The entity-action event concept
Tags: analytics, concept, data
Published: 2022-10-26 15:21:40

## Where we are coming from

We, as well as many other data professionals out there, grew up with still the most common event out there: the **pageview** - the mother of all tracking events for over a decade. Over the years new events, mostly to track online shopping behavior, became the new normal and the concept of the traditional purchase conversion was born. With the rising importance of mobile apps (where there is no such thing as a pageview), event tracking evolved immensely. And today it's not only about online shopping anymore. **But events and event-based tracking came to stay**.

We believe that tracking shouldn't sound like some abstract techy abbreviation concept. It should feel natural and **everyone in an organization should immediately understand it** no matter if they implemented the tracking or not. Only when everyone understands what is being measured, there will be fewer misunderstandings, higher data quality, and more actionable data in the organization at the end of the day.

## elbwalker's approach to the concept of an event

A lot of languages are based on some kind of **subject, predicate, object structure**. It is the general rule for understanding this sentence right here (which may drove some of us insane at school). At elbwalker, we asked ourselves how we can evolve a simple pageview to a more natural concept.

Let us introduce: the **page view** (notice the space!). A small change with a huuuge impact.

Doesn't look very different to you? Well, let us explain why it is.

Tracking starts with a user interaction that triggers something. Whether it is something implicit, e.g. loading, scrolling, waiting, or something explicit, e.g. clicking a specific button right at this moment. We treat the user, who e.g. is loading something, as the subject. The page (context) is the object and the action "view" is basically the predicate.

## A user views a page by loading it → page view.

Since we want to evolve the classic, static concept of an event **we split the action (view) from the object (page)**. Just because there are so many more possibilities that can be done with the same object.

To sum up: **an elbwalker event consists of three components: a trigger (load), an entity (page), and an action (view)**. Now we're free to do a lot of great things! So let's get started.

## How this concept makes your life in measurement much easier

It's nice to know that a page view has happened, but we also want to know which page exactly had that view. Also, the information _click_ isn't worth a lot, if we don't know what exactly has been clicked by someone. We need to **know the context** to know that it was the add to cart button of a specific product in a specific size. Most of the time, the more context, the better.

> Context creates meaning. Context is queen and king.

An elbwalker entity is defining the scope to create a specific context. Inside this entity scope, all actions are to be defined. As a data person, I want to know which product someone added to the cart. As a data person, I want to know which page someone viewed. And so on. To capture this information you can add properties to an elbwalker event. You will likely know this from e.g. Google Analytics 4 implementations.

There are endless possibilities of what someone can do on a page. There is no need to just focus on the view, and create weird concepts like bounce rates. Let's move on and measure the read action in addition to the view action of a page. And how about measuring the user's feedback like the like action or share action? Imagine all the new possibilities we can now analyze and report and how we can personalize and optimize based on the context of a page.

| Entity | Actions |
|---|---|
| page | view, read, like, share |
| product | view, interest, like, add |

We've built the open-sourced [walker.js](https://github.com/elbwalker/walker.js) to support this new approach of event tracking. The combination of an attributed-based tracker and the new event concept makes tracking implementation **easy, fast, and reliable**.