How to create a tracking plan

What is a tracking plan?

You may be wondering what a tracking plan is, well it’s a document that lives and breathes and shows you which events you need to track, the location of these vents in the code base and the importance of these events for your business.  Tracking plans help keep every team member on the same page while also making it easy for product, engineering, marketing and monetization teams to understand and use all the data you have collected. A tracking plan should come in a Wiki or Google Sheet format so it’s easy to share and can be frequently updated by investors. You’ll know you have a good tracking plan if it performs the following functions.

• Gives a summary of events and properties to be added
• Gives good reasons why these events should be tracked
• Gives detailed locations of where they should be added in the code base
• Gives investors progress and conversion updates

What do you want to know?

A key approach to speccing out data monetization is to be certain of what you want to learn about your business or product and put it in a question, key metric or goal. When you use a question, it makes it easier to get a more structured and targeted approach for removing meaningful events from all the other stuff. Tracking alone may not help you understand what marketing channels are working so when you come up with your questions, next up you have to build a list of metrics that can be measured to provide answers to your questions. When the metrics are defined, you’ll be sure of the data that should be tracked.

What metrics can answer your questions

Metrics may be different for each question however we’ve outlined a few examples that give you an idea of how they work.

Acquisition

• New user growth rates
• User attribution (learning the sources of new users)

Activation

• Active users
• Total users
• User activation rates

Retention

• Engagement
• User satisfaction
• Churn rate

What is your customer LTV

• Frequency of per customer purchases
• Duration for paying back customer acquisition costs
• Average per customer revenue

Will this variant of the pricing page draw more sign ups

• Page view pricing to signup conversion rates.

These metrics can answer questions you have and help you generate more events to track.

 Getting started

As you begin, it’s important to adhere to these rules as you create your tracking plan so it stays tidy, neat and semantically useful.

• Avoid creating events for tracking low level priorities
• Each event should help provide an answer to your business questions
• Avoid making event names dynamically
• Add only events you feel are missing
• Begin constructing your funnel with your core customer lifecycle

Creating tracking plans may be daunting but they are totally worth it because the stronger your tracking plan is, the stronger your data will be.