Event Explorer

The Event Explorer lets you browse, search, and analyze all the events being tracked in your product. It's the starting point for understanding your data and discovering insights.

Accessing Event Explorer

Navigate to Analytics → Event Explorer from the sidebar.

Features

Event List

The main view shows all tracked events with key metrics:

Column	Description
Event Name	The name of the tracked event
Total Count	Total number of times this event was triggered
Unique Users	Number of distinct users who triggered this event
Last Seen	When this event was most recently triggered

Click on any event to explore its properties.

Search and Filter

Use the search bar to find specific events by name. This is helpful when you have many events and need to find a specific one.

Event Trends

Select one or more events to see their volume over time:

1. Click the event selector dropdown
2. Choose the events you want to compare
3. Select your preferred metric:
   • Event Count: Total number of events
   • Unique Users: Number of distinct users
4. Choose time granularity:
   • Hourly: Best for recent data (last 24-48 hours)
   • Daily: Best for weekly/monthly views
   • Weekly: Best for long-term trends

Bots are excluded by default

The trend chart toolbar surfaces a small "Bots excluded" hint to remind you that the chart and the table below it filter out events flagged as bot traffic. Opens and clicks fired by mailbox-provider link prefetchers, mail-app preview crawlers, and security scanners no longer inflate engagement metrics out of the box. See Bot exclusion below for the full picture.

Property Breakdown

When you select an event, you can explore its properties:

1. Click on an event row or the filter icon
2. The right panel shows all properties for that event
3. Click on a property to see value breakdown
4. Toggle between pie chart and bar chart views

This helps you understand the distribution of values for each property.

Common Use Cases

Discovering What Events Exist

When you're new to the data or want to audit what's being tracked:

1. Leave the search empty to see all events
2. Sort by "Total Count" to see most common events
3. Sort by "Last Seen" to find recently active events

Finding High-Volume Events

To identify your most triggered events:

1. View the event list sorted by Total Count
2. Select the top events for trend analysis
3. Compare against unique users to understand if volume comes from many users or few power users

Analyzing Event Properties

To understand the context of an event:

1. Select the event you're interested in
2. Click on each property to see value distribution
3. Look for unexpected values or patterns

Example: For a "purchase_completed" event, you might analyze:

• product_category - What categories sell most?
• payment_method - Credit card vs. PayPal usage
• device_type - Mobile vs. desktop purchases

Bot exclusion

Every aggregate analytics surface - Event Explorer's trend chart, dashboard widgets, the campaign detail page, and journey analytics - excludes bot-flagged events by default. This prevents bots from inflating your engagement numbers.

What gets flagged as a bot

The platform flags events fired by:

• Machine opens - an email open fetched by a machine, not read by a person:
  • Prefetch: any open within 5 seconds of the send. Nobody has opened and read a message that fast; a mail proxy or filter has fetched its images.
  • Apple Mail Privacy Protection: an open from Apple's published relay addresses, whatever the timing. With Privacy Protection on, Apple loads every image whether or not the person reads the message. Apple's list also covers iCloud Private Relay, so it is applied to opens only, never to clicks.
  • Gmail's image proxy: Gmail fetches images as a message arrives and again when the person opens it, so a Gmail proxy open within 20 seconds of the send is a machine open, and a later one is a real open.
  • Outdated browsers: a browser reporting Chrome older than version 80 (2020). Real browsers update themselves; security scanners keep an old, fixed signature. Applies to opens and clicks.
• Outlook Safe Links and other mail security scanners that fetch images and links before delivery
• Mail-app preview crawlers that fetch images and links to render notification previews
• Security scanners that follow URLs in inbound email to check for phishing
• Link scanners that look like a person - a mail filter that opens every link seconds after delivery from a normal desktop browser. A click is counted as a bot when it comes within 10 seconds of the send, or when the same person clicks 3 or more different links of one message, each within 15 seconds of the last. The whole burst is then the scanner's: the clicks before the third link and an open up to 60 seconds before the burst are flagged too, with the reason "Part of a security-scanner burst"
• Headless browser fingerprints typical of automated tooling

Every open and click also records who fetched it: mailClient (gmail_proxy, apple_mpp, yahoo_proxy, outlook, scanner, prefetch, browser or unknown), the user agent, and sinceSendMs (milliseconds from the send to the event). A person's timeline shows it as Opened by - for example "Gmail image proxy", "Apple Mail Privacy Protection" or "Browser - Chrome on macOS" - and marks a machine open as Machine open with its reason. A proxy's or scanner's own device is never recorded as the person's platform. The IP address is never stored; it is only checked against Apple's address list.

Where bot exclusion applies

Surface	Bots excluded?
Event Explorer trend chart	Yes (with "Bots excluded" hint)
Event Explorer event list and counts	Yes
Event Explorer property breakdown (both the slice and its denominator)	Yes
Dashboard widgets	Yes
Campaign detail page metrics	Yes
Journey analytics	Yes
Per-user event timelines	No - bots are tagged but still shown
Compliance / data exports	No - every event is exported

There is one definition of "bot" behind all of these, and it covers both the current $is_bot property and the legacy isBot spelling, so an older event cannot slip past by being written under the previous name.

The exclusion is purely a dashboard concern, not a data-retention one. Bot-flagged events are still recorded; they just don't count toward aggregate metrics by default.

Date Range

Use the date picker in the top right to adjust the analysis period. The event list and trends will update to show data only from the selected range.

Best Practices

1. Start broad, then narrow: Begin by exploring all events, then focus on specific ones
2. Compare events: Select multiple related events to see relative volumes
3. Check property coverage: Look for events with missing or null properties
4. Monitor new events: Sort by "Last Seen" to catch newly implemented tracking

Related

• Custom Events - Learn how to track custom events
• Funnel Analysis - Use events in conversion funnels
• Creating Segments - Build audiences from these events