When to Use What?

   Journey Analytics The behavioural analytics tool.  |   Analytics User |   Latest Version Latest version 23.04.0 cloud hosted.

It is important to pick the right custom event to get the desired outcome. The diagram below provides a good way to decide between milestones and segments.

Milestones are useful when you want to know when, or if, a significant event happens, such as if a ID validation package is used in an application. If however, you simply want to differentiate between different groups of users, then segments are the way to go, such as age bracket, gender, and other demographics.

As milestones are essentially breadcrumbs, they cannot be revoked once they have been sent to Insights. Therefore, it is important not to implement milestones, for example, to track age or gender or other things based on user’s input. If the user changes their option, there will be multiple milestones sent for each selection, which distorts the data collected in Insights.

Note also that segment events that are implemented in a supported application or on Journey Manager need to be added to the Segment Whitelist in Journey Analytics. For more information on the Segment Whitelist, see Preferences. This additional step is intended to act as a deterrent for personally identifiable information (PII) data from being stored in the Journey Analytics database.

In most cases, either milestone or segment events get the desired result in terms of answering specific questions from the business, however, it may sometimes be necessary to implement both. The decision to implement either, or both, depends on what insights you want to get from the User Journey View and analytics report.