---
title: "Event Taxonomy"
canonical_url: https://ampl.webclat.com/glossary/event-taxonomy
description: "An event taxonomy is the naming and structure system for analytics events - conventions, property standards, and the governance that keeps it alive."
source: Webclat | Amplitude Solutions (official Amplitude partner, independent consultancy)
---

# Event Taxonomy

**Definition:** An event taxonomy is the naming and structural system for a product's analytics events: the convention every event name follows (commonly Object-Action, like 'Report Exported'), the standard property vocabulary shared across events, and the categorization that keeps hundreds of events findable. It is the grammar that makes event data readable by humans, and increasingly by AI assistants.

## What does a good taxonomy look like?

One casing and one grammatical pattern for all names; properties reused across events rather than reinvented ('plan' means the same thing everywhere); values from controlled lists, not free text; and a home in version control or a data-management tool - not in one analyst's memory. The test: a new PM can guess an event's name correctly on the first try.

## How do taxonomies decay, and what prevents it?

Decay arrives via speed: a deadline instruments 'signup_new_v2_final' and nobody deletes it. Prevention is mechanical, not moral - naming rules enforced at the pipeline edge, new events requiring a tracking-plan row, quarterly pruning of unqueried events. Governance features exist in Amplitude for exactly this; using them is the habit.

> Example convention: Object-Action in Title Case ('Invoice Sent', 'Trial Started'), snake_case properties (invoice_value, trial_length_days), platforms named in a source property - one line of grammar that scales to a thousand events.

## FAQ

### How do I fix a broken event taxonomy without losing history?

Consolidate behind a migration map: define the clean event set, alias or transform old names into new ones where the platform allows, keep a translation table for historical queries, and quarantine (don't delete) the junk. Rebuilding trust takes one clean quarter; deleting history takes it forever.

In practice: Taxonomy health is the first dimension our free audit scores - and the commonest reason instances get rescued. (https://ampl.webclat.com/services/amplitude-audit)