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In this guide, we provide guidance on what to track and how to track it.

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Start With 2 Events

We recommend starting with just 2 events, which can provide a lot of value with little effort:
  • Sign Up - Tracking Sign Up is a quick way to understand your product’s growth; by counting the number of Sign Ups, you can answer “How many new users am I acquiring every day, week, and month?”.
  • Value Moment - Tracking a value moment can help you assess how well your product is doing. You can answer questions like “How many users experience value in my product each day/week/month?” or “How many users come back (retain) and experience the moment again?”.

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Choose a Value Moment

Value moments are often the use of important features or taking a critical action. Here are some examples:
  • Social: Post Created, Friend Added
  • E-Commerce: Purchase Completed, Review Submitted
  • Media: Video Watched, Article Read
  • SaaS: Document Created, Call Started
We recommend keeping your event names short and descriptive. We like to use the Object-Action convention, as you can see in the examples above.

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Include Properties

Properties add context to the event. We recommend these properties for your two events: Sign Up
  • Source (e.g Referral, Organic, Paid)
  • Country (e.g. United States, Vietnam, Germany)
  • OS (e.g. Windows, iOS, Android)
Value Moment
  • Up to you! This will depend greatly on your value moment:
    • A “Video Watched” event may benefit from a “Duration” property
    • A “Message Liked” event may benefit from a “Message Type” property
  • Ask yourself: What is the most important information related to your value moment?

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We Recommend Server-Side Tracking

Adblockers and browsers are making it harder and harder to track users on the client-side. If you want to make sure the data you’re collecting is accurate, you’ll want to do most of your tracking server-side. Frontend event tracking (especially on the web) loses between 15% and 30% of events. If you’re only tracking on the client-side, you’re missing out on a lot of data, even if you’re using a reverse proxy. Want to learn more? Read our full guide on choosing the right method for tracking.

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Next Steps

Once you’ve chosen a few events to track first, you’re ready to set up Mixpanel.