Silent Tracking

Silent tracking, also known as Phase Zero or Baseline Measurement, is a critical part of program success. It's a recommended project phase where a baseline of real data is collected before starting your gamification program. As its name implies, silent tracking measures activity, but none of Nitro's user-facing elements are activated.

Note: Customers leveraging ETL data ingestion typically do not need to undergo silent tracking. Systems providing ETL data generate historical reports as the basis for benchmarks.

Typically, silent tracking is enabled for three months prior to program kickoff. Collecting and analyzing silent tracking data allows you to calibrate the starting thresholds of missions and rewards so you hit the right level of success. Silent tracking allows you to:

Set benchmarks to validate program success.
Gather user composition and frequency data on user behaviors.
Use metrics to create (or confirm) the motivation structure.
Provide input for points economy and level structure.
Identify areas of program optimization.

Recommended guidelines for implementing silent tracking typically consist of two distinct user provisioning settings. 1) Users are provisioned for action logging and Bunchball analyzes the action data coming out of the program. 2) Users are provisioned for the UI elements once the action logging and data analysis is complete.

Logging action data - Enables a given user in the program the ability to log action data (send actions to Nitro). To log data, the Nitro ID is sent with the /users/{userId}/actions API call. The user is "created" in Nitro the first time an action with that ID is logged.
Enabling UI/UX elements - Enables the UI/UX elements to display to the user. Generally, the entire system and everyone on it is included. However, distinct elements within features, such as events feeds, missions, and so on, can be segmented by groups (if applicable to your program).