Setting up custom events

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.

Note: Date type custom events can't be used as automation campaign triggers.

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 also send custom events from your mobile app after integrating with the Ometria SDK.

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

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

We need 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.
An example payload, including any properties that represent a product ID. We can use property IDs to access your product catalogue data stored in Ometria.

Example payload:

[
{
"@type": "custom_event",
"id": "123456789",
"timestamp": "2023-05-25T15:32:52+00:00",
"event_type": "example",
"properties": {
"Store": "example store",
"event_time": "2023-05-25T15:32:25Z",
"product_id": [
"12345"
],
"variant_id": [
"54321"
],
"product_name": "Example product",
"product_price": 20.99,
"product_quantity": 1
},
"identity_email": "ometria@example.com"
}
]

Note: Try to keep your event type name under 64 characters in length - event types with longer names will be truncated.

Ometria will:

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

Your developers will then 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.

See also:

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 }}

Testing your email with a custom event block

Custom event blocks don't display in the visual editor.

This is because the data isn't available in the editor for a preview, as the block uses data from the payloads passed in the event.

To see a preview of your custom event block, create an automation campaign using the event as an entry trigger and select the template with the block you want to check.

Set the campaign to testing mode and then check the preview in campaign performance to see your block populated.