Property Value

A property value is the actual content a property holds for a given event or user — for example the category property's value being 'shoes'.

If a property is the name of a dimension, a property value is what splits the report into comparable groups; breaking down an event by a property means counting it per distinct value. The key concept for the health of that breakdown is cardinality — the number of distinct values a property has: low cardinality such as device type (a few values) makes a useful breakdown, but very high cardinality such as an order id or a full URL with parameters creates thousands of single-member groups that show no pattern and only weigh down storage. A common trap is inconsistent values for one concept: 'Tehran', 'tehran' and 'تهران' are counted as three values and the real city fragments into three, so value consistency matters as much as type correctness.