Customer Data Platforms mini-course #1: The different types of ‘events’ you can collect

First things first

Victor Nouchet

Aug 07, 2022

Hi everyone! Hope you’re enjoying summer ☀️🏄‍♂️

This is the 1st edition of a series of posts on how Customer Data Platforms work.

How can they help you? What do they do? What are their principles? What are all the (sub)features?
Where do they stand in a modern growth stack? What is the ROI? When should I start to implement it?

We’ll answer all of these questions and more, but we’ll go slowly.

I’ll create separate mini-editions to focus on one thing at a time.

I don’t have any idea of how many posts I’m going to create at the time you’re reading this (probably a lot).

But what I can tell you, is that at the end of this series you’ll have everything you need to fully understand Customer Data Platforms and where to start.

Hope you’ll enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing about this,

Victor

Let’s not try to define a CDP.

I might surprise you, but I won’t try to define a Customer Data Platform.

Because there are more and more CDPs, which are adding more and more features:

I am going to use Segment mainly for my examples, which is the leading CDP in the world.
But I also worked with Rudderstack, Hull and hear more and more about Snowplow.
Amplitude (which was a product analytics tool at its beginnings) is now starting its own CDP…

These tools all have things in common, but they’re also all quite different at the same time. That’s why it’s almost impossible to define a CDP.

Instead, I’ll go through each kind of thing you can do with a Customer Data Platform, with practical examples.

I believe this is how you’ll learn how it can be helpful for you and your company. Not by using buzzwords or complex acronyms.

Let’s go!

The 1st thing you’ll do with a CDP is to: collect « events ».

What’s an event?

That’s almost a mental shift. Before working with CDPs, I had no idea of what an event was.

I mean, you just install pixels on your website, and that’s it. You don’t really know what’s going on.

You receive a certain number of conversions into Google Ads, but that’s it.

The ‘event’ system brings much more simplicity.

If Segment is installed on your website, Segment will receive events from your website.

Anything you decide to track with a CDP is an event.

That’s the basics of a CDP: you decide to track some info/metrics about your users, and those pieces of information and metrics will be sent as ‘events’.

Sources:

Your website is one of the sources of data for your CDP. There can be many other sources: your product, your mobile app, your database, and even 3rd party tools… We’ll get into the details about this later.

For now, here’s what you can remember: you collect ‘events’ from ‘sources’ of data.

The main types of events:

1. The `Track` event

Track events are helpful… To track user behaviors from your sources.

Let’s take some examples.

How Notion tracks user behaviors (using the `track` event)

So right now I am writing this piece of content within Notion. As Notion is a web app, we can have a look at what they’re tracking using the inspector.

For example, if I create a new page, they’ll send a track event to Segment:

Segment events are triggered from Notion when I create a new page (see `trackSegmentEvent` appearing on the left).

If we have a closer look at the event, we can spot some interesting things:

As you can see, Notion triggered a track event named « create_page » when I created this new page.

Then, we have some other information.

`Track` events properties

First, I want to bring your attention to the properties field.

Properties are used to add context to events.

For example, here, we can learn:

I created this new page with the ‘cmd + n’ shortcut (see from: “cmd_n”).
I am on my Mac: deviceType: "mac"

And a bunch of other properties that could be helpful for Notion teams to learn how users behave on their product.

If someone at Notion is wondering if users are using the User Interface or keyboard Shortcuts to create new pages, he can open a product analytics tool, have a look at the ‘create_page’ event, and look at the ‘from’ property to check numbers.

(Here I spoiled a bit the next chapters of this series of mini-course: collecting data is not the only job of CDPs. They also can send data to different tools — we’ll discover how later).

Ulysse: using `Track` to learn how the conversion funnel is performing

We used track events at Ulysse to have a deep understanding of how the flight booking funnel is performing.

Each step of the funnel is split by a track event.

For instance, when you research a flight, the CDP receives a prebooking_flight_searched event, with all the contextual info about the flight.

Here’s what it looks like on the other side, within the Customer Data Platform (left side of the screen):

Any event will appear on the ‘debugger’ view in your Customer Data Platform (left side of the screen).

Here you go! Track event = you track user behaviors.

2. The `Identify` event

Identify events are used to collect attributes about your users.

That’s typically:

email
first/last names
phone number
any interesting attribute you want. That could be:
- when was the user’s last transaction, if you’re a fintech
- what role does the user have? (admin, employees, editor…) if you’re a SaaS
- what’s his/her favorite language
- shipping address, if you’re an eCommerce
- … as many as you want

Identify events will help you create profiles of your customers.

This is how you’ll have a clear understanding of your customer base because each customer will have a unique profile with different attributes, based on its interactions with your business.

If we go back to the Notion example, here’s what attributes they have for me:

Sending to tools

Identify events are especially helpful to send attributes to your marketing & sales tools.

For example, if you connect Customer.io to Segment, an Identify call sent to Segment will create or update a customer profile into Customer.io as well.

Same thing for CRM tools: Notion salespersons are able to see how I interact with the product directly in Salesforce thanks to those attributes.

This is exactly how you’re able to create personalized experiences based on data collected from your product. For both marketing and product.

So that’s it: Identify events = create or update the attributes of your customers’ profiles.

In both Segment and your tools.

3. The `Page` event

This one is really straightforward: each time a user visits a page from your website, a page call should be triggered. Yep - that’s it!

You can automatically trigger a page event each time a page is loaded from your website.

Of course, you get a bunch of information along the page call, such as the URL, the path, the page title, and the referrer (helpful to understand where your traffic comes from).

Good to know (about any event)

Please note that any of the events I mentioned automatically collect data about devices.

A really basic page call will collect the screen size, the browser locale, the date the event was sent at… And many more! (We don’t have to care about most of them).

How to implement events:

You’ll probably need to reach out to a developer to implement those events into your code base.

As we’ve seen, it can come from your website, where implementing the Segment script is as simple as implementing any script on your website. You also have the option to visually create events for a front-end source like your website.

But if you want to track events from your product, mobile app, or back-end (see my post on server-side tracking), or simply have a more robust tracking, you should work with developers: they’re able to trigger events from the when users interact with your product.

CDPs allow you to get the big picture of your customers

At the end of the day, a CDP will create a unified view of your customers — from the 1st day they visited your website, to their last interactions with your product. This includes:

Actions (track events) they’ve made on your website/product — behavioral data
Attributes (identify events) personal info related to your business from your customer
The pages they’ve seen (page).

Those 3 types of events are the most important ones. Not that complicated, right? 😉

4. The other types of events:

1. `Screen` event

Screen is the same thing as page but for mobile apps. On mobile, you don’t actually visit (web) pages, but screens. That’s why!

2. The `Group` event

It’s the equivalent of a Identify call, but for a… group. For instance, if you want to link several users from the same company into HubSpot you’ll need to use the group call.

This way, you’ll also have attributes for accounts (not only users). Really interesting for B2B marketing especially.

And that’s it for today! I told you, one thing at a time…

What’s super nice with CDPs is that you only have to do the setup once.

Then you just have to plug your tools to your CDP to be able to use the same data for product, marketing, sales, growth…

This is exactly what we’ll dive into in the upcoming post: how to plug your tools and how events are ‘translated’ by CDPs into these tools.

All you have to remember… 💭

For today, here’s a brief summary of what we’ve just seen:

One of the main jobs of a CDP is to collect events from your sources (data sources like website, product, mobile app…).
There are 3 main types of events:
1. The Track event is used to track user behaviors & actions
2. The Identify event is used to create user profiles, using attributes
3. The Page event, to know all the pages your users visited.

See you in 2 weeks!