Track

The track call lets you record the user’s actions along with any properties associated with them.

Each user action is called an event. Every event has a name associated with it, for example, Product Reviewed. This event can have properties associated with it, like review_id and rating.

For ecommerce-specific events, refer to Ecommerce events specification.

Event Names

It is recommended that events have a descriptive human readable name. This allows everyone (include you 6 months from now) to instantly understand the meaning of an event.

Vague or abstract names like ProdRV and Event2 should be avoided. Instead focus on unique unabiguous names like Product Reviewed and Order Submitted. A common framework is to use nouns and past tense verbs.

Identity data (user traits) will be automatically added to track calls from the most recent identify call, so you do not need to add it manually. This information will be included in a traits object in the context fields of the payload. Note that track calls also automatically handle anonymousId values associated with the user.

See our Identify doc for more details.

Sample payload

Here is a sample payload for the track event after removing Common fields:

{
  "type": "track",
  "event": "Product Reviewed",
  "properties": {
    "review_id": "86ac1cd43",
    "product_id" : "9578257311",
    "rating" : 3.0,
    "review_body" : "OK for the price. It works but the material feels flimsy."
  }
}

The corresponding event that generates the above payload via the JavaScript SDK is:

rudderanalytics.track("Product Reviewed", {
  review_id: "86ac1cd43",
  product_id: "9578257311",
  rating: 3.0,
  review_body: "OK for the price. It works but the material feels flimsy."
})

Send a sample track call

Use RudderStack’s Event Playground app to send sample events to RudderStack and test the data flow without any instrumentation.

Click Send to see the API call in the Network tab of your browser’s developer tools.

Follow these steps to use the Event Playground app to send test events to your account:

1. Sign in to the RudderStack dashboard. Note the data plane URLThe data plane URL is the location where events are routed and sent to the RudderStack backend for processing. You can find this URL in the home page of your RudderStack dashboard. at the top of the default Connections page.

2. Set up a source and note its write keyThe write key (or source write key) is a unique identifier for your source. RudderStack uses this key to send events from a source to the specified destination. .

3. Click Use My Account in the Event Playground app below and specify the write key and data plane URL obtained in the above steps.

4. Click Save.
5. Select the required API Method from the dropdown. You can also edit the relevant fields or traits/properties.
6. Click Send to my account to send the event.
7. Go to the Live Events viewer of your source (set up in Step 2) to verify that the event is successfully received.

Track fields

Apart from the Common fields, the track call accepts the following fields:

Field	Type	Presence	Description
event	String	Required	Name of the user action
properties	Object	Optional	Includes the properties associated with the event. For more information, check the Properties section below.

Properties

Properties are additional contextual information that are associated with a track event, that give more clarity of your users’ actions.

RudderStack has reserved some standard properties listed in the following table and handles them in a special manner.

Property	Type	Description
revenue	Number	The revenue amount as a result of an event. For e.g., a product worth $20.00 would result in a revenue of 20.00.
currency	String	The currency of the revenue as a result of the event, set in ISO 4127 format. If this is not set, RudderStack assumes the revenue is in USD.
value	String	An abstract value associated with an event, to be used by various teams.

Different destinations recognize some of the above data points differently.

With RudderStack, you don’t have to worry about these inconsistencies across destinations. Our open source destination transformer code handles these destination-specific conversions automatically.

For example, Mixpanel has a track_charges method for tracking revenue. In this case, you can pass the revenue property and RudderStack will handle the conversion automatically through our destination transformer code. You can see the Mixpanel transformer code in our open source Github repo.

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