If you’re looking at an event in Heap that was defined by someone else, we recommend taking the following steps to try to understand the event’s purpose.
Talk to whoever created or last updated the event. You can see this information under the definition history section at the bottom of the event details page.
Check the event category. For example, if the event is has a vague title like ‘View – Any Page’ but it’s nested in the category ‘Help Center’, you can infer it’s a view of any Help Center page specifically.
- Review the event structure. Some event structures are more ambiguous than others, though if the CSS selector has a key word like ‘search’ it’s probably related to engagement with the search options on your site.
Play around with the analysis preview. There are often clues about what interaction the event is defining in the analysis preview. For example, you may discover grouping by path for a generic button click leads to blog posts, giving you a clue about which button is referenced in this definition. We recommend looking at path, href, and target text for insight into user behavior.
Read through the definition history. This will tell you who defined it and if any updates were made, which may help you understand what it is. For example, if it was defined during a certain marketing campaign and hasn’t been updated since, it might have been specific to that campaign.
You can also find an event by inspecting the page it appears on. Note that this only works for events that are defined as a CSS selector. For our example, we’ll use the Click – Thumbs Up/Down event that we set up for this Help Center, which is defined by a click on the css selector .rs-ratings.
From the page the event should be on, open the developer console. In the console, enter `document.querySelectorAll(‘[selector goes here]’)` which will generate a list of places where the element is. If you hover over an item on that list with your mouse, it will highlight where it is on the page, telling you what this event defines.
Note: You may need to update the curly braces in this text to straight braces for it to work correctly.
When digging into your data, it’s dangerously easy to get excited and create a bunch of new events, only to forget what those events were meant for. This will cause your dataset to get cluttered over time, and result in others (maybe even you) scratching their heads about what the event was for.
As a best practice when creating events, we recommend always using a consistent naming convention and adding a note for context about why you created the event.
For more features and recommendations for managing a growing dataset, see our Data Governance guide.