Best Practices for Tracking User Behavior in Event Flows | Mixpanel Community

Best Practices for Tracking User Behavior in Event Flows

Tracking behavior clarification: In our current setup, the team sometimes tracks a single event only after the user finishes a flow (e.g., Deposit Completed), and they use event properties to indicate what happened during the steps (like which method was clicked, etc.). Is this a recommended approach? Or would you advise breaking it into multiple step-by-step events (like Deposit Button Click, Deposit View, Payment Method Selected)? note that the argument is that increasing the events will add complexity and increase cost

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kapa.ai
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kapa.ai
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Your approach—tracking only a single event at the end of a flow (e.g., Deposit Completed) and using event properties to capture details about the steps taken—is a valid and sometimes recommended strategy, especially when you want to reduce complexity and avoid data overload.Mixpanel best practices emphasize:Summary:
Your current approach is recommended if your main interest is in the final outcome and the details of the flow can be captured as properties. Only break the flow into multiple events if you specifically need to analyze user behavior at each step (e.g., for funnel/drop-off analysis). Otherwise, keeping your event model simple will reduce complexity and cost, and is aligned with Mixpanel’s best practices.> “Be intentional with your data. Prioritize the most critical data you’ll need based on your analytics strategy and KPIs, then iterate. Tracking everything and anything your user can do in your product can lead to unnecessary development effort and unused data.” Create A Tracking Plan
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Sultan A.
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kapa.ai what’s Autocapture?
kapa.ai
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Let me check the knowledge base for you again. One moment! 📚
kapa.ai
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Autocapture is a Mixpanel feature that automatically collects commonly tracked user behavior data—such as page views, button clicks, form submissions, and other element interactions—without requiring you to manually add custom tracking code for each event. You simply enable it with a single snippet of code, and Mixpanel starts capturing these interactions in real time. This makes it much faster and easier to get started with analytics, reduces maintenance, and ensures you don’t miss important user actions as your product evolves. Autocapture is available for web via the Mixpanel JavaScript SDK and can be used alongside precision tracking for more advanced needs What is autocapture for analytics? Docs: Autocapture.
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