--- title: "How to Create a Product Analytics Tracking Plan | Step-by-Step Guide" description: "Learn how to create a tracking plan that connects business goals to actionable product data. Step-by-step guide with examples, templates, and common mistakes to avoid." url: "https://donux.com/blog/how-to-start-product-analytics-tracking-plan" language: "en" authors: ["Giustino"] published: "2026-03-22T00:00:00.000Z" updated: "2026-03-22T00:00:00.000Z" --- Product Analytics # How to Create a Product Analytics Tracking Plan (Step-by-Step Guide) The second step of a successful Product Analytics strategy is a well-though tracking plan ![Line chart illustration showing structured growth path for product analytics tracking plan](https://images.app.donux.com/unsafe/blog/how-to-start-product-analytics-tracking-plan/ijS1NAr30UDy7eACQ2bkVLKXRg.png) A tracking plan maps your business goals to specific events and properties you'll track in your analytics tool. Start with your goals, turn them into questions, identify the user flows that answer those questions, then define 10-15 core events with clear naming conventions. Without one, you'll drown in data that nobody uses. Welcome to the second episode of our mini-series about Product Analytics. In our first article, we defined our business goals. Today, we'll cover how to create a tracking plan and prepare for actual implementation. If you skip this step, you'll end up with a Mixpanel or Amplitude dashboard full of events that nobody knows how to interpret. We've seen this happen across dozens of the 80+ SaaS companies we've worked with - teams track everything, then struggle to answer even basic questions about user behavior. A tracking plan prevents that. Welcome to the second episode of our mini-series about Product Analytics. [In our last article](https://donux.com/blog/how-to-start-product-analytics-business-goals), we started defining our business goals; today, we’ll see how to create a tracking plan and prepare for the actual implementation. As a product analytics manager, you are responsible for ensuring that the correct data is collected and tracked to gain actionable insights into how your product is being used. To do this, you need to create a tracking plan that outlines what data needs to be collected and how it should be tracked. ## What is a tracking plan? A product analytics tracking plan (or simply a tracking plan) is a document that helps you map your business goals to specific events and properties that you want to track. Collecting and analyzing data from these events and properties will help answer questions about your business goals. Your implementation plan is also a map for your developers when they implement a product analytics platform. ## Why create a tracking plan at all? There are so many things that you could track. If you track everything without knowing upfront the types of questions you want to be able to answer, you’re going to end up with a lot of data and no idea of what to do with it. A tracking plan helps you understand your business’s goals, questions and answers and focus on collecting the data that will help you understand your business’s progression. ## A living document A tracking plan starts with the business goals you defined in the previous step (check out our article [“Getting started with product analytics: define business goals”](https://donux.com/blog/how-to-start-product-analytics-business-goals)). 1. For each goal, note down the key questions you want to understand about your product and the user behavior in your product. 2. Then, identify the user flows or behavior patterns that will help you answer each question. 3. Finally, pinpoint the specific events and their related properties that map to those flows. Like many other product-related assets, the tracking plan is a living document that will evolve over time. It will start as a tracking plan you create upfront, which your developer can implement. However, as you make changes to your product, the tracking plan will need to be amended and updated with new events and properties that become important. Some examples of changes to the product can include: - flows being altered within the product, - revisions being made to key behaviors that are being driven through the product, - new features being launched. ## How to create a tracking plan Let’s see how we could approach a hypothetical project management app tracking plan. Imagine that our goal is to have more active users in the app. Our first objective should be to identify the key activity that will accurately indicate that we are helping our users achieve this goal. In this case, we might assume that if a user invites another user, they get value out of the product. For this reason we could decide to track an event called “Member Invited”. However, this is not enough! We also need to track what the user does before they invite someone (to optimize that funnel) and what the user does afterward (to ensure they continue to get value from the product). Therefore, we should add two other events to our “Member Invited” event: “Account created” and “Workspace configured”. These are the three key events we’ll track in our flow. Tracking events allows you to understand why people are more or less successful at completing each step. For example, if you find