Custom Events Vs Custom Attributes

Just want to hear your thoughts on how your teams reacted when they are told to think about leveraging more custom events and harnessing the event properties for segmentation and message personalisation rather than hosting data points on the users' profiles. What's been your journey?

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Comments

AllanHeoFNM

In Braze, Custom Events truly do hold a lot, a lot of power. So many things (reporting, conversions, triggers, etc.) are based on Custom Events, and Braze has come a long, long way with being able to implement custom event properties in your messaging (e.g. canvas_entry_properties for Canvas steps). Also, another huge plus is that event properties don't incur any data points, so they are very flexible from a consumption perspective.

With the improvement of Segment Extensions, event properties are becoming more accessible for segmentation as well, but it's not quite perfect yet; there's SQL limitations, Extension Regeneration limitations, or Event Property 30-day Look back limitations. I'm sure Braze is working towards improving all these features though.

A few more limitations with custom event properties:

1. It's just so dang hard to see these properties inside the dashboard. The best way to see the values populated in these properties are through the event user logs, which every team NEEDS to setup if they haven't already (blog post coming soon 😅).

2. In the case you want to split users at the first step of the Canvas based on custom event properties, you won't be able to do this bc you can't make Audience paths based on custom event properties, and Action Step requires one more action. There was actually a post in The Forum with this exact use case. There's also a workaround for this where you can use the User Update step for this use case.

Like I said, I think the accessibility of Custom Event Properties has come a super long way. But sometimes, you have a valid use case for wanting to store data as a custom attribute. And those, you can easily see in the dashboard which just makes your daily operation so much easier.

Hope this helps Raj!

Rajorigin

Thank you @AllanHeoFNM for your great insights on this. There is always this ongoing conversation with different business teams that are migrating to Braze from Adobe or Salesforce CRMs about housing custom attributes against user profiles (that they are more comfortable, more to with the mindset) than creating custom events (both from Web SDKs and from data teams as batched events) that trigger canvas/campaigns. Thanks again mate, really enjoying reading your blogs too!!

Arso

@Rajorigin I agree with everything Alan said. Another good point that always comes up when discussing custom attributes vs. custom events + properties, is that, with Connected Content you have all your data points available at any time.

Custom attribute data is stale, unless you update it frequently. However, every time you update a custom attribute, it counts towards your data points volume.

Connected content eliminates both problems. You get real-time data and you're saving on your contract.

Rajorigin

@Arso , fantastic. I am yet to get myself acquainted with what Connected Content can offer but really appreciate your inputs. Have heard of segment extensions and @AllanHeoFNM you have mentioned this as well. You have mentioned about the current limitations as well with Segment Extensions, are you able to provide an example? With teams that are onboarding into braze are concerned about lack of visibility and analytics from custom event properties, this becomes a difficult discussion at times. How does Braze support insights and analysis for custom events and what's your experience navigating this. Thanks heaps and really appreciate all your inputs.