Send custom events

Autocapture records what happened on screen: a page view, a click on "Continue", a form sent. It cannot know what that click meant in your product. A custom event names it: checkout_started, invite_sent, report_exported.

With named events, you can answer questions such as these:

Custom events also give the AI judge evidence. The default rubric asks what the person came to do (Intent). It also asks how the session ended (Outcome). The judge answers mostly from the session's events.

Without custom events, the judge sees page paths, clicks, sent forms and errors. It must guess what they mean in your product. With custom events, it reads checkout_completed or payment_declined.

1. Your code calls the SDK's capture or track method with an event name. Properties are optional.
2. Sequential stores the name exactly as sent. It gives the event the class Custom, because the name is not one of the SDK's own event names. See Events.
3. The name becomes a value of the Event Name field. You can filter on it in Events, Sessions and Users. You can use it as a step in Funnels and Flows.
4. When Sequential judges a session, each custom event becomes one line for the judge: the name, then its properties as key=value pairs.

Names not to write, for each naming rule:

• Send each event once, from the code where the moment happens.
• If one action means two things, send both events.
• Filters and funnel steps match the name exactly. Checkout Started and checkout_started are two different events.
• Without failure events, the judge can only guess the outcome from behaviour.
• Name a failure after what failed, for example checkout_failed or export_failed. Use a specific outcome such as payment_declined only when the app can tell.
• Send only the few moments that show if your product helped a person.
• Do not send events that autocapture already records, such as page views and button clicks. button_clicked adds nothing. What each SDK supports lists what each SDK autocaptures.
• Send checkout_completed after your server confirms the payment, not when the button is pressed. Send export_failed from the error branch.
• In component code, make sure that a re-render does not send the event again.
• An upgrade paid through checkout is a checkout_completed and a plan_upgraded. Then each name means the same thing in every funnel and count.
• A name with an id in it is a new event every time.
• Steps and filters cannot match an event's properties. To use a moment as its own funnel step, give it its own event name. Send plan_upgraded and plan_downgraded, not plan_changed with direction: 'up'.

Names that SDKs use. Names that start with $ belong to the SDKs. Some plain names do too:

Sequential gives an event with one of these names the class of that SDK's own events. It gives some of them the class System and hides them.

Names that Sequential hides. Sequential hides a fixed set of names that carry little meaning. It hides them in the Events list, from any SDK and in any letter case. A replay's Insights does not pass them to the judge. For example: scroll, scroll_depth, hover, resize, focus, blur, heartbeat, ping, idle, set, change, session_start, session_end, app_backgrounded and feature_flag_called.

Sequential still stores the event. All +N above the list shows it. Names like checkout_started and report_exported are on neither list.

Long names. The judge may see only the first 60 characters of a name.

• Other useful properties are format, step and item_count.
• Mixpanel drops properties whose keys start with $. The judge and the property preview on the Events page skip them.
• The full list of personal words is in Which properties the judge reads.
• If the app has no error code at that point, send the HTTP status or a small fixed set that you define, for example network or http_402. Do not send the message that your server returned, because messages vary and can contain personal data.
• Sequential stores a value written as a date and time as a date. See Which properties the judge reads.

The judge skips a property if its key contains one of these words: email, mail, phone, tel, password, pass, token, secret, address, addr, name, ip, user, username, account, ssn, iban, card. Sequential calls this the key filter.

Sequential splits a key into words at _, -, ., spaces and capital letters. So the judge skips plan_name, userRole and account_type. It reads plan, role, workspace_tier and description.

Dates. Sequential stores a value written as a date and time, such as 2026-10-01T09:00:00Z, as a date. Watch and Ask do not pass it to the judge. Raw event data still shows it.

• The key filter applies wherever the judge reads events from storage: Watch, Ask and the rubric's Try it preview.
• The Insights tab of a replay builds its own list in the browser. There, the judge receives up to three of each custom event's properties, whatever their names. See AI and third parties.

If a property value is a web address, Sequential replaces its query values with [redacted] before it stores the value. It keeps marketing parameters such as utm_*. This does not filter personal data. Keep personal data out of properties. See What Sequential keeps from page URLs.

Dropped events

• If a call with a $ name was queued before the SDK loaded, the SDK skips it silently. It does not throw.
• If the properties cannot be turned into JSON, the SDK drops the event silently. Examples are a BigInt or an object that refers to itself.
• In TypeScript, sequential.js has no published type declarations. Read it through window with a narrow local type, as the Sequential SDK page describes.

Super properties

• Super properties are for properties that belong on every event. An example is the experiment variant that a visitor is in.
• The SDK adds super properties to every later event from the page, autocaptured events included.
• If capture() passes the same key, the capture() value wins.
• Super properties come before the event's own properties. The hover preview on the Events page and a replay's Insights show only the first three. The judge's 80-character line fills in the same order. So each super property can take the place of one of the event's own properties.
• sequential.unregister('experiment') removes one super property.
• sequential.reset() clears them all. It also starts a new anonymous visitor and a new session. So call it only on sign-out.

PostHog. Sequential keeps the properties on the event. In a mobile app, use the capture call of PostHog's SDK for your platform. See Mobile apps.

Mixpanel. Mixpanel drops properties whose keys start with $, except autocapture's element properties.

Amplitude. Leave batching (useBatch) off. Batched events do not reach Sequential today.

Pendo. Pendo support is the least proven. The event should arrive with your event name. This has not been checked against a live Pendo agent yet. If your events appear with the name track, the event name was lost.

Sequential stores Pendo properties as user properties, not on the event. So the judge's line for a Pendo event is the name alone.

• The dates are at the top of the query card on Events.
• All +N is above the list.
• The date range includes its whole end date, in UTC. So by default, it includes today's events.
• When you click in the Value box, it lists the event names that Sequential has received, most frequent first.
• To see the properties, click the icon at the end of the row (Event details). The Properties table lists them. Raw event data shows the stored event.

1. Open Funnels and click + Add step.
2. In the new step, click + Condition.
3. For the Field, pick Event Name.
4. For the Value, type your event name.
5. Add the next step in the same way.
6. Click Run.

• There is no "contains" or "starts with" match on an event name.
• Event Property has a type and an operator, for example Number > 5 or Text contains pro. is on Text matches the exact text of the whole value. See Property conditions.
• On the Retention page, set the start event or the return event to your custom event, with an Event Name condition. For example: people who signed up came back to invoice_created on day 7. With no conditions, each of them is any event.
• If a session is longer than 255 events, Sequential leaves out plain clicks first. Custom events are among the next events that it leaves out.
• Custom events give the judge evidence. How much one event changes an answer depends on the model and on your questions.

To see a count per event name, open /events?breakdown_by=event_name. To choose the dates, add &from_date= and &to_date=, each written YYYY-MM-DD in UTC. The range includes the to_date day.

The grouped by list on Events does not offer Event Name.