People, Events and Properties

People

The basic unit in KISSmetrics is a person. People within KISSmetrics means people - not visits or sessions. Think of a person as an actual human user of your site. When you view your reports, most of your reports are going to be about people. People have one or more identities. These identities are either created automatically by KISSmetrics (which we refer to as an anonymous identity), or they can be passed in by you (which we refer to as a named identity). Examples of named identities include e-mail addresses, user names, Facebook ids, etc. KISSmetrics will attempt to pick up named identities when it can. It will also take care of managing and tying together these identities for you automatically. To summarize a person within KISSmetrics has:

• one or more anonymous or named identities
• a series of events they have performed
• a collection of properties that have been assigned to them (see below)

Setting an identity in KISSmetrics is easy, you just call the identify method. Below is an example with our Javascript API:

_kmq.push(['identify', 'bob@bob.com']);

For more information on the identify method as well as examples in other programming languages, please see API Methods.

Events

People perform events on your site. An event is an action that can be taken, such as Viewed Homepage, Completed Signup, Clicked Pay Button or Invited Friend. You’ll want to track the events that are important and meaningful for your site. With KISSmetrics you can use our Event Library to create new events without a developer or you can use any of our APIs. An event consists of:

• a unique name that you provide (e.g. Viewed Homepage). This is limited to 255 chars and all commas (,), and colons (:) will automatically be changed to spaces (KISSmetrics will convert foo:bar,baz to foo bar baz). There is a limit on all accounts of 65,535 unique event names. If you have a Viewed Homepage event and a Signed Up event you have used 2 of your 65,535 event names - each of these events could happen millions of times without issue. If you think your product will exceed the limit on number of event names there is likely a better way to track the data you want to track and we recommend you contact us.
• a timestamp of when the event happened (which is automatically assigned, but can be overridden - see API Specifications)
• a person who did the event (which is automatically assigned to the current identity)
• a series of optional properties that you can define (see below)

Recording an event in KISSmetrics is easy, you just call the record method. Below are some examples with our Javascript API:

_kmq.push(['record', 'Viewed Homepage']);
_kmq.push(['record', 'Signed Up', {'Plan':'Pro', 'Amount':99.95}]);

For more information on the record method as well as examples in other programming languages, please see API Methods.

Note: There is no need to predefine your events within our user interface. As soon as you start sending us the event it will be available in your reports (within 1-3 hours).

Properties

Properties are where some of the most valuable information you’ll collect will be stored. Properties are very simple. They have:

• a unique name that you provide (e.g. Gender). This is limited to 255 chars and all commas (,), and colons (:) will automatically be changed to spaces (KISSmetrics will convert foo:bar,baz to foo bar baz). There is a limit on all accounts of 65,535 unique property names. If you have a Gender property and an Age property you have used 2 of your 65,535 property names - each of these properties could be set millions of times without issue. If you think your product will exceed the limit on number of property names there is likely a better way to track the data you want to track and we recommend you contact us.
• a value (text or number) that you set (e.g. Male). Property values are limited to 8 KB of data in theory, but in practice are usually restricted to much shorter values due to maximum URL lengths. KISSmetrics does not alter the values you pass in in any way.
• a timestamp of when that property was set (which is automatically assigned)

Both events and people can have properties. When you assign a property for an event it is automatically transferred to the person doing the event. So if you have an event Completed Signup which has the property Gender with a value of Male, then that property will be copied to the person record of the person signing up. This is important because KISSmetrics keeps a whole history of all properties for all of your people. This allows you to create reports on activity your people do based on properties that were set earlier. So you’ll be able to tell how many of your users who did the Completed Signup event later did the Invited Friend event broken down by Gender without the need to pass in the Gender property for every event. Additionally if a user decides to change their gender later KISSmetrics will know during which periods of time they were Male and which periods of time they were Female (assuming you pass us the new value for the Gender property).

Setting properties in KISSmetrics is easy, you just call the set method. Below is an example using our Javascript API:

_kmq.push(['set', {'Landing Page':'design1'}]);

For more information on the set method as well as examples in other programming languages, please see API Methods.

Note: There is no need to predefine your properties within our user interface. As soon as you start sending us the property it will be available in your reports (within 1-3 hours). There is no need for you tell KISSmetrics which properties are numeric and which ones are text, KISSmetrics figures it out for you automatically. For more information see API Tips.

Code Examples

For actual usage examples please see API Methods.

---

Filed under Getting Started