because of this:

It’s close to what everyone is doing every day in your company
Therefore everyone understands these events immediately. Subscription created, Deal won, Free trial started often don’t need extra explanation
They are super solid. They rarely change unless you change your business model
They often can be tracked by collecting data from backend or core systems, like your production DB or your CRM (reduce frontend browser data fails)
You end up with a high-level business customer journey funnel that is your leading chart in all your business dashboards

How do you define these events?

Map out your major business entities – here is the typical SaaS example: Content, Account, Free trial, Session, Subscription
Then write down the usual activities for all entities. Like: Content created, Content viewed, Content read, Content discovered, Content clicked, Content shared, Content converted
Then define the properties that define the context of the entity: content_title, content_type, content_author, content_length, content_topic, content_audience

Combine all to get your business events.

If I start with a tracking setup, I start with these. This is the foundation. Product and UX events are built on top of it.

With what kind of events are you starting your data collection?