Introduction

This article talks about Data Management and how to effectively manage your events and user attributes in MoEngage.

Effective management of events and user attributes will go long way to ensure that your marketing efforts through MoEngage are optimized and less error-prone for your marketers.

The Data Management feature in MoEngage will enable you to enable only those events and user attributes that you want to see in the event and user attribute drop downs across the MoEngage dashboard like in Segmentation, Analytics, Conversion Goals, and so on. Unnecessary events and user attributes seen in the dashboard drop-downs can lead to a time-consuming segment and campaign creation process. 

For example, in the image shown below, there are a lot of incorrectly tracked events and events that are hard to understand based on their names.

 

Clean events and user attribute drop-downs to give a better understanding to marketers while creating segments and campaigns.

For example, in the image below, the names of the tracked events clearly convey their purpose and thus simplify segment and campaign creation.

At times, you may end up in a situation where there are a lot of unknown events and user attributes in your MoEngage account that you do not need or that are not readable by your marketers. In such cases, it becomes really important to manage the events and user attributes and their corresponding display names. Below is a snapshot of how the Data Management dashboard looks.

Actions supported with Data Management dashboard:

• Block unnecessary events, event attributes, and user attributes so that they are no longer processed by MoEngage.
• Hide unnecessary events, event attributes, and user attributes from your drop-downs so that your marketers do not create segments/campaigns with incorrect data points.
• Mark the allowed data types of your event attributes and user attributes so that the appropriate operators are available for them during segmentation and analytics. Once you have defined the allowed data type of your attributes, MoEngage will try to typecast the incoming data to the set data type.
• Add a display name for events and user attributes, which will enable your marketers to have a better understanding of your events and attributes while creating campaigns.
• View all tracked events, event attributes, and user attributes on the dashboard.

Enabling Data Management

To enable data management, please reach out to your MoEngage Account Manager or write to support@moengage.com 

Once enabled, this is available under Settings -> Analytics and Data -> Data Management, as shown below: 

 

 

Please note that only Admins of your accounts will be able to execute actions like changing status, visibility, allowed data types, readable names, and descriptions.

Overview

The Overview tab of Data Management will give you a high level of information about the number of unique events and user attributes that are currently tracked for your account - 

You can use this dashboard to get a high-level understanding of the data you are tracking in MoEngage.

Usage Metrics

Events: This denotes the number of unique events tracked for your MoEngage account out of the total available events that can be tracked.

User Attributes: This denotes the number of unique user attributes tracked for your MoEngage account out of the total available events that can be tracked.

Activity

Unique events created new: This shows the number of unique events that were newly created in your MoEngage account

Unique user attributes created new: This shows the number of unique user attributes that were newly created in your MoEngage account

Unique events blocked: This shows the number of unique events that were blocked in your MoEngage account either automatically due to a limits breach or manually by one of the users.

Unique user attributes blocked: This shows the number of unique user attributes that were blocked in your MoEngage account either automatically due to a limits breach or manually by one of the users.

Events

The events dashboard of data management, as shown below, will list all the events tracked for your MoEngage account and will enable you to take action on your events.

As shown in the screenshot above, we have categorized your events into two - MoEngage events and Custom Events.

Custom vs. MoEngage Events 

MoEngage Events

These are the standard events tracked by MoEngage.

Custom Events

These are the custom events that you are sending to MoEngage from different data sources like Mobile apps, websites, and other server-side sources or partner integrations.

Event Attributes

On expanding an event, you would be able to see the event attributes of that specific event as shown below -

These event attributes are also visible on the event detail pop-up which can be opened by clicking on the three dots menu against any event and selecting the edit option. The event attributes will be visible as shown here.

User Attributes

The user attribute dashboard of data management as shown below will list all the user attributes tracked for your MoEngage account and will enable you to take action on them.

Custom vs MoEngage User Attributes

There are certain user attributes that are tracked by MoEngage. Such attributes are marked in the dashboard with a MoEngage logo as shown below.

Categories

The events and user attributes listed on this dashboard are placed under their respective categories which are pre-created by MoEngage. You can expand any category to see the events or user attributes under that category as shown below.

Actions

The following actions are supported by the data management dashboard.

Action	Result	Supported for
Change Status: Allowed	On changing the status of a blocked event to allowed, the event will start getting tracked for your MoEngage account. By default, all unique events will be allowed unless you breach data tracking limits.	Events Event Attributes User Attributes
Change Status: Blocked	On changing the status of an event to blocked, the event will no longer be tracked for your MoEngage account even if received. All your existing campaigns for this event will not work.	Events Event Attributes User Attributes
Change Visibility: On	On changing the visibility of an event to on, the event will start being visible in your drop-downs. By default, all unique events will be visible in drop-downs.	Events Event Attributes User Attributes
Change Visibility: Off	On changing the visibility of an event to off, the event will stop being visible in your drop-downs. The campaigns/segments which are using events with visibility off will continue to work just fine as the events will still be tracked in your MoEngage account but only hidden from drop-downs.	Events Event Attributes User Attributes
Set / Edit Display Name	On setting/editing the display name of an event or event attribute, the same will be visible in drop-downs to make it easier for marketers when creating the segments/campaigns.	Events Event Attributes User Attributes
Set / Edit Description	On setting/editing the description of an event/event attribute, you will be able to get additional context about tracking. This is already set by MoEngage for the MoEngage events as of now and those cannot be edited.	Events Event Attributes User Attributes
Set Allowed Datatype	Set a single allowed data type of attributes so that incorrect data types are not ingested into the database.	Event Attributes User Attributes

