HockeyStack Academy 101 - Define Properties
This guide explains how HockeyStack data model works, even with messy datasets that have duplicates and/or no defined relations.
We discussed that each action and entity in HockeyStack can have properties. If goals are nicknames for a group of actions, defined properties are nicknames for a group of properties.
Let’s go back to our Actions table.
This table depicts a list of website sessions from various sources. The properties Source, UTM Source, and UTM Medium have meanings on their own. But they have a much larger meaning when looked at together. For example, a UTM Source = linkedin and UTM Medium = paid_social might mean LinkedIn Ads, and a UTM_Source = empty and Source = facebook.com might mean Facebook Organic.
Let’s say we want to add another column to our table to depict this meaning, which will be called “Channel” Our ruleset will be:
- If UTM Source contains “linkedin” and UTM Medium contains “paid” → LinkedIn Ads
- If UTM Source contains “linkedin” and UTM Medium contains “organic” → LinkedIn Organic
- If UTM Source is empty and Source contains “facebook”, or if UTM Source contains “facebook” and UTM Medium contains “organic” → Facebook Organic
This Channel property doesn’t actually exist in our dataset, but it can be inferred from the list of other properties that our actions have. This is called a “Defined Property”. You can apply the same thing on any Shared Property as well.
For example, a common Defined Company Property to define is “Region”. If your CRM only stores countries, you can create a Defined Company Property that groups relevant countries into regions.
For a ruleset like Country = “Canada” or Country = “United States” → NAM, you can imagine the below Company Properties:
In HockeyStack, navigate to Definitions > Properties.
This page is your property dictionary.
You can click on the + icon on the top right corner to create a new defined property.
Each mapping in a defined property will have:
- A ruleset
- And a value that the ruleset maps to
The ruleset can be constructed using and/or logic using any property in the HockeyStack dataset.
The mapped value can either be:
- A static value
- For example: I want to map Canada and United States to “NAM”
- A dynamic value
- For example: I want to create a property called Resources that stores all my resource interactions. This property will show 1- the URL of the page if the action is a pageview on a resource page, 2- the name of the email, if the action is an email open on an email with a specific subject schema, 3- blank if it’s neither.
High level filters like Action Name, Action Type, or Touchpoint Type are often overlooked by beginners to HockeyStack. In the above case, we wanted to add a specific filter to only include pageview actions, because clicks and form fills might also have a page url. The significance of this becomes clearer when you are doing attribution, where the number of touchpoints is really important.
Touchpoint Type property
Touchpoint Type is an action property that helps distinguish between different categories of sales and marketing actions.
Below is a full list:
