In this article, we detail out some best practices based on specific industries. These suggestions are based on standard goals and objectives for companies in these spaces. This is not a comprehensive list of everything you'll need, but are instead best practices you should keep in mind as you create your taxonomy.
NOTE: This article is part three in Amplitude's data taxonomy playbook series. If you missed them, you can read part one here, and part two here.
Industry Best Practice Guides
Be sure to check out our industry-specific best practices guides that are designed to to help you implement Amplitude and start getting insights quickly. These guides follow our 3 step process for instrumentation.
An efficient instrumentation process contains 3 key steps: setting product metrics, designing a data taxonomy, and instrumenting your taxonomy. This process ensures that you're not over-instrumenting events such that your taxonomy is full of noisy data that is not valuable to your team; at the same time, this process also ensures that you're not under-instrumenting such that your taxonomy is unable to answer your team's core metrics.
With the goal of driving tangible conversion, retention, and product outcomes, our Industry Best Practices Guides provide you with sample use cases and business questions, a recommended taxonomy, and a complementary dashboard that can be used for your own implementation, all carefully tailored to meet the specific needs of your industry.
We currently offer guides for companies in the following sectors:
Please review these guides for examples of best practice end-to-end implementations and details below for additional best practices on taxonomy design.
E-commerce / Marketplace
Be sure to include every event in a critical flow, and for every critical event, use the same key event properties. Amplitude lets you specify that a property must be constant to have a funnel conversion count.
Some examples of key event properties are Product ID, Category ID, Cart ID, Transaction ID, Order ID, Promotion ID, and Campaign ID.
If you allow customers to save any billing or address information, send an event when they use this in the checkout flow. Create a custom event that includes all address and billing events. Then, in your funnel analysis, use the custom event for the billing and address step.
Events and event properties
| Events | Event Properties |
|---|---|
|
Product Viewed |
|
|
Product Added to Cart |
Consolidate all SKU information into one event property with all of the SKU info stored in an array separated by commas. ["Product ID", "Color", "Quantity"] |
|
View Cart |
|
|
Checkout - Started |
|
|
Checkout - Added Shipping Address |
|
|
Checkout - Added Billing Address |
|
|
Checkout - Added Payment |
|
|
Checkout - Completed |
For this event, we recommend tracking an 'Order Size' event property. An event property count of the total products in your cart is a good practice, so that you can easily segment on different cart sizes. You are not able to sum the products listed in an array, so this property is important. |
|
Saved Billing |
|
|
Saved Address |
|
|
PageView - Product Category |
Impression tracking can be done by tracking an array of all products seen on this page. You should also track the count for total number of products on the page, in addition to the page number that they were on in a search page. This helps you understand if users are not getting the items the want on the first or second page. Page = [1, 2, 3, 4…..] |
|
PageView - Product Detail |
A 'Source' event property will show you the page the user was on before they came to the product detail page. Source = PageView - Product Category |
User properties
- Purchase Date
- Attribution Data (organic vs. campaign)
- Total Revenue Spent
- Promotions Used
- Total Number of Orders
- Total Number of Favorites
- Total Number of Saved Items
- Categories Used
- Brand Purchased
Social
Events and event properties
|
Events |
Event Properties |
Notes |
|
Send Chat |
Message ID |
If two users involved in a single action and you want to be able to track the events on both users profiles, send an event for each user. Have the events be triggered by the initial action. 'Send Chat' + 'Receive Chat' |
|
Receive Chat |
Message ID |
|
|
Total Swipes |
|
For events with an extremely high volume (e.g. total chats sent, or total swipes), send one event at the end of the session and store the total as property value. |
|
Any General Event (PageView - HomePage, Category)
|
|
|
User properties
- Total Number of Followers
- Total Number Following
- Gamification Status
- Total Number of Groups
- Total Number of Communities
- Total Number of Chats
- Social Integrations
- Attribution Data (organic, campaign)
Media
Events and event properties
|
Events |
Event Properties |
Notes |
|
Send Chat |
Message ID |
If two users involved in a single action and you want to be able to track the events on both users profiles, then send on event for each user. Have the events be triggered by the initial action 'Send Chat' + 'Receive Chat' |
|
Receive Chat |
Message ID |
|
|
‘Heartbeat’ Events |
|
If a user is watching a video, send a heartbeat event. The benefit of sending this is so that you will not have to adjust the end session time and will have more aggregate session times. The drawback is that you may experience event volume inflation. Example: If a user is watching a video or playing a game, send an event every five minutes or so. |
|
Any General Event (PageView - HomePage, VideoCategory) |
|
|
User properties
- Attribution Data (organic, campaign)
- Total Hours Watched
- Total Articles Read, Favorited, etc.
B2B
NOTE: We recommend that you set up account-level reporting, which is only available to Enterprise customers who have purchased the Accounts add on.
Events
- Company Metric Event: One daily event with properties for an entire company/organization/group.
User properties
- User ID for Company Level Metrics
- total X created
- total users
- Account billing
- company-level metrics
Gaming
Events and event properties
|
Events |
Event Properties |
Notes |
|
Game start |
|
One daily event with properties for entire company/organization/group |
|
Purchase Made |
|
|
|
Add Items to Cart |
|
|
|
Ad Revenue |
|
Fire when an ad comes up for a user. |
|
Impressions Event for Ad |
|
|
|
Ad Clicked |
|
|
|
Send Chat |
Game ID |
If two users are involved in a single action and you want to be able to track the events on both users profiles, send an event for each user. Have the events be triggered by the initial action. 'Send Chat' + 'Receive Chat' |
|
Receive Chat |
Game ID |
User properties
- Attribution Data (organic, campaign)
- Current Level
- Games Played
- Total Number of Games Played
- Tokens / Currency
- Total Spent
- Items Purchased
- Game or User Name
- Current Rank
- Special Features Used (e.g. avatar)
- Games Won
- Games Lost
- Top 10 Games
- Most Popular Games
- Days Active to Date
- Days Playing to Date
- Days Since Last Game Played
- Days Since First Game Played
Sample event taxonomies
To help you better understand and visualize event taxonomy, we have built a few examples here:
Copy the Google Doc template for your own use.
Download Excel version of template for your own use.
We hope this article helps you develop a better understanding of how to set up your events on Amplitude. If you are on a Growth or Enterprise plan, please do not hesitate to reach out to your Success Manager if you need help with setting up your taxonomy. If you are not on a paid plan and would like to discuss Event Taxonomy, check out the Amplitude Community.