The rule of thumb here: keep the number of custom activity types manageable - between 10 and 25. Usually, you can park between these two numbers if you create a custom activity type for each combination of your main taxonomy comprising personas and a list of actions to be tracked.
In our estate agency example:
- Main taxonomy - property interest:
- Type of activity performed:
- Request valuation form submitted
- Request property viewing form submitted
- Property page visit
- Property search
- Property saved to favourites
- Property Search saved to favourites
As a result there will be 12 unique activity types, like: selling property page visit, letting property page visit, selling property search, letting property search, and so on.
One small but important detail worth noting here is that we could have avoided creating duplicates for both selling and letting in our example and stored selling or letting value in the details of the activity. However, this would have made the use of these activities inside other marketing features, like persona scoring rules or marketing automation, more complicated and less visual.
For example, when configuring persona scoring rules for a purchaser, we could either:
- Select "visited selling property page" activity type
- Or, select "visited property page", and configure further condition "where property page is selling"
The second option is less attractive because:
- Further conditional checks could affect the performance on high traffic websites.
- It's less visual in the DXP admin. In persona scoring rules list, activity log, and other places, these extra conditions are not displayed, hence you have to expand the specific rule to notice the difference.