out that users who have a hard time configuring their workspaces are also less likely to invite someone, it might be worth thinking about how to optimize the “configure your workspace” experience. We would have this situation: - Goal: Have more active users - User flow: Account created -> Workspace configured -> Member invited - Events 1. Account created 2. Workspace configured 3. Member invited Now for each of the events we have listed here, we have multiple properties that we want to track. These properties provide details about the event that might give you insight when doing your analysis later. This would bring us to this: - Goal: Have more active users - User flow: Account created -> Workspace configured -> Member invited - Events 1. Account created Property 1: plan | Example Value: (trial, premium) Property 2: company\_id | Example Value: (12342) 2. Workspace configured Property 1: company\_id | Example Values: (12342) Property 2: onboarding\_variant | Example Values: (Test A, Test B, Control) Property 3: plan | Example Values: (trial, premium) 3. Member invited Property 1: invite\_method | Example Values: (Email, Url, QR Code) When defining properties, something to keep in mind is the human desire to track absolutely everything. If you fall into this trap, you risk having so much data that it becomes hard to extract the meaningful pieces of the data that drive impact. ## What to include in a tracking plan It’s helpful to note there’s no one right way to fill out a tracking plan. You can define the triggers, events, and properties you want to track, and that could be it. If you have the technical experience, you could also fill in implementation considerations. The great thing about a tracking plan is it provides a central place for you to have a constructive conversation with your technical team, even if you’re not very technical. So, what should be included in a tracking plan? These could be good default values: - Event Name: The name of the event to trigger - Related business goal: What KPI/Goal is associated with that event - Trigger: When the event should be triggered - Event Definition: A description of the event - Property list: with name, type, and definition - Sample Values: One of the most important fields: it can solve many discussions or misunderstandings - Implemented?: A simple true/false field - Notes A simple spreadsheet can get you a long way before you need something else, so I would advise starting with that. If you don’t want to start from scratch, [Mixpanel](https://mixpanel.app.box.com/s/1xou3n8z6a14igg3hiiuxs7ur15cii4y) and [Segment](https://segment.com/docs/connections/spec/) have great templates you can use. ## Conclusion A good tracking plan is a stepping stone for a successful product analytics strategy. Linking your events to your business goals will help you focus on the correct data to track and will avoid many headaches during analysis 😅 In [the following article](https://donux.com/blog/how-to-start-product-analytics-insights) of this mini-series, we will see how to get insights from a correctly implemented tracking plan, looking at some examples using Mixpanel. If you enjoyed this article, please share it on Linkedin or Twitter and let us know your feedback at [hello@donux.com](mailto:hello@donux.com). ## Questions, answered. ### How long should a tracking plan be? Start small. 10-15 core events is a good starting point for most SaaS products. You can always add more as you identify gaps. A tracking plan with 200 events that nobody maintains is less useful than 15 well-documented events that your team actively uses. ### Who should own the tracking plan? The product manager or product analytics lead typically owns it. But engineering, design, and data teams should all contribute. The tracking plan works best as a shared document, not something one person maintains in isolation. ### When should I create a tracking plan? Before any analytics implementation. If you're already tracking events without a plan, it's not too late. Audit what you have, clean up naming inconsistencies, and document everything in a tracking plan going forward. ### What tools work best for tracking plans? Google Sheets is the most common starting point. For larger teams, tools like Avo, Amplitude Data, or Mixpanel Lexicon can enforce your plan programmatically and catch errors before deployment. ### Do I need a separate tracking plan for mobile and web? Not necessarily. Use one tracking plan with a "platform" or "source" property on each event to distinguish between mobile and web. This keeps your event definitions consistent and makes cross-platform analysis possible. ### How often should I update my tracking plan? Review it at least once per quarter, or whenever you ship a major feature. Remove events nobody looks at, add events for new flows, and verify that existing events still fire correctly. Treat it like a product backlog, not a static document. ## Put it into practice. [Talk to Donux](https://donux.com/contact-us) [Getting Started with Product Analytics: How to Define Business Goals That Drive Real Insights](https://donux.com/blog/how-to-start-product-analytics-business-goals) [Getting Started with Product Analytics: How to Get Insights from Your Data](https://donux.com/blog/how-to-start-product-analytics-insights)