Quickstart: Tracking Plan in Avo
Managing a tracking plan is hard. You have to make sure it’s kept up to date to what is actually being tracked, make sure existing events and properties are reused where relevant, make sure new events and properties match with the naming conventions you have in place, communicating changes and collect feedback from the team, share implementation instructions with developers, and so on.
If you relate to any of the challenges mentioned above you might want to consider switching your tracking plan over to Avo.
The Avo Tracking Plan is a collaborative web app that will make managing your tracking plan less of a headache, with features like Tracking Plan audit to ensure naming conventions are followed, global event and property namespace to ensure consistency across your events and properties, branched collaboration with approval workflows and auto generated implementation instructions, auto publishing to keep your downstream schemas in sync, and more!
When you have your tracking plan defined in Avo you can check out our code generated, type-safe, functions for developers to increase tracking implementation speed and reliability, and tracking observability with the Inspector so you know how your actual tracking compares to the tracking plan.
In this guide we’ll walk through the process of setting up your tracking plan in Avo, suggesting your first changes on a branch, inviting a team member and asking for a review. If you’re looking for a deeper dive into the tracking plan design capabilities of the Avo Tracking Plan, check out our deep dive guide on data design in Avo.
Step 1: Create an Avo workspace
Head to our onboarding flow and setup a new workspace.
Step 2: Get your existing tracking plan into Avo
There are three ways to get your existing tracking plan into Avo:
- Import from Amplitude, Mixpanel or Google Sheets
- Import events from Inspector
- Build your tracking plan from scratch
If you don’t have an existing tracking plan, or if you just want to start fresh, you can skip this step. No worries, you can always import your existing tracking plan later.
Step 3: Create a new branch
When you are making changes to your tracking plan in Avo, we always recommend creating a branch first – no matter how small your change might be. That allows you to make suggestions in isolation from the source of truth on your main branch and get feedback from your team.
Open a new branch by clicking the icon next to “main” in the left sidebar. Then you are prompted to open an existing branch or creating a new one.
Step 4: Make changes to your tracking plan
When you’ve created the branch, navigate to the Events tab in the tracking plan to start making changes to your tracking plan on the branch. Create a new event by clicking the + Add Event button.
In the event details, complete the definition of your event by filling in each section of the event details. Check out our data design deep dive guide for a step by step guide for defining an event. Below is an example of an event with a description, triggers, sources and a property.
New and modified events are highlighted in the workbench at the top of your tracking plan events view, so you can easily access and have overview of your new and modified events.
Step 5: Invite a colleague and ask them for a review
Now we’re ready to share our suggestions with our team, and ask them for input. Go to your workspace settings and invite a team member. Workspace members can be one of admin, editor, comment only or view only. To learn more about members and roles, check out our members docs.
When your colleague has joined the workspace they have access to the tracking plan, can create their own branches (editors and admins) and you can request their feedback (comment only, editors and admins) by adding them as a collaborator on your branch.
To review the changes on your branch, click the View changes button in the workspace sidebar. There are two review modes, one for tracking plan changes and another for code changes.
Tracking plan changes
The tracking plan changes represent the changes that are made to the data structures in your tracking plan. There you and collaborators can comment on each item and discuss them. To add a collaborator to your branch, click Edit Collaborators in the top right corner of the view changes screen and select the workspace member you want to add. Branch collaborators will be notified on any discussions on the branch and when the branch status changes.
Code changes
The code changes screen represents the code changes that are required to implement the tracking plan changes in code. Code snippets are available for all events, whether they are to be implemented with manual implementation or the [Avo codegen]. A collaborator can review the code changes, comment on them and then approve the branch or request changes. Learn more about branch approvals in our approval workflow guide.
What’s next?
Now you know how to open a branch in Avo, suggest changes and ask for review from your team. The next step is for a developer to implement the changes in code using Avo codegen or pseudocode snippets. To get even better idea of how to maintain your tracking plan in Avo, check out the deep dive guide on data design in Avo.
