Track event properties and reporting best practices

Welcome to part two of a two part series on Track events! For general information and best practices related to track events, please see my first Community post here: Track events best practices

Reporting within the Pendo UI

When it comes to event properties, reporting options within the Pendo UI are more limited.

Track Event Details Page

On the individual track events details page, the table will display up to 5000 entries, with each row corresponding to a track event with event properties received within the selected filter and date range.

CSV download is also an option and does not have the same limit as the UI - the file will include all track events.

Visitor and Account Reports

Please note that event properties cannot be added to visitor or account reports. For visitor and account reports, only ‘event count’ and ‘days active’ can be used for track events.

Data Explorer

To visualize event properties in Pendo, you might be able to use Data Explorer with the ‘Group By’ function as described here: Data Explorer - Group By

However, the event property format must be either a boolean or string (with less than 200 values). An event property cannot be used for ‘Group By’ in Data Explorer if:

The event property is a ‘number’ or ‘time’ format.
OR
The event property has more than 200 values within Pendo (date range selected for the report doesn’t matter)

In this below example, the track event ‘Record Created’ has an event property called ‘type’ with only five values (< 200). Thus, ‘Group By’ can be used.

Only one event property can be used for ‘Group By’ at a time. So if the track event had 5 event properties, even if all of them were eligible for ‘Group By’, you would have to generate multiple reports, one for each event property.

Recommendations on reporting within the Pendo UI

Event properties can be used to create extremely targeted segments for data analysis within Pendo. Additionally, if you are just looking for a snapshot of data, the event properties table on the individual track event detail page within the Pendo UI can be helpful.

If the event property is a boolean or string format (with less than 200 values), Data Explorer and the ‘Group By’ option can be helpful.

As a reminder, if you are sending an event property to Pendo that is a number or date field, you won’t be able to use that event property for ‘Group By’. However, you could send an additional event property that is a string (with less than 200 values) and use that for ‘Group By’. I’ll explain this in more detail with the example below.

Below is an example track event that is being sent whenever someone completes a particular workflow. The event property ‘completion_time’ is a number (measured in seconds) and can’t be used for ‘Group By’. However, the event property ‘completion_speed’ is a string and can be used for ‘Group By’. You would need to ensure that there is a limited number of values for ‘completion_speed’ (e.g: ‘slow’, ‘normal’, ‘fast’) so that we remain below the 200 value ceiling.

pendo.track("Workflow1", {
  completion_time: 300,
  completion_speed:"slow",
  result: "success",
});

Track event properties and the Pendo API

There will still be situations where you need more robust reporting options than what is available in the Pendo UI. Common use cases are:

Using ‘Group By’ for event properties with more than 200 values
Reporting on multiple event properties for a particular track event at the same time
Complete export of historical data

In those situations, you would need to use the V1 API, specifically the aggregations endpoint with the source trackEvents. There are third party tools that can be used to pull Pendo data via the API if you don't want to develop the API calls on your own. Some additional resources on the API are below: