As your Iterable projects grow to contain more users—and more custom events from their interactions with your marketing campaigns, websites, and apps—you'll likely want to understand which custom events they're using and how they're being used.
Benefits to monitoring your custom event usage include understanding how your marketing campaigns are performing, identifying which events are most important to your business, controlling the data that you store in Iterable, and ensuring that your project's data hygiene is maintained.
In this article
Viewing custom events
You can view and manage a project's custom events usage if you have the Manage Settings project permission.
To view a project's custom events usage, go to Settings > Data Schema Management, which opens to the Custom Events tab.
This screen displays usage data for an Iterable project's top 1000 most-saved events (as counted over the project's entire lifetime).
From here, you can select a date range to display the events from that period, filter and sort custom events, view the dynamic lists or journey tiles that reference them, and export the displayed data.
NOTE
- If your Iterable project has a large number of custom events, the data on this screen may load slowly.
- Iterable refreshes this data once per hour. If you don't see updates that you expect, check back a bit later.
- Currently, the data displayed on this screen does not include campaign custom conversion events.
- The Last seen column describes the most recent time that Iterable saved each event (from an API call, a customer data platform integration, etc.). Events that are Discarded do not impact this value.
Filtering events by date range
To display the events from a certain period of time, use the date picker near the top of the screen to select a date range. Make sure to pay attention to the selected times and time zones.
NOTES
- After you use the date picker to narrow your search, the Custom events screen still only counts and displays events whose names correspond to the top 1000 all time most collected event names in your project. However, the event volume count will only include events that were collected during the selected date range.
- For any given set of dates, Iterable caches the results of the custom events query for one hour. If you make a query, new data arrives, and you make a new query with a different date range, you may see inconsistent counts until the cache refreshes. (This cache is stored on our web server for all of your project users. Refreshing your browser will not refresh the page data.)
Viewing the lists and journeys that reference your custom event
When creating journeys, or defining segmentation queries for dynamic lists, you may select contacts who have certain custom events in their history. From the Custom Events screen, you can see a combined total of the lists and journeys that reference your custom event in the References column.
To see the names of the list and journey references for an event, click on the overflow menu (three dots) and select View references.
You'll see the list(s) and journey(s) that use your custom event on the right side of the page.
- List references - The dynamic lists that use the custom event to populate users. To view the list, click on the List ID.
- Workflow references - The journey(s) that reference this custom event in the provided Node ID (or Tile ID). To view the journey, click on its name.
NOTE
Segmentation queries used to define static lists can reference custom events, too. However, when saving static lists, Iterable does not retain their segmentation queries—and therefore loses any association with custom events. Because of this, list references always reflect dynamic lists.
Exporting a summary of custom event usage
You can export a summary of a project's custom events to a CSV file.
To export a custom event usage summary:
- Go to Settings > Data Schema Management, and click on the Purchase Fields tab.
- Click on the overflow menu (three dots) in the upper right corner of the page and select Export Event Summary to CSV.
Some things to know about the data in this file:
The events included in the CSV are based on the tab you're viewing in the Data Schema Management screen. If you're viewing the Saved tab, the CSV includes all saved events. If you're viewing the Discarded tab, the CSV includes all discarded events. If you're viewing the Deactivated tab, the CSV includes all deactivated events.
The events included in the CSV are also filtered based on any search criteria you've entered in the search bar at the top of the page.
Event Count and Last Seen are impacted by the Volume date picker on this page. If you select “past 30 days”, the Event Count includes the number of times that event was tracked during that time period. If an event wasn’t tracked in that period, the Last Seen column reflects as “Never” and the Event Count is zero.
To create a file with a particular sort order, first sort them in the Data Schema Management page by clicking on a column heading. The CSV download keeps those rows in the same order. If you sort by descending Volume, then the event that was tracked the most appears as the second row in your CSV (where the first row is column names).
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The CSV file,
custom-event-usage.csv, includes the following columns of data:Column name Description Event Name Name of the custom event. Event Count Total number of times the event was tracked during the selected period. Last Seen (UTC) Date and time of the last tracked event. If the event wasn’t tracked during the selected time frame, “Never.” YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss List References Number of lists that use this event as criteria. Journey References Number of journeys that use this event as criteria. Retention Period (days) Number of days that Iterable saves tracked events before deleting. If no retention policy is set, “Unlimited.”