What is Autocapture?
Automatic collection of clicks, pageviews, and form interactions without per-element instrumentation. Fast to start but noisy: retroactive data comes with vague names and mystery events that explicit tracking would have labeled.
Related terms
Event Tracking
Recording user actions as timestamped events with properties, the raw material of product analytics. Clean event tracking answers what users do before asking why; replays and surveys explain the motivations behind the counts.
Explicit Events
Hand-defined tracking calls placed at meaningful product moments: signup completed, checkout started, invite sent. Explicit events cost engineering time upfront and pay back in clean names and trustworthy funnels.
Event Taxonomy
The naming contract for analytics: object-action conventions, required properties, and ownership per event. Taxonomies prevent the analytics swamp where three teams log the same signup three different ways.
Cohort Analysis
Grouping users by shared start time or behavior, then tracking each group retention or revenue over its own lifetime. Cohorts reveal whether product changes help new users or just reflect older, stickier ones.
Hypothesis
A falsifiable prediction written before an experiment: changing X will move metric Y by a stated direction. Hypotheses force teams to name the mechanism, which makes both wins and flat results interpretable.
Randomization
Assigning users to test variants by chance so groups differ only randomly. Sound randomization is what lets an A/B result claim causation instead of correlation with pre-existing user differences.