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Contact Builder Events
Events in Contact Builder allow you to take contact behavior into account as you segment and filter your audience. Use this information to begin marketing processes and activities within your account, including Journey Builder. The events collect data based on what actions your contact performs or occurrences involving your contact. You can target that behavior and modify your communications to better target that contact. For example, you can find out which contacts abandoned shopping carts and contact them to complete their order.
Event information flows into the application via the contactEvents REST API. This API provides event information for Marketing Cloud Engagement apps and writes that information to defined data extensions.
To bring event information into Contact Builder, complete these tasks.
- Define the event in Contact Builder (using a sendable data extension as the entity to hold the event data).
- Create the call using the contactEvents API to bring the information into the data extension linked to the event in Contact Builder.
The data extension used to contain this information must contain these fields.
- eventInstanceID
- parentInstanceEventID
- contactKey (This field identifies the data extension as sendable and links the event to the contact._
- data, including these fields:
- key, name, or ID identifying the data extension
- Name and value pairs for all applicable event data
The event source generates event IDs that link to the event information. These IDs identify the specific event for later use. The contactKey field maps to the contact to which Contact Builder associates the event data.
Ensure that you also include fields in the data extension used to contain any additional information provided by the event. The data extension must contain fields for all attributes to successfully write all data associated with the event. The name of these fields corresponds to the name part of the name and value pairs provided by the contactEvents REST API call.
For example, your data extension could include these name and value pairs.
- Customer Key (acruz@example.com)
- Order Number (123456)
- Order Total (177.99)
When you connect events to data extensions, you can access the data collected by an event as part of your segmentation and filtering activities. Use this data to determine how contacts receive information.
- Contact abandons cart on the shopping site.
- Event API collects data from the abandoned cart and passes information to Contact Builder.
- Event serializes information to data extension for usage.
After the information passes through the contactEvents REST API route to the data extension, Journey Builder can use that information to begin journeys or take steps within a journey. Journey Builder monitors that information and react accordingly to any additions or changes. You can interact with that information using the Journey Builder app and the Journey Builder Platform.
- Create an Event
Follow these steps to create an event in Contact Builder.
