Naming conventions: a step towards clean data

Benefit of naming conventions

To make the most of your data, it’s important to be intentional about the way you name monetization evens and where you put them in your code database. If you do not do this, it gives room for different developers to implement tracking with different preferences and timing which will complicate and jumble up events thus making them difficult to monetize or read.

There are many ways to name one user interaction. For example, a user signing up for a newsletter can be implemented as “signup” “user signed up” or “sign up”

If there are no consistent naming conventions, you could leave your teammates confused at which event really represents the user signing up for your newsletter. It may be a small issue for a start-up, but when your business progresses, it can become a major problem. To help your teams use data easily and avoid such confusing situations, you can do these simple things.

• Have a process that enforces the framework of your company.
• Align a framework that allows for naming your properties and events.

If you can pull off these two simple things, you’ll have consistency, clarity and convenience with your data which will also influence the decisions your company makes.

Consistency – data consistency is a major benefit of having a clear framework. When data has the same names in each tool. It makes it so much easier to use them with no questions.

Clarity – when different teams use the same data, maintaining standards ensures that It’s easy for everyone on each team to understand what all the events mean, this means your teams can launch experiments and run monetization with data that is easy to understand.

Convenience – as your company grows and brings in more products and features, you will add more tracking so having a pre-existing strong naming convention makes it easy for your developers to implement new calls without having to think too much about how to get it done.

The object – action framework.

The most important thing to remember is that you must pick a single naming framework and stick to using it.

Choose your object 

This is the first part of the objet- action framework. They are the key pieces in your website or app that customers often interact with. A good example is a cart for an ecommerce store.

List how your users can interact with them 

The second step is figuring out how your users will interact with your objects. An example is booking a hotel or putting an item in a cart.

Select the properties to collect with each object. 

It is recommended for you to trach general events such as Products Viewed as well as a few other properties that allow you see more details. When you use only the top-level you can see the number of people who view your products however, you cannot see the most popular categories or products. As you consider which properties to collect, you should consider collecting the same properties on the same object irrespective of the action associated with them. This way you can see the most shared and viewed categories and products.

Be casing specific

As you document each event and its associated properties, remember to be clear about what casing you use. It can seem like doing too much but in the long run it makes a lot of sense.

The most common casing options are:

All lowercase – account created

Snake_case – account_created

Proper Case – Account Created

camelCase – accountCreated

Sentence case – Account created

Put it all together

It’s now easy to construct your events when you put it all together, you can document your events with your tracking plan ensuring you implement them with the same formatting in code.

More options

There are other ways to go about this besides the object-action frame work by using whatever order of objects and actions as well as whatever casing you desire in either past or present tense. The most important thing is that you maintain consistency. Another thing to remember is to stay away from dynamically making new events that have unique variables. This won’t help you understand your funnels as well as skyrocketing the costs of using your tools.

We hope this guide helps you understand the benefits of having clean data. In a few months or years, you’ll be glad you did as all your events will have the same naming convention.