5 ways to improve your product analytics data

Sep 13, 2023

This is a guest post by Anna Debenham. Anna is a former developer and director of product at cybersecurity company Snyk. She is currently an operating partner at boldstart, a VC firm supporting developer-first, infra, and SaaS startups.

Any data scientist will tell you the worst part of their job is dealing with messy and unstructured analytics data. Usually, this is caused by software engineers capturing analytics without knowing how the data will be used by someone else. The result is unreliable data that teams don't trust.

In this post, I'll cover the best practices for how to build a solid analytics foundation you can trust (and your data scientist won't hate).

1. Implement a naming convention

As your product grows, the amount of analytics data grows with it. Without naming conventions, your data quickly becomes difficult to work with.

For example, let's say you're capturing signup metrics. Your team might capture events differently and with multiple names:

• Web developer: Captures Create Account when a user clicks a button to begin signing up.
• iOS developer: Captures the same event but names it user_sign_up.
• Android developer: Calls it create account but only captures it when they have finished signing up.

Now, you must remember all these differences when looking at your data! Annoying! Using a naming convention prevents these problems.

Suggested naming guide

• Only use lowercase letters.

• Use present-tense verbs, e.g., "submit" and "create" instead of "submitted" and "created".

• Use snake case, i.e., signup_button_click

• Create a dedicated list of allowed verbs, and don't deviate from it. Here's a list of the most common ones you're likely to use:

  - click
  - submit
  - create
  - view
  - add
  - invite
  - update
  - delete
  - remove
  - start
  - end
  - cancel
  - fail
  - generate
  - send

• For event names, use the category:object_action framework:

  • category describes the context the event took place in – e.g., account_settings or signup_flow

  • object is a noun that refers to the component or location the event took place in, like forget_password_button or pricing_page.

  • action is a verb that describes what happened, like click, submit, or create

  • Putting all of these together, you get account_settings:forget_password_button_click or signup_flow:pricing_page_view – The order is important as it makes it easier to find a specific event within a long list.

• For property names:

  • Use the object_adjective pattern. For instance: user_id, item_price, or member_count.

  • Use is/has prefixes for boolean properties. For example: is_subscribed, has_seen_upsell.

  • If the property's value is a date or timestamp, include _date or _timestamp at the end. For example, user_creation_date, last_login_timestamp.

2. Filter out internal users

A common mistake I see is developers inadvertently inflating their own metrics by not filtering out their own usage. This leads to massive bias in their data – especially in startups that have few users!

For this reason, it's important to filter out events sent by your own team. There are a few ways to do this:

• Filter out events from users with internal emails.
• Add a property on your events is_employee or is_test_user and filter events where these are true.
• Exclude internal IPs from your analytics tracking.
• Filter events by domain host e.g., exclude localhost:3000, staging.yourapp.com.
• Turn off tracking in development using a localhost, dev, or config check.

Tip: Rather than add these filters to each new insight you create, set it as your default filter.

For a detailed guide on how to do this in PostHog, see the tutorial on how to filter out internal users in PostHog.

3. Prefer backend to frontend tracking

Backend analytics are more reliable than frontend analytics. There are 3 reasons for this:

1. Many users have tracking disabled or blocked on their browsers (especially tech-savvy users), which prevents events from being sent.
2. Frontend analytics often rely on JavaScript execution, which can be interrupted by various factors – such as network issues, CORS, browser settings, and more.
3. You have complete control of your backend implementation and execution.

Where possible, it's a good idea to log events on your server instead of your client. Here's a guide to help you decide when to rely on frontend or backend analytics:

• Use frontend analytics where getting partial data is acceptable, and you want to:

  • Understand user journeys, such as the sequence of pages a user visits.
  • Track user interactions like clicks, scrolls, or form submissions.
  • Gather data on client-side performance, like page load times and responsiveness.

• Use backend analytics (or query your database) if:

  • You need accurate data – e.g., the number of users that signed up in the last week.
  • You want to analyze data alongside other business metrics.

4. Deploy a reverse proxy

As mentioned above, tracking blockers can prevent your events from being sent. To make your frontend analytics more reliable, you can capture your events using a reverse proxy.

A reverse proxy enables you to send events to your analytics provider through your domain instead of your provider's. This makes events less likely to be intercepted by tracking blockers.

💡 PostHog Tip: If you're using PostHog to capture events, here's how you can set up a reverse proxy.

5. Version your events

As your application evolves, so do the events you track. Implementing a versioning system for events ensures you can easily distinguish between older and newer events, especially when significant changes occur.

For example, if you initially tracked an event as registration:sign_up_button_click and later revamped your registration flow, you can introduce a new version of this event registration_v2:sign_up_button_click. This way, you preserve historical data on the old event while making it easy to compare the impact of your new changes.

Conclusion

I hope this guide will help you get the most out of the data and make it more trustworthy!

Make sure you're reviewing your data regularly to ensure it meets your standards, and clear out anything you don't need. While it can be hard to find the time to do so, it's an investment which saves you significant time in the long run!