Event Properties

You can collect user behavior in the form of events. You can send events to Algolia’s Insights API (this API enables Click and Conversion Analytics, A/B testing, AI Re-Ranking, Personalization, and Recommend).

Different events make use of different properties. For some events, you need to perform additional actions before sending them, for example, obtaining the queryID. The following guidelines will help make the most out of your user events. You can find details about handling queryID and userToken parameters in separate guides.

Naming events

All events must have an eventName property. The name can be up to 64 ASCII characters. To maintain a clean data set and maximize the impact of your user events data, you need to establish a naming convention. If you use multiple analytics services next to Algolia Analytics, it’s essential to name events consistently to facilitate analytics aggregation.

Algolia recommends the following practices:

• Use Segment’s object-action framework to name events according to the object users interact with and the interaction type—for example, “Product added to cart”. If a user action can occur on multiple pages, you can distinguish these events by adding the page type to the event name. For example, to distinguish if the product was added from a product-listing page or a product-detail page, you can add: “PDP;Product added to cart” and “PLP;Product added to cart”
• Choose non-technical event names so that every team member can understand and use them
• Capitalize your event names consistently, for example, using title case

Including the correct indexName

All events need to include the name of the targeted Algolia index. For example, if a user clicks or converts on a search result, indexName is where the results come from. If a user views a filter, the indexName is where you’ve declared the filter attribute in the attributesForFaceting.

Including objectIDs for item-based events

If an event occurs on a specific item or set of items (instead of a category of items), you need to include the items’ objectIDs. You can send up to 20 objectIDs in one call.

Including positions for click events related to Algolia queries

Click events related to searching and browsing require the positions parameter. This parameter specifies the clicked items’ positions in the results set.

Click positions start at 1, not 0. For example, if a user clicks the second and then fourth result, the positions parameter would be [2, 4]. Algolia uses this parameter to calculate the average click position.

Sending multiple types of events

You should send as many different click and conversion events as required to reflect meaningful user behavior. For example, you could send conversion events when a product is added to a wish list and when the product is bought.

After completing a search, the engine calculates one click-through-rate for all click events and one conversion rate for all conversion events.

For example:

• A user searches for “ps5”, then buys it. This is a converted search.
• Another user searches for “ps5”, adds it to their wish list, then buys it. This is also a converted search. It doesn’t count any differently towards the conversion rate because the user engaged in two conversion behaviors on the same search.

Validating events

When first sending events, you should validate that Algolia receives the events you expect. The validating events guide outlines the tools and methods you can use.