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Flite Metrics 3 > Framework

Event Relationships

Take a look at the diagram below. It shows a hypothetical user’s interaction with a simple ad that includes a header and a gallery navigation component with a video and a feed inside it.

The diagram shows a complete and detailed account of the user’s session. First, the user hovers over the ad, clicks the video play button, and watches somewhere between ¼ and ½ the video before pausing it. Next, the user clicks the gallery navigation button to view the feed, selects a feed item, scrolls through it, and clicks the Back button. Finally, the user scrolls the feed, selects another feed item, scrolls through it, and clicks the “Read More” button to click through to the item’s source.

Having this kind of information about each ad session is very powerful and paves the way for some very interesting analytics. The concept of event relationships, which is built into Flite’s metrics framework, is what allows us to create this kind of diagram for any ad session. There are three types of event relationships on display in the diagram above:

  • Sequence: The order in which events happened. In the diagram above, event sequence goes from top to bottom, and left to right.
  • Context: The idea that certain events happen within the context of another event. In the diagram above, context is indicated by indentation. For instance, the Item Select and Scroll events occur within the context of the Feed View event.
  • Trigger: The idea that certain events in the ad are triggered by other events. In our diagram, triggers are indicated by arrows. So, the play button click was the trigger for the video starting to play, and the navigation button click was the trigger for the feed being displayed.

We discuss each of these three concepts in more detail below.

Sequence

Each event tracked by a Flite ad has a sequence number associated with it. The sequence number denotes the event’s order with respect to the other events in the same session. Event 0 is always the Impression event that is logged when the ad is loaded. Each consecutive event is given the next available integer number.

Sequence numbers allow us to understand the order in which a user performed various interactions with the ad. Contexts and triggers, which we discuss below, are actually recorded using sequence numbers.

Context

Event B is said to be in the context of Event A when Event B cannot happen without Event A happening first, and understanding Event A is necessary to fully understand Event B. For example, you cannot pause or mute a video without playing that video first. Therefore Interactions like pausing, seeking, and muting a video, as well as Notation events that indicate the video’s progress, always happen in the context of the video play Content event.

Flite ads use sequence numbers to record an event’s context. Contexts are typically Content events, though an Impression can provide the context as well. For instance, the Component List Notation that is logged when an ad loads is logged in the context of the ad Impression.

Context lends a natural hierarchy to the events that happen during a session, and provide an additional dimension when analyzing event data. Filtering sessions by context allows you to zero in on a particular part of your ad (e.g. a Twitter feed or a YouTube video), and understand exactly how users interact with it.

Trigger

Event A is said to trigger Event B when Event A directly leads to Event B. Only events of type Content have triggers, and those triggers are typically Interactions. For instance, a video play Content event may be triggered by a button click Interaction. However, for automatic events, the trigger may not be an Interaction. For instance, suppose you have a video in your ad that begins playing as soon as the ad loads. The trigger in this case is the ad Impression itself.

Flite ads use sequence numbers to record an event’s trigger.

In the Flite metrics framework, many important things that may seem like a single event at first glance are actually tracked as two events – an Interaction that tracks something the user does, and a Content event that tracks what that Interaction caused to happen. For instance:

  • When a user clicks on a link to view some content outside of the ad, a Clickthrough Interaction is tracked when the user clicks the link, and a Clickthrough Content event is tracked when the clickthrough content loads.
  • When a user clicks the Play button to start video play, a Play click Interaction is recorded, along with a Play Content event.
  • When a user clicks a gallery thumbnail to load a different item in the gallery, a navigation click Interaction is always logged, and depending on the item that was loaded, a Content View event for whatever item came into view (feed, image, etc.) may be logged as well.

Triggers connect these event pairs, with each Content event logging the Interaction that caused it as its trigger. This kind of causality information helps you better understand how users interact with your ads, and can also be very valuable for analytics. For instance, your ad might have multiple actions that result in the same clickthrough URL being opened. That means the same Clickthrough Content event will be tracked with different trigger Interactions, allowing you to easily see which call to action is most effective.