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An event is a kind of thing that happens, at one grain: the business process a fact is built around.

What you can do with a event

• jobFind where a fact is captured
  I need to know where a fact is recorded, who provides that place, and whether it may name a person.
• tableMeasurement Plan · Measurement Model
• tableInstrumentation Plan · Data Sources
• tableLifecycle Map · Journeys
• tableInstrumentation Plan · Identity
• tableInstrumentation Plan · Channels

Its events— 22

• Web visitOne session on an owned digital surface.
• Email engagementOne open or click for one subscriber.
• SMS engagementOne delivery, click or reply for one subscriber.
• Paid media clickOne click on a paid placement, carrying the campaign and tactic key.
• Social and video engagementOne engagement, a view, like, share or comment, on one social or video platform, observable only in aggregate because the platform holds the identity.
• Print, mail and broadcastOne placement or drop.
• Consumer authenticationOne authentication or registration attempt by one consumer on one surface.
• Partner handoffOne consumer handed from a partner's surface to the brand's.
• Lead submissionOne form, call or chat that yields a resolvable lead.
• ConversionOne completed intended outcome: a booking, a purchase, a sign-up.
• Fulfilment outcomeOne confirmed conversion afterwards fulfilled, cancelled, returned or left undone: the fact that says whether what was agreed actually happened.
• Public social conversationOne public post or comment matching a monitored topic.
• Window elapsedOne lookback window closing with no qualifying activity for one consumer: the fact that nothing happened, recorded so that a lapse can be dated rather than noticed.
• Propensity scoreOne model score for one consumer crossing a declared threshold: a prediction recorded as a fact, so that acting on it can be audited later.
• ReferralOne referral, review or recommendation attributable to one consumer: the act of bringing someone else in.
• Paid impressionOne paid placement served on a digital surface: an impression, a view or a play the platform delivered and billed for, with no person in the count.
• Search impressionOne appearance of an owned page in a search result for a tracked query, as the engine reports it.
• Assistant answerOne answer an assistant returns for a tracked query, as rendered, whether or not the brand is in it.
• Assistant citationOne citation of an owned page inside an assistant's answer: the answer names the brand's content as what it drew on.
• Brand mentionOne mention of the brand by name on the open web, on a page, a post or an answer matching a tracked topic, by someone the brand has not resolved.
• CrawlOne fetch of an owned page by a machine reader, and what it could read there: the structured data it found or did not.
• Consent changeOne grant or withdrawal of a permission by one person, for one purpose on one channel, recorded so that what may be sent to them can be shown to rest on it, and so that withdrawing it is shown to be as easy as giving it.

Why it matters

What goes wrong without it, as the commitments that license this kind say it, each standing on its sources.

• Declare measurement grain before calculationA rate means nothing unless everyone agrees what one instance of its numerator and its denominator represents. Marketing reporting fails less often because a number is wrong than because two numbers computed at different grains were divided — sessions over people, clicks over sends — and nothing in the output says so. Declaring the grain first is what makes the calculation reproducible by someone who did not write it.
  Declaring the Grain
• Separate executable actions, observed events and consumer actor grainWhat a system did and what a person did are different facts, and the two are easily merged — which is why event models separate what was explicitly triggered from what was implicitly observed. A send is not an open; a delivery total is not a set of people. Once an execution record and a behavioural observation are the same kind of thing, every count downstream quietly mixes them, and an audience figure stops being checkable.
  XDM ExperienceEvent Class · Declaring the Grain
• Keep audience eligibility, preference and permission basis distinctThese answer three different questions — can this person be reached, how do they want to be reached, and are we permitted to reach them — and collapsing them is how an organisation comes to treat membership of a segment as a consent. Eligibility is an addressing fact, preference is a stated choice, and a permission basis is a condition with a purpose and a jurisdiction. Only the last has anything to say about whether an activation is allowed.
  Regulation (EU) 2016/679, Article 6 · Audience Taxonomy · Global Privacy Protocol · Data Privacy Vocabulary · Regulation (EU) 2016/679, Article 7: Conditions for consent · Consent Receipt Specification 1.1 · Transparency and Consent Framework v2.2 · RFC 8058: Signaling One-Click Functionality for List Email Headers
• A journey is a state machine, not a funnel pictureA funnel diagram names stages and says nothing about how anyone moves between them, so it cannot be validated, queried or executed. A state machine names the legal moves and what triggers each, which is the difference between a journey a system can run and a journey a deck can show.
  State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction · Declaring the Grain · Statecharts: a visual formalism for complex systems
• A move that cannot be counted is a pictureA journey that names its moves and cannot count them is a funnel with arrows: it can be drawn and not measured, which is the failure a state machine was adopted to end. Customer-migration models make the point exactly. A transition rate is the moves out of a condition over the people in it, and the people in it are the fact that put them there; so the events added to give every move a trigger are not extra instrumentation but the missing denominators of rates the model already carried and could not derive. A law that every move has a trigger, satisfied by facts nothing observes, would be the same picture with more arrows.
  Modeling customer relationships as Markov chains · Declaring the Grain · The Goal Question Metric Approach · Counting Your Customers the Easy Way: An Alternative to the Pareto/NBD Model