Naming event types

Question

To create metrics I must have events sent to Split using the SDK, REST API, or Segment. When I'm using “track” with the SDK or the REST API, I must choose an event name. How should I choose event type names?

Answer

As noted in the product documentation, there are only three hard requirements for the event type:

• 80 characters or less
• Starts with a letter, number, or left-bracket ( [ )
• Contains only letters, numbers, hyphen, underscore, brackets, or period

The documentation uses “page_load_time” as an example in many places, but there is often a better way to name events that may already be familiar:

OBJECT -> ACTION

For example, “song.played”, “song.created”, or “song.viewed”. On an eCommerce site, similar events might be “product.viewed”, “product.addedToCart”, or “account.profile.address.updated”. In each case, we end with a verb, but start with a string of nouns.

Choosing good event type identifiers makes working with the rest of the Split interface easier: common nouns alphabetize together and the events the names describe are intuitively associated.

More examples are provided at the Segment Academy site.