Event Properties vs. Actor Properties [v5]
One of the most common questions asked by users is what is the difference between event properties and actor properties? In this article, we aim to provide further insight into both properties as well as the differences between the two.
Event Properties
An event property can be a reference to data columns, a reference to values derived from lookups, or a logical expression evaluating multiple data columns.
Event properties are critical in organizing and getting specific with your data set. You can add new roll-up columns, create static filter sets, rename columns or values and have them as persistent saved objects, and more. Event properties are solely concerned with events and event meta-data.
An event property that uses filter is an event property with one specified value.
An event property that uses label is an event property with more than one specified value.
An event property that uses calculate is an event property that performs a mathematical function.
You can read more about the methods used in creating event properties in our Build an Event Property article.
Actor Properties
Actor properties can be created by users to allow the editing and creation of objects related directly to actors and the events they perform. Actor properties can be thought of as segments of users who do similar behaviors or are in similar demographics.
An actor property that uses the show method aggregates over the events that belong to each actor and produces a value for each actor.
An actor property that uses label, calculate, or filter performs comparisons or arithmetic with other actor properties and literal values.
You can read more about the methods used in creating actor properties in our Create an Actor Property article.
What is The Difference?
The big difference is scope.
The scope of a query refers to the type of entity an aggregation in Scuba iterates over to produce a result. An aggregation can iterate over events, actors, or flows. It follows that Scuba's three query scopes are called event scope, actor scope, and flow scope.
In general, every Scuba query or measure involves some sort of aggregation. Here are some aggregations (with example context) that you can specify in Scuba:
count unique users that viewed the support page
average session durations for Android devices
sum play time per music service
We’re going to focus on the first two to dig deeper into the differences between event and actor properties.
Event Scope
Event properties are used to filter or calculate on a per-event basis over time, meaning they are centered around the actions themselves: what was done. When you create a query that iterates directly over the events imported to a Scuba table or dataset, the query is in event scope.
You can visualize the data aggregated over in an event scope query as a spreadsheet or relational database table, with one row per event, and each column corresponding to either a raw event property imported directly from the source data, or a manual event property created in Scuba.
Actor Scope
Actor properties are used to filter or calculate on a per-actor basis over time, meaning they are centered around the Actor: who did the action. When you create a query that iterates directly over the actors contained within the Scuba table or dataset, the query is in actor scope.
Unlike in event scope, the actor-based tables that an actor scope query iterates over are not stored on disk or generated during the Scuba import process. Instead, Scuba produces an actor-based table from a subquery over the event data, and then produces results from the actor-based table.
To learn more about scope and how to resolve scope mismatches, please read our Understand Scope article.