What event should i use for sending a "button pressed" event on Firebase Analytics

Question

The one I found most suitable is SELECT_CONTENT, but as the doc says:

Select Content event. This general purpose event signifies that a user has selected some content of a certain type in an app. The content can be any object in your app. This event can help you identify popular content and categories of content in your app.

I'm moving my GA events to FB and I wish to keep the comfortable format I have:
screen_name (category) | button_name (action) | value (opt_value)

How can I achieve this? I know I can just create custom events with the screen name and custom param for the button name and value but then my params won't be available in the FB dashboard unless I use the value param which is an int (I need a string) as written here and I'll need to create from advance an audience for every button so I could filter by it later, which is completely not making any sense (!).

Also, I don't want to integrate with BigQuery at the moment.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The built-in Firebase Analytics events are structured more around key actions the user can take within the app. For example, there might be multiple buttons or UI widgets that could be used to share content, so these could be tied to the SHARE event.

Therefore, I would recommend looking through the built-in events and using them where appropriate for any button presses you have.

If those don't suffice and you want to track more, the SELECT_CONTENT is quite a general purpose event that you can map in any way you see fit. For example, you could set the CONTENT_TYPE to say, "button" and ITEM_ID to the name of the button. While this is not the main purpose of this event, it should work for what you're after.

The last and most flexible option is a custom event with custom params, however as you noted, only the VALUE param will show in the built-in Firebase dashboard so for this approach you would need to use BigQuery to retrieve the data and therefore not very useful for your situation.