<aside> 👉 This post is for aspiring PMs who have no idea how product analytics work (I didn't). It's not difficult to understand.

</aside>

Quick Context

• Product Analytics works mostly on concepts of Events and Event Properties.
• Think of them as footprints a user leaves when using your app. And much more.
• To do product analytics, most companies use 3rd party tools like Amplitude, CleverTap, MixPanel.
• We will use Amplitude in this post but you can replace the word Amplitude with any analytics platform that your company might be using.
• 20-30% of your time as PM may go towards Analytics.

Events

Events are the atoms of product analytics.

<aside> 👉 An Event is essentially a bunch of data that is sent to a user's profile on Amplitude based on specified triggers

</aside>

I would understand if this definition seems unfriendly. We will break it down one by one. We will get to "what bunch of data" and to "what user profile" later. Let's discuss "specific triggers" first.

Triggers

You as a PM decide these triggers. You can put these triggers at 3 places:

Client Side (in your app)

You can set triggers based on when user does an action in your app.

"Trigger this event called play when user taps play button"

"Trigger this event called exit_video **when user exits a video"

Server Side (your backend)

There can be some automated actions that are not performed by the user but that affect the user.

For example, sending a push notification. When you sent a notification to a user from your backend, you can add an event trigger along with it.

"Trigger this event called notification_sent when our server sends a push notification to a user"