Status

The Status flag will help you allow or block events, event attributes, and user attributes as per the requirement.

Over time, you may start seeing incorrect events, event attributes or user attributes in your account probably due to an incorrect integration/testing and you may want to block such incorrectly tracked data points.

You can change the status of events from the events tab of data management as shown below.

You can change the status of event attributes, from the event details pop-up or from three dots menu as shown below.

You can change the status of user attributes as shown below.

 

Blocking due to Limits of data tracking

At times, if your events, event attributes, or user attributes are breaching the limits mentioned here or as shown in your overview tab, then your new events, event attributes, or user attributes may get automatically blocked.

Visibility

The Visibility flag will help you to hide or un-hide events, event attributes and user attributes from your drop-downs.

Your drop-downs may get cluttered over time due to too many events and event attributes being present in them, even the ones which your marketers don't need. In such cases, hiding will ensure that such events and event attributes no longer appear in the drop-down.

To set the visibility of events, refer to the below image.

To set the visibility of event attributes, refer to the below image.

To set the visibility of user attributes, refer to the below image.

Edit display name

Display name will enable your marketers to read your event, event attribute, and user attribute names clearly while creating segments.

At times, when your analytics systems are generating events, it is possible that they are encoded and are not easily readable by marketers. In such cases, you can always define a display name for your events and make it easy for your marketers.

To set the display name of events, click on the three dots menu and select the edit option to add/edit the display name of your event or event attributes.

To set the display name of event attributes, click on the three dots menu against any event attribute and select the edit option to add/edit the display name of your event or event attributes.

To set the display name of user attributes, click on the three dots menu against any event attribute and select the edit option to add/edit the display name of your event or event attributes.

Edit description

The description will give additional context to your marketers on what an event does. You can set this from the edit event/edit event attribute/edit user attribute pop-up, similar to what is shown in the edit display name action.

Set Allowed Datatypes

Setting up allowed data type action is supported for user attributes and event attributes and will ensure that any other data type is not recorded for the same attribute.

To set allowed data types for event attributes, click on the three dots menu -> select the edit option to navigate to the event attributes tab, and select the event attributes. Once selected, choose the set allowed data types option as shown below.

To set allowed data types for user attributes, select the user attributes -> and set allowed attributes. Once selected, choose the set allowed data types option as shown below.

How does this work?

For example, if you set the allowed data types of an attribute called "amount" as Numeric, then after this point, whenever the "amount" attribute is tracked, MoEngage will try to typecast the value to Numeric. For example, after setting allowed data types of amount as Numeric, if you send {"amount": "145"}, which is a string value, we will save it as 145 numeric and enable you to run numeric operators on this value in Segmentation and Analytics. However, if you send {"amount": "sample value"}, we will not be able to typecast this value, and hence it will be dropped. We will not save the amount: sample_value in your database to ensure accurate data is only saved.

The below table lists the data type of incoming attributes on columns and the allowed data type on rows and the value of each cell represents the data ingestion logic.

	String	Numeric	Boolean	Date	Location
Any	Accepted as String	Accepted as Numeric	Accepted as Boolean	Accepted as Date	Accepted as Location
String	Accepted as String	Typecast to String	Typecast to String	Typecast to String	Typecast to String
Numeric	Typecast to Numeric if possible else drop	Accepted as Numeric	Dropped	Dropped	Dropped
Boolean	Typecast to boolean if possible else drop	Dropped	Dropped	Dropped	Dropped
Date	Typecast to Date for accepted formats else drop	Dropped	Dropped	Dropped	Dropped
Location	Typecast to Location for accepted format else drop	Dropped	Dropped	Dropped	Dropped

By default, attributes will be set to Any which means that any data type will be accepted for this attribute. If more than one data type is set for an attribute then your segmentation drop-down will show multiple data types during query creation as shown below.

Once you set the allowed data type, only the allowed data type will be ingested going forward. However, we may still see older data types in your database due to past data present in the system. By default, the allowed data type will be pre-selected for your segmentation.

Event Details

The Event details tab will list the different data points about an event, all the event attributes of the event, and a few sample recent events recorded to give you more context -

User Attribute Details

You can navigate to the user attributes tab for executing actions by clicking on the three dots menu against a user attribute and selecting the edit option. This will open up a pop-up as shown below.