Event naming conventions

Fill in the rules below, and each section has a concept review dropdown that explains the reasoning if you want it. Once the rules are set, you use them to name events in your Event Tracking Plan, which is where the events themselves live. Examples below follow the Doughnut Labs brand: a SaaS company that sells disruptive Doughnut Technology through a website and app. The grayed E.g. text shows a filled-in answer, so delete it and replace it with your own.

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Naming rules

These apply to every event name, no exceptions. Most are pre-filled to the Segment standard; the grayed text is the recommended default, so keep it unless your team has a specific reason to change it.

Concept review: Naming rules

The point of a naming convention is that one action always produces one name, so that everyone logging, querying, or reporting on it lands on the same string. Analytics tools treat Cart Viewed, cart viewed, and Viewed Cart as three unrelated events, so a single drift in casing or word order quietly splits one behavior into several, and every chart built on it undercounts without anyone noticing.Most of these rules are locked to the Segment standard rather than left open because the value of a convention comes from everyone following the same one, and a widely used external standard is easier to onboard new people onto and is what the analytics tools already expect. The rules left with any room, like how you handle a rare edge case, matter far less than picking a single answer and writing it down, because a convention that is imperfect but consistent beats one that is elegant but applied three different ways.

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Object then action

The one rule everything else depends on: name the object first, then the action that happened to it. Read the name aloud and it should say what the user did to what: Product Viewed, Cart Viewed, Order Completed. Write your product’s most common events in the object-then-action form, to set the pattern for everyone: E.g. Product Viewed, Product Added, Cart Viewed, Checkout Started, Order Completed, Order Refunded.

Concept review: Object then action

Putting the object first is what makes a list of events readable and groupable. When every name leads with the thing it acts on, all the events for one object collect together the moment the list is sorted, so every Product event sits in one block and every Order event in another. Lead with the verb instead and the same events scatter across the alphabet, with Added, Viewed, and Removed landing nowhere near each other even though they act on the same object.The past tense follows from what an event is: a record that something already happened. Product Viewed describes a completed action, while View Product reads as an instruction to the software, which is a different kind of statement. Keeping every event in the past tense also keeps them parallel, so the names line up as a consistent log of behavior rather than a mix of records and commands. This is the rule most worth protecting, because a single backwards name is the kind of thing that gets copied once and then spreads.

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Your objects

The nouns your events act on. Listing them keeps everyone using the same word for the same thing, so no one logs Basket when the rest of the team uses Cart.

Concept review: Your objects

The object is the noun at the front of every event name, and agreeing on the list is how you stop the same thing from being called two names. If one person logs Cart Viewed and another logs Basket Viewed, analytics sees two unrelated events and the behavior is split across both, so a shared list of objects is what keeps one thing to one word.Keeping the list of objects fairly small tends to make the whole scheme easier to hold in your head, since a handful of well-chosen objects can carry most of a product’s events when paired with different actions. Where to draw the object’s boundaries is a judgment call, for example whether a wishlist is its own object or a state of a product, and there is no universally right answer. What keeps it working is deciding once and recording it here, so the next person extends the list instead of quietly inventing a parallel one.

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Your actions

The past-tense verbs that describe what happened to an object. A shared list keeps the team from splitting one action across near-synonyms like Viewed, Seen, and Opened.

Concept review: Your actions

Actions drift even more easily than objects, because most actions have several plausible synonyms. Viewed, Seen, Opened, and Loaded can all describe the same moment, and if the team uses them interchangeably then one behavior ends up spread across four event names, none of which shows the full picture on its own. A shared list of actions settles which verb wins for each kind of action, so the same behavior always produces the same word.Reusing an action across objects works in your favor: Viewed pairs with Product, Cart, and Order to give you three clear events from one verb, and that consistency is exactly what makes them easy to reason about together. A small, reused set of actions combined with your list of objects covers a surprising range of a product’s behavior, and it means a new event is usually a new pairing of words you already have rather than a brand-new term to define.

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Put it together

An event name is one object plus one past-tense action, in that order, in Title Case, separated by a space. That is the whole rule. Product + Viewed becomes Product Viewed Cart + Viewed becomes Cart Viewed Order + Completed becomes Order Completed Customer Profile + Entered becomes Customer Profile Entered When an event acts on a set rather than a single item, the object goes plural, but the order and tense do not change: Products + Searched becomes Products Searched

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Related resources

• Naming conventions overview How the six conventions relate.
• Event tracking plan Where each named event is recorded.
• Set up tracking The full tracking path.
• Tracking best practices Why renaming an event splits its history.
• Data dictionary Where the metrics these events feed are defined.