Data points are the lifeblood of the Braze experience. Every piece of data being sent to Braze that describes who your users are, their behaviors and actions within your applications and website, are calculated as data points. While data points (attributes and events) are used to track user behavior, create segments, and send targeted messages with Braze, they are also calculated to determine how much you pay for Braze services and overage fees.
What’s Your Allowance?
Every account has a data point budget, so how do you know if you’re on track? You have to be proactive, but it’s pretty simple. Use the Braze Dashboard > Subscriptions and Usage > Total Data Points Usage report to review your contracted data point allotment and usage to date. From here you’ll find your contract start and end dates, allotted data points for the duration of your contract, and total data point usage to date. You will also see the usage per individual App Group.
How Did You Spend It?
A great way to track your usage is to use a spreadsheet that calculates your data points burn rate month-to-month. We did the hard part, so all you need to do is download our Braze Data Point Usage spreadsheet and you can keep track of your data points and email volume usage month-to-month. From the Total Data Points Usage dashboard you also view data point usage by app group.
Understanding where and how your data points are being used can help identify any data anomalies or spikes, or help forecast for planned adjustments. For example, you can see which app groups (e.g. production apps or QA apps) are consuming data points towards your allotment to avoid overages leading to potential additional charges. Within the dashboard, the “App Group Level Data Point Usage by Category” shows a breakdown of how data was consumed – whether by attributes, custom or purchase events, as well as how session starts and ends may impact your overall usage.
You should also get familiar with the “Most Used Events and Attributes by App” dashboard. This gives you an even more granular look (yep, this is for the true data nerds) into which specific events and attributes per app group are consuming data as well as the % of overall usage pre-attribute/event. For example, you can identify if unnecessary updates to default attributes like “first_name” are driving up usage.
Now that you’re enlightened and more aware of the rate your data is being consumed, I bet you want to be able to identify inefficient and costly data processes that may be driving up your usage. Stayed tuned for an upcoming Brazed and Confused article to learn how!