Defined Properties

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.