Event Tracking Best Practices for SaaS

You've decided to add event tracking to your product. Now comes the hard part: figuring out what to track and how to organize it. Track too little and you're flying blind. Track too much and you're drowning in noise.

Here's a practical framework for getting event tracking right.

Start with the events that matter

Before you instrument everything, identify the events that actually drive your business. For most SaaS products, these fall into a few categories:

Acquisition events

• User registered
• Trial started
• Invitation accepted

Activation events

• First project created
• First feature used
• Onboarding completed

Revenue events

• Subscription started
• Plan upgraded
• Payment failed
• Subscription cancelled

Engagement events

• Key feature used
• Milestone reached
• Team member invited

Start with these core events. You can always add more later, but having clean, meaningful data from day one is more valuable than comprehensive but messy tracking.

Name events consistently

Event naming seems trivial until you have hundreds of events and can't find anything. Establish a convention early and stick to it.

A common pattern is object.action:

user.registered
user.upgraded
project.created
project.deleted
payment.succeeded
payment.failed

This makes events easy to search and filter. Want all payment events? Search for payment.*. Want to see everything that happened to users? Search for user.*.

Avoid vague names like click or action. Be specific: signup_button.clicked is more useful than button.clicked.

Include useful metadata

The event name tells you what happened. Metadata tells you the context. Include information that will help you understand and debug later.

Good metadata for a signup event:

{
  channel: "signups",
  event: "user.registered",
  description: "Sarah signed up for Pro trial",
  user: {
    id: "user_456",
    email: "sarah@startup.com",
    name: "Sarah Chen"
  },
  metadata: {
    plan: "pro",
    trial: true,
    source: "google_ads",
    campaign: "q1_2025",
    referrer: "https://google.com"
  }
}

Now when you look at this event, you know exactly who signed up, which plan they chose, how they found you, and which campaign gets credit.

Organize with channels

Channels are like folders for your events. They help you focus on what matters and filter out noise.

Common channel structure:

• signups - New user registrations
• payments - Revenue-related events
• errors - Application errors and failures
• activity - Key user actions
• deployments - CI/CD and infrastructure

Keep channels focused. If a channel gets too noisy, split it up. If you never look at a channel, consider removing it or consolidating with another.

Connect events to users

Anonymous events are less useful than events connected to real users. When something goes wrong, you want to know who was affected. When something goes right, you want to know who to learn from.

Always include user information when available:

user: {
  id: "user_123",        // Your internal user ID
  email: "user@example.com",
  name: "Display Name"
}

This lets you see all events for a specific user, which is invaluable for debugging and customer support.

Write useful descriptions

The description is what you see at a glance in your feed. Make it human-readable:

Good: "Sarah upgraded from Free to Pro ($49/mo)" Bad: "subscription.updated"

Good: "Payment failed for john@example.com - card declined" Bad: "payment.failed"

Think of descriptions as headlines. They should tell the story without needing to click for details.

Don't track everything

It's tempting to track every click, every page view, every micro-interaction. Resist that urge.

More data isn't always better. Too much tracking:

• Makes it harder to find important events
• Increases costs
• Slows down your application
• Creates maintenance burden

Track the events that help you make decisions. If you wouldn't act on an event, don't track it.

Review and refine

Event tracking isn't set-and-forget. Schedule regular reviews:

• Are you tracking events you never look at? Remove them.
• Are there gaps in your understanding? Add new events.
• Are event names and metadata consistent? Clean them up.

Your tracking should evolve with your product. What mattered at launch might not matter at scale, and vice versa.

Getting started

If you're starting from scratch, begin with these five events:

1. user.registered - Know when someone signs up
2. user.activated - Know when they hit their "aha moment"
3. payment.succeeded - Know when you make money
4. payment.failed - Know when you might lose money
5. error.occurred - Know when things break

Once these are working and you're comfortable with the data, expand from there. Good tracking is built incrementally, not all at once.