Understanding the data types—attributes and events

With Engage, you can track two types of user data—attributes and events.

Attributes are distinctive user properties like gender, location, wallet balance, or plan name.

Events are actions your users perform within your application. Examples: "Clicked a button", "Visited home page", "Placed an order".

Engage lets you track any attribute and event. The choice you go with will depend on how you plan to use the data for messaging or segmentation.

As an example, when a user upgrades their plan, there are two different ways you can track the data:

1. You can track the new plan’s name as an attribute

2. You can track the upgrade action with plan details as an event

Either works depending on how you want to later use that information. If you need to later segment users by when they upgrade or how many upgrades they have done, then tracking as an event is the better option. If you only need to know the user's current plan at any time, then tracking as an attribute works.

Generally, if you are not interested in when the data changed or the previous value of the data, track it as an attribute. When you track an attribute, the value overwrites the previous value (if one exists). In order words, only the latest value of an attribute is stored. If you want to track changes to the data over time, then track it as an event. Engage stores each event data with the date so you can do things like segment users by that event and date or the number of times the event has occurred.

We have a select list of attributes we use internally for customer identification and messaging. We call these standard attributes. They are:

• first_name and last_name - The customer's first name and last name. We use these as primary identifiers for each customer profile. This simplifies identification, search, and referencing for you.

• number - The customer's phone number in international format (numbers only). When you initiate a send-SMS action through campaigns or automation, this is the property we deliver the message to.

• email - The customer's email. When you initiate a send-email action either through campaigns or automation, this is the property we deliver the message to.

• device_token - A unique identification number linked to the customer's device. When you initiate a send-push notification event through a campaign or automation, this is the property we send it to. Engage tracks up to 5 device tokens and platforms for each customer.

• device_platform - The mobile device platform the device token is gotten from. The value is either ios or android