Braze Bread & Butter: Custom Events & Purchase Events [Part 2]

Christmas came early! I bought myself the Nike Air Max 1s and logged it as a Purchase Event in Braze!

🗣️ WATCH FULL YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE 🗣

[Braze-mas 2023, Day 7]

What’s up everyone, my name is Allan, Founder and Consultant at For Now Marketing, and welcome to Day 7 of Braze-mas 2023!

In yesterday’s video, we started talking about Custom Events and how crucial they are in building a successful Braze instance for your marketing team. Let’s talk more about Custom Events, particularly Custom Event Properties, and also dive into Purchase Events, the butter of Braze.

Custom Events Properties

So yesterday, we discussed Nike firing a Custom Event called “clicked_module” for every single clicks of these rectangular modules on their website. I’m sure many of you were wondering: how does Nike know exactly which module was clicked? They don’t want just a generic “clicked_module” data… They want specifics!

Of course, if I were on Nike’s Braze team, I would absolutely want to know which modules were clicked, so we can make some personalized retargeting efforts later on. That’s where Custom Event Properties come in.

According to the Braze docs, Custom Event Properties are Custom Event Metadata, once again metadata is children-data that describe their parent-data, or also called attributes, which are like adjectives that describe something.

So Custom Event Properties or Custom Event Metadata or Custom Event Attributes are additional data that describe that specific instance of the Custom Event.

What does that mean in our context?

That means every time a Nike consumer triggers “clicked_module”, Nike can choose to log additional Custom Event Properties along with the clicked_module Custom Event, to add some additional context on that specific click of the module.

Well what are some examples of Custom Event Properties that could be helpful in our situation?

If you said the timestamp of the Custom Event, that is a great answer and I absolutely agree, but timestamp is actually required with all Custom Events, so that won’t count as one of the Custom Event Properties.

How about module_name? That way, I know exactly which module was clicked in the sea of “clicked_module” Custom Events. Maybe section_title? Top Gifts by Price, Featured, Always Iconic.

Some of these modules have button CTAs. Maybe that could be helpful to log as well.

The nice thing about Custom Event Properties is that they don’t count against your contractual data limit, so you can freely log custom event properties. Custom Events count towards your data points, but not how many Custom Event Properties come with each Custom Event.

Also, do you remember the datatypes that we covered for Custom Attributes a few days ago? Well, Custom Event Properties are also technically attributes. And that means that all the datatype that were available for Custom Attributes, are ALSO available for Custom Event Properties, which is very very cool.

The only thing to note here is that when I do send additional information as a Custom Event Property to my user profile, you can’t actually see those Event Properties. They’re not visible on the user profile, which can sometimes be frustrating for Braze users hoping to check some Event Property values. On the next video, we will cover the only place in the Braze dashboard where you CAN see Event Properties.

Lastly, let’s talk about Purchase Events. Purchase Events are so similar to Custom Events, so we won’t spend too much time here. Purchase Events are also user actions, particularly the action of them purchasing an item. The names of each Purchase Event will be the Product Name or Product ID that the consumer purchased. Just like Custom Events, timestamps are required, and just like Custom Events, Purchase Events can also have Purchase Event Properties. The only two additional requirements for Purchase Events is that they need to have a currency and price associated with this Purchase Event. That makes sense, because it is a Purchase Event after all.

So for me, Christmas came early! I decided to buy myself the Nike Air Max 1s that I’ve been eyeing for $52.97. But silly me, I ordered the wrong size at first, so I did have to make a return, and buy another pair. That was all to show that you can also have negative prices for Purchase Events, and only positive priced Purchase Events count towards the Total Number of Purchases counter here.

Our final note for today, I mentioned that Purchase Events are the butter of Braze. While I think Purchase Events are very cool and can be very helpful, majority of the Braze teams I’ve worked with choose to use Custom Events instead of Purchase Events. For example, they’ll log a Custom Event called purchase_created, along with Custom Event Properties for currency, price, product_id, and all the other information that a Purchase Event typically requires.

This might just be a preference decision, or teams don’t want to introduce another aspect of data, but that is simply the behavior I’ve noticed with many teams I’ve worked with. If you like butter with your bread, I say why not, you just gotta go buy the butter.

Thank you!

That’s it for Day 7.

If you have any questions, please share them in the comments. We’re happy to help! 🙏

If you learned something from this video, please subscribe for more awesome Braze videos in the future!

Thank you for watching, and see you next time!

allan@fornowmarketing.com

fornowmarketing.com