- Start from the decisions you need to make, then work backward to the events that inform them.
- Track moments of value delivered, not just clicks — clicks alone don't tell you why.
- Vanity events that nobody ever queries are a maintenance cost with no return.
- A short, curated event list beats an exhaustive one nobody can navigate.
Tracking everything is the same as tracking nothing
Teams that instrument every possible click and page view end up with an unusable flood of data that obscures the signals that matter. A tracking plan with fifteen well-chosen events that get used regularly beats one with two hundred that nobody queries.
Start from decisions, not from data availability
The right way to build a tracking plan is to list the actual product and business decisions you need to make, then identify the minimum set of events that inform each one — not to instrument everything that's technically easy to capture and hope it's useful later.
Track value delivered, not just activity
A click tells you someone did something. It doesn't tell you whether that something delivered value. Events framed around outcomes — 'report generated successfully,' 'first automation triggered' — are far more useful for understanding retention than raw interaction counts.
Vanity events cost more than they're worth
Every tracked event has an ongoing maintenance cost — schema updates, storage, and cognitive overhead for anyone querying the data. Events that seemed interesting at setup but nobody has queried in six months are a quiet tax on the whole analytics system and are worth actively pruning.
Review the tracking plan like you'd review any other system
A tracking plan set up at launch and never revisited drifts out of sync with the product as features change. Reviewing it every few months — adding events for new features, removing ones nobody uses — keeps the system lean and genuinely useful instead of accumulating cruft.