Hello.
I always thought that in GAUA it wasn’t great to have event name, category and action as it could get confusing, ie Click being a category however, click is also an event name, clicking is also an action etc…
I see that is present in Piwik Pro, it would be great to know why is even mandatory and if arbitrary, wouldn’t be easier just to do the event and add any dimensions we want to the hit and not be forced to the category, action, label structure?
ie in a PiwikPro youtube video the action has values such as ‘grey button’ or ‘black button’ which doest’n make sense, sounds more like an attribute, should be ‘color’ as a dimension on its own, perhaps another could be clicked item with values ‘button’ or. ‘link’…
Would be great to know why those fields are mandatory.
Thanks. D
Hi,
even if I always felt the same using UA or Piwik PRO, it is best to ignore the “why” and find a way to work with what is available. This is how I usually work with events:
An action should always be unique and understandable without knowing anything about the other values. That said, just use the action for your “event name” and either add a constant category to all of them or try to use this feature to group your events in a meaningful manner.
Every other context information will end up as a custom dimension or inside the “name”. parameter, even if this might seem ugly; using this field like the “label” in UA. Separate multiple values with a pipe or even add key:value pairs as a JSON string (depending on that you want to to with the data and where).
The values can get quite long and still survive.
Is that the best solution? Maybe not. But using the event structure like it is, I can just look at event actions and know what is going on, having more data available in the name when it is needed.
Hope that helps.
best
Markus
1 Like
This is a great workaround for the mandatory category, action and will follow your advice, thanks. The question still is why Piwik Pro imposes such structures in the first place.
Maybe also what I meant with this post is provide feedback to remove the forcing mandatory fields, looks as if it was inspired in GAUA and it sucked there (to me). GA4 or Adobe event + common and attributes style is good i think. thanks.