Name events after the user action, not the screen title
Why screen-based event names break funnel reports and how action-oriented naming steadies event tracking strategy.
When teams rush instrumentation before launch, events often inherit whatever the designer named a screen: HomeScreenView, CheckoutPage, ProfileTab. Those labels feel convenient in the ticket. They age poorly once marketing asks whether users completed payment or merely opened the payment layout.
Prefer the action
An event should describe what the person did: checkout_started, payment_submitted, order_confirmed. Screen context can live in a property such as screen_name when you still need it for debugging.
Protect the funnel spine
Pick a short spine of conversion events that never share names with exploratory clicks. If order_confirmed fires only after the warehouse acknowledgment, say so in the tracking plan. Ambiguous spines are the usual reason weekly conversion charts argue with finance.
Leave room for retirement
Document which legacy screen-named events remain for historical charts and which ones stop appearing in new reports. Retirement notes prevent engineers from “helpfully” reintroducing old labels during a hotfix.