Tenjin Tutorial: Analyze Custom Events to Optimise your User-Acquisition

Overview

Learn how to analyse your custom events in Tenjin’s Dashboard

With the Tenjin SDK, you can gain insight into user behavior by sending custom events.

The aim of this training is to give you an in-depth overview of the following:

1. What kind of custom events you can send
2. And how this data can be analyzed to better optimize your User Acquisition (UA) activity

Summary

How to use Tenjin’s custom events to gain insight into user behavior

With the Tenjin SDK, you can gain insight into user behavior by sending custom events. At a high level, you should be able to instrument a custom event anywhere your user value might be associated within your app. Each event may have an optional numeric value associated with it. You can see how often these events occur, what source they came from, how much they cost, and how much value they generated.

Some examples for post-install events include:

• registration complete
• use hint
• tutorial complete
• level complete
• virtual currency purchases (you can pass in the amount of currency spent as the event value)

Upon completion of this training, you will be able to check the following for each of your custom events:

• How many users generated a custom event
• How many times a custom event was generated
• What value is the custom event worth
• The average value per user

Setup

What you will need

This training requires sending custom events to Tenjin either with the native SDK or through a 3rd patry attribution provider.

Instructions for the Tenjin SDK custom event integration is here.

You may want to track some kind of “funnel” or “sequential” activity, for example: complete registration -> complete tutorial -> complete level 1. For this, you will have to track your user’s stage in the funnel (Tenjin SDK will not do this for you), then emit a custom event for each stage.

As an example, the stages would be stage-1-registration-complete, stage-2-reg-and-tutorial-complete, and stage-3-reg-tut-level-complete.

Check the custom event integration status on the dashboard. If you select the app you’re integrating from the Apps tab, you can see all of the relevant events to make sure the Tenjin SDK is integrated correctly.

How to

An in-depth analysis of an example custom events report in the Tenjin Dashboard

To view your post-install events on the Tenjin dashboard, go to Analyze -> User Acquisition tab and select the “Custom Events” Report. Here, you can choose which custom events you want to view. Let’s take ‘use hint’ as an example event to understand the charts.

In the date range Oct 17 to Nov 16, you got 1438 users who did the “use hint” event. We received the “use hint” event 3643 times. On day 3 of life, 57 users performed “use hint”. In the first 3 days of life, your new users (people who installed in the date range) made a total of 2324 “use hint” actions. On day 3 of life, 2.72% of new users performed “use hint”. Click the app row to expand it. The child rows show the breakdown by channel.

The “use hint” chart shows, on average, how many “use hint” events were performed for each user on each day of life. You can see that by day 2, on average, each user performed 1 “use hint” event (some users performed lots of “use hint” and many users didn’t do it at all).

The “Users” chart shows how many users did “use hint” on each day of life. On day 0, 858 users did an “use hint”. But on day 1, only 100 users did “use hint”.

In the Cumulative Count chart, you can see times that cohort of users performed your post-install event. In this example, the 858 users did “use hint” 1691 times on day 0.

You can also change the “Group By” on the left to “channels” or “campaigns” to see the breakdown and decide which campaign drove the most “use hint” events. The definitions of the post-install event metrics are here.

You can also pull this data into your data warehouse with Tenjin’s DataVault, as shown below. Contact your Growth FullStack Account Manager for the SQL Query.

FAQ

What kinds of custom events can I choose to send to Tenjin? 

When deciding on the value of a custom event, you should be able to answer “yes” to most of these questions:

• Is this an ACTION performed by the user?
• Is the TIME performed relevant?
• Are the number of OCCURRENCES important to me?
• Is the AVERAGE or SUM of the values important to me?

You should not send user attributes using custom events. Example: user’s IP address, demographic or device info. This help forum post describes what events you should think about tracking as you on-board.

Can these post-install events be used to optimize my User Acquisition activities? 

Yes, it’s very common to track and optimize based on your user’s post-install activities. In addition to the analyses described above, you can also route these events to your partners (ad networks) or your own servers, as described here.

Feedback

Do you have any feedback for us?

We at Growth FullStack are always happy to receive your valuable feedback. Whether it’s about requesting additional support on optimizing your workflows, building a customized dashboard, or anything else, feel free to reach out to us and let us know how we can support you further.

Iterate & Maintain

Iterate

If you’re using the SQL query provided by the Growth FullStack team, it can be edited to include other relevant metrics.

Maintain

Please be aware that any changes or updates to the SDK integration may break this template.