Overview

The Data Tracking Interface Asset enables experience designers to log events and access the resulting data points for visualization and analysis via Intuiface Charts & Dashboard or virtually any third-party analytics, marketing automation, or data warehousing tool on the market.

Intuiface Platform plans determine the number of Players that can collect data and the data point storage limit for the Intuiface account. See our article about Analytics tiering for more details.

Adding the Data Tracking Interface Asset to Your Experience

In Composer, on the Interface Assets panel, click the "Add an Interface Asset" button. In the Select an Interface Asset panel that just appeared, select the Data Tracking option in the Analytics category and then click the "Add" button.

Automatically Logged Events

Two sets of events can be automatically logged if the Data Tracking Interface Asset is present.

• Experience Started and Experience Stopped
  • The moment an experience is run in Composer or Player, the Experience Started event is logged. The moment an experience is stopped, the Experience Stopped event is logged. (If an experience crashes, the Experience Stopped event won't be logged.)
  • By default, these events are logged. In Edit Mode, use the Properties panel or the X-Ray panel to turn their collection on or off. At runtime, you can turn this logging on and off using actions - see below for details.

• Scene Entered and Scene Left
  • The moment a scene is entered, the Scene Entered event is logged. The moment a scene is left, the Scene Left event is logged.
  • By default, these events are not logged as - for a large and/or active deployment - these events could generate a large number of data points. In Edit Mode, use the Properties panel or the X-Ray panel to turn their collection on or off. At runtime, you can turn this logging on and off using actions - see below for details.

Data points representing both Experience Stopped and Scene Left have an associated Elapsed Time value measured in seconds.

Manually Logging an Event

The Data Tracking Interface Asset introduces a set of actions that can be used with any trigger. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of triggers and actions, see this article.

1. Specify the trigger you will use to log an event.
   For example, perhaps you used a button to play a video named "Service Overview".
   
   
   
2. For an action, choose the Data Tracking Interface Asset as the target and "Log event" as the action. Continuing this example, in the image below, we're using the button to both play the video and log this event
   
   
   
3. Type a name for the event in the "Event Name" dropdown list. All previously used Event Names will be available for reuse. You can also use binding to specify a name.
   For this example, we call the event "Video Played".
   
   
   
4. Optionally, specify one or more parameters. Use these parameters to add additional context for the event. The value of each parameter can be entered directly or accessed via binding,
   Here we use the System Info Interface Asset to get the city name. We gave this parameter the name "Location".
   

That's it! Now, every time the button is pushed, a data point will be created with an Event Name of "Video Played" and one parameter named "Location" whose value is the name of the city in which your device is located.

Predefined Triggers

The Data Tracking Interface Asset itself has two sets of predefined triggers. These triggers are not automatically logged - you must log them manually - but their names are predetermined.

• Session Started and Session Stopped
  • See the session section below for details.
• Logging Paused and Logging Resumed
  • See the next section for details.

Starting and Stopping Event Logging

The Data Tracking Interface Asset itself includes the actions Pause logging and Resume logging.

• Pause logging: Disables all automatically logged events - with one exception - and uses of the Log event, Start new session and Stop current session actions throughout the experience.
  • Even if logging is paused, if the experience is stopped, Composer/Player will still record Scene Left and Experience Stopped events.
• Resume logging: Enables all automatically logged events and uses of the Log event, Start new session and Stop current session actions throughout the experience.

By default, logging is enabled.

Additional actions enable you to control whether Experience Started/Stopped and Scene Entered/Left should be logged..

• Include experience started & stopped events: Data points will be created every time an experience is started and stopped. That is a max of two data points per experience run. Logging is on by default.
• Exclude experience started & stopped events: Data points will not be created when the experience is started and stopped.
• Include scene navigation events: Data points will be created every time a scene is entered or left. This is the default state. Will apply to all future navigation events until the Exclude action is triggered.
• Exclude scene navigation events: Data points will not be created whenever a scene is entered or left. Will apply to all future navigation events until the Include action is triggered.

Creating Sessions

The Data Tracking Interface Asset includes actions enabling the identification of a session. A "session" is a collection of events associated with a single, shared context. It could be a user, a time of day, a sales pitch, etc.. By labeling sessions, you can identify patterns across multiple sessions, patterns that can have business relevance.

For details, see the article about working with sessions.

Important Notes

• Up to two minutes can elapse between the Log Event action (and automatically logged events) in a running Intuiface experience and the availability of the associated data for export or for viewing within a dashboard.
• A compression rate of 98% is applied prior to data point transfer from Composer/Player to the Intuiface Analytics Data Hub. This not only speeds data transfer but it minimizes the consumption of data plan limits imposed by 3G/4G service providers.
• If an experience crashes, data points collected over the previous 60 seconds could be lost.
• Data transfers from Composer and Player to the Analytics Data Hub occur over HTTPS.
• Nothing prevents you from collecting confidential information. Be careful about who has access to your collected data points.