When it comes to tracking plans everyone has their own opinions. And we do too.
As we've seen in our tracking plan 101 article, you can add more information to an event by specifying some properties.
In some cases though, it's not straightforward to decide if it's better to add a property or to track a new event.
These are the principles we use internally.
Tracking the action as new event if:
it's part of the main workflow and we think we will use that particular action over and over again in a report
the list of properties for the old event is already crowded
if we need intend to look at that number frequently (on a weekly basis)
Example:
In our workspace, the following actions user_trait_filter_added, group_trait_filter_added, event_filter_added are tracked as different events instead of having one single filter_added event with a property that takes as values (user traits, group trait or event).
Tracking the action as a property of an old event if:
the action does not make sense as a standalone entity
we will be looking at that number only once in a while (every quarter or so)
there are other possible options on the same level
Example:
In our workspace, the following action report_created is tracked as a single event that has a property containing the type of report created (Active Users, Retention, Feature report etc). Having 15 different events would not be very handy because in each report setup we would have to pick 15 events instead of one.