Custom events

Overview

An ‘event’ in Ometria is any action taken by a contact which can be used to either segment or trigger a campaign. E.g. Placing an order, visiting your website, etc.

Ometria has a number of in-built events, but custom events allow you to define your own automation campaign trigger, for example: 

• wish list event
• customer visited an offline store
• customer has visited a specific webpage or has completed a specific action on a website.

These events will also be made available for you to use in your email templates.

Custom events are passed to Ometria via an API call.  You can find details of the API endpoint and the object definition in our API Reference.

You can use custom events to trigger automation campaigns and to segment your contacts in the customer filter. 

Setup

If you’re interested in implementing a custom event for your automation campaigns, please speak with your customer success manager to discuss your use case. 

We require the following information from you:

• The event type you would like to use, e.g. wish list event.
• Any top-level properties you would like to be able to segment on in the automation flow.
• Any values in the properties object which represent a product ID. This can then be used to pull in the information which Ometria holds on this product (eg. title, price, image).

Ometria will:

• Create the custom event and associated fields in the platform
• Enable the custom event in the automation campaigns builder.

Your developers will need to set up the API call and test it.

You are responsible for all of the logic for your custom event - you will need to send us the event data and information. 

Note: You only need to supply data which you consider relevant for a specific custom event, as we will use product IDs to find the product details.

For example, if the custom event is to trigger an email when a contact visits a specific webpage, you must track this contact and send us the event when it happens - this will not be set up in Ometria.

Properties

Properties are the custom fields within a custom event, defined by you.

All properties in the request are made available for use in email templates. For example, {{ event.special_discount }} which will pull up the discount for anyone who has visited that specific page.

Note: Fields within a custom event triggered campaign only populate with the data you supply in your API call. A custom event campaign cannot use data held in the Ometria platform.

If you trigger a campaign without a value assigned to these fields then there will be blank areas in your email content. 

Fields

The following field types are available for custom events:

Timestamps

The timestamp in a custom event is used by Ometria to trigger when the custom event is added to an automation flow.

You can use timestamps in the following ways:

• A timestamp in the past will not enter the contact into the automation flow.
• A timestamp set to the current time and date enters the contact into the automation flow immediately.
• A timestamp set in the future will enter the contact into the automation flow when that time and date occurs.

Note: Automation flows can have 1000 contacts in at any one time. If your custom event will enter more than 1000 contacts with the same timestamp, then batch the timestamps in increments of approximately 5 minutes and send 1000 per increment.

Templates

You can use your existing automation templates with custom events or the Ometria team can create new templates if required, please ask your CSM for details.

If you are creating your own templates, the merge tag format for custom events is {{ event.property }}