Event & property naming

A short, opinionated style guide for event and property names.

There's no schema enforcement on event or property names — Millimetric will store whatever you send. But analytics taxonomies rot fast unless you have a convention. Here's ours.

Event names

snake_case, past tense, scoped to the actor.

✅  signup
✅  trial_started
✅  checkout_completed
✅  invite_sent
✅  agent_task_completed

❌  Sign Up
❌  signing-up
❌  signupCompleted
❌  Signup Successful

$-prefix is reserved

System events emitted by the SDK or the server start with $. Don't define your own $-events; they're indistinguishable from system ones in the dashboard.

| $pageview | Browser SDK on load and SPA navigation. | | $identify | Server, on POST /v1/identify. |

Verb in the past tense

signup is fine, but signed_up is better. Past tense reads naturally in funnel queries: "users who signed_up then subscribed".

That said, the existing convention in this codebase uses bare nouns/short verbs (signup, purchase, clicked_pricing) — both work. Pick one and stick to it.

Don't pack multiple events into a name

❌  button_clicked_pricing_page_hero
❌  user_logged_in_via_google_oauth

✅  clicked_cta             (with properties: { page: "pricing", section: "hero" })
✅  logged_in               (with properties: { method: "google" })

Property cardinality is cheap. Event-name cardinality is what kills your dashboards.

Roughly 30–50 events is plenty

If you have 200 distinct event names, you almost certainly should have fewer events with more properties.

Property names

snake_case. Type the value. Include units where ambiguous.

✅  amount_cents: 4900
✅  currency: "usd"
✅  duration_ms: 1240
✅  is_first_purchase: true
✅  user_role: "admin"

❌  Amount: "$49.00"
❌  duration: 1.24
❌  firstPurchase: "yes"
❌  Role: "Admin"

Booleans named as questions

is_paid, has_premium, was_invited, did_complete_onboarding. Reads nicely in WHERE clauses.

Units on numbers, always

duration_ms, amount_cents, latency_ms, size_bytes, weight_kg. Pick a unit per metric and never mix.

Money in cents

Or any fixed-precision integer. Never floats for revenue. amount_cents: 4900, plus currency: "usd". Always together.

$-prefix on properties means "ambient context"

The browser SDK adds $viewport_w, $viewport_h, $language, $timezone. Following that convention for your own ambient context ($session_user_role, $build_version) keeps event-specific properties visually distinct from cross-cutting ones.

Conventions tools rely on

If you set these with the listed names, dashboards and MCP tools will Just Work.

Property	Used for
utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term	Classifier (also reads them off url)
fbclid, gclid, ttclid, msclkid, li_fat_id	Classifier
amount_cents + currency	Revenue dashboards (roadmap)
experiment_id + variant	A/B test analysis (roadmap)
plan (string)	Cohort filtering on user-tier
path (on the event itself, not in properties)	Top-paths breakdown

A small starter taxonomy

Steal this for a SaaS product:

Event	When	Key properties
$pageview	every navigation	path, url, referrer (auto-captured)
signup	account created	plan, referral_code, invited
trial_started	trial begins	plan, trial_days
subscription_started	first paid charge	plan, amount_cents, currency, billing_period
subscription_changed	upgrade/downgrade	from_plan, to_plan, amount_cents, currency
feature_used	a notable in-app action	feature, result
invite_sent	user invites a teammate	count
support_ticket_opened	help requested	category, priority
error_shown	user-facing error	error_code, http_status
account_deleted	farewell	reason

For e-commerce, swap signup/trial_*/subscription_* for viewed_product, added_to_cart, removed_from_cart, started_checkout, completed_checkout, refunded. See the E-commerce recipe.

Renaming is a chore — pick now

There's no rename API. Renames happen by:

1. Start emitting the new name.
2. Wait for the retention window to pass (default 90 days).
3. Old events expire, new events have the new name.

Or query both names with a CASE WHEN until the old one rolls off. Easiest by far is to pick a convention before you start and write it down somewhere your team will read it.