Skip to content
Marc Boeker edited this page Jan 14, 2022 · 1 revision

Attractify

Introduction and idea

Attractify is an Customer Experience Platform. It is lightweight, can be used in any environment and respects your users data privacy. Our goal is to strengthen your digital strategy. Therefor we help you to understand the customers journey on all digital channels while in real time streaming predefined marketing actions to the user.

Overview

(Which components are used and how does the data-flow looks like?!) (TODO INSERT IMAGE HERE)

Getting started - Try our Demo

Get a first look into attractify by trying out our containerized playground.

Install it via one command:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/inovex/attractify/master/docker-compose.yml | docker-compose  -f /dev/stdin up

Once Attractify is started, you can visit the usecase-shop under http://localhost:8000

The API is available under http://localhost:8080. You can use the following credentials to login:

User: demo@example.com
Password: demo4321

Integrate in a project

We will explore the way to integrate Attractify into your website. As a prerequisit, you must create an API-Auth-Key [LINK API-Access] in order to communicate with the backend. Replace it with YOUR-API-KEY-HERE in the following javascript.

Furthermore the SDK-Script must be loaded before we can run our custom code. Get it through our CDN: https://cdn.attractify.io/sdk/v1.js

Since we want to track an event, we need to create it. [TODO INSERT GIF OF EVENT CREATION HERE]

Now let us write the code in order to identify the user, who is visiting the site and track on which site he currently is. Note that identify() is a function that the previous loaded SDK provides.

const attractify = new Attractify(
      "YOUR-API-KEY-HERE"
  );


  attractify.identify();
  attractify.track("Page Viewed", {
      page: window.location.href.replace(window.location.origin, "")
  });

Features

Attractify offers a variety of features. The following section explains them in deatil.

Channels

Channels define the source of your users. If you have a website and an app, you should create two separate channels. This makes it easier to examine your users behaviour on a per channel basis and helps you target each channel with different marketing actions. If a single user is identified by a consistent ID on your website and in your app, Attractify will merge all events of this user over both channels.

Parameters

  • Name - The name is only used to describe the channel.
  • Key - The key is used internally to track the source of events and destinations of marketing actions. We suggest to use a single, descriptive word like web, app, email.

It is not possible, to change the key after the channel has been created.

Actions

  • Edit channel
  • Delete channel

Deleting channels

If you delete a channel without stopping the event tracking or changing your audiences or marketing actions to a new channel, they will stop working. The best way is to leave a channel unused instead of deleting it.

Events

Events are the essential base for learning more about your user's behaviour. Each important action on your website or in your app should be reflected by an event definition. Events can contain additional properties with structured data to provide more context and to better understand your user.

Please note, that if you delete an event, we still keep all tracked instances of it.

Actions

  • Edit event
  • Delete event

Defining an event

An event has a name, a description and a list of properties. The name should follow a consistent naming convention to prevent confusion. We suggest something like Subject Action e.g. Page Viewed, Product Added To Cart or Checkout Completed.

You could also use camelCase like pageViewed, productAddedToCart or checkoutCompleted.

Properties

Properties are values that could be attached to an event to track additional information. When a user adds a product to the shopping cart, you can add the product's ID and price as a property. The more detailled the information you have tracked is, the better you can fine tune your audiences or marketing actions. You need to defined the properties ahead of tracking so that Attractify can validate the incoming properties against the definition. This ensures that only valid information is stored.

Parameters

  • Name - The name of the event. Must be unique. Please use a consistent naming schema.
  • Description - A description to better understand, what the event does.

Changing events

After an event is in use, you should be careful about changing its name or properties. Adding additional properties is no problem, but before removing or modifying a property, please make sure it is not used by computed traits or actions.

Changing an event name that is used by computed traits or audiences should be avoided.

Property parameters

A single property needs to be identified by a unique key. We cast the value to the given data type.

  • Key - The name of the property. Please use camelCase as naming schema.
  • Type - A data type for the property.
  • Regex Pattern - If you want to validate the value before casting it to the given data type, you could add you own regex.
  • Required - Indicates if the property must be supplied and valid.

Context

Contexts can contain additional information for events and actions. Maybe you want to target users from different countries or with different browsers? Or you want to know on which page on your website a specific event has occured. Then you can supply this additional information as context.

Each request that contains a context will be validated against the context definition.

How to define a context? Every context is associated with a channel. You can only assign one context to each channel as we're resolving the context definition on every event or action call based on its channel.

Event Log

The event log contains all events that have been tracked over all channels. You can filter these by event name or search for events from a specific user.

Actions

  • Show event with properties and context
  • Delete event

User Profiles

A user profile combines all events, identities and traits under a single persona. User profiles are automatically created if a tracking event or action request is received.

Each user profile will be assigned a unique ID to identify this user. If traits for a user were updated, the last updated timestamp is refreshed.

If you delete a profile, all associated identities and events will be deleted too.

Actions

  • Show profile
  • Refresh computed traits
  • Delete profile

What is a user profile?

A user profile contains all custom and computed traits as well as all identities and events for a single user.

Identities

A user profile can have multiple identities from one or more channels. Each identity has its own ID, a type, the channel it originates from and a flag if it is anonymous or not. The type can be freely chosen trough the identify API call and specifies what kind of ID is used. Examples are

  • email - for an email address
  • userId - if you use your internal user ID
  • mobileNumber - for a mobile subscriber number

and many more.

Custom traits

Custom traits are pieces of information that are already known to the organization and can be supplied using the identify API.

Computed traits

Compared to custom traits, computed traits are dynamically refreshed when a new tracking event is received.

Actions

  • Refresh profile

Custom Traits

Sometime your organization knows a lot more about a user than Attractify does, because the user is already a customer. In this case custom traits can help to, share that knowledge with Attractify.

You can supply these information through the identify API call. But to make sure, that only valid data is imported and stored in attractify, you need to create a schema. This ensures that only predefined properties with the corresponding data type are accepted.

The specifics of those properties are the same as in the event or context definition.

Changing custom traits after user profiles have been created does not pose a problem. Existing custom traits of a user profiles are not modified and new user profiles will get the new properties.

Computed Traits

A computed trait defines a single property of a user profile that is updated as soon as an event is tracked.

Parameters

  • Name - The name of the computed property.
  • Key - A key that is used to access this property later. We recommend camlCamse as a naming schema.
  • Type - The method that is used to compute the trait.
  • Event - The event that should be used for computation.
  • Property Name - Some methods require a single property that is selected here.
  • Aggregation Type - For aggregations, you need to specify a type.
  • Use timestamp instead of property value - For selecting a single event, you can either return the timestamp of the event or its value.
  • Property Name - If you want to return the property's value instead of its timestamp, select the property here.
  • Event conditions - Events that are used for computation can meet certain conditions.

Audiences

Audiences are a way to group user profiles together based on certain criteria. Sometimes you have tough requirements for a specific target group in your actions. Then you have to use audiences instead of targeting users by their traits.

Audiences can have one of two types:

  • Events
  • Funnel

Events and Funnel are configured the same way. The only difference is, that in a funnel the order of the events must match the definition whereas in a list of events, the order does not play an important role.

If you want to make sure, that a user has a specific journey, use funnels, otherwise events.

Actions

  • Refresh audience
  • Edit audience
  • Delete audience

Defining an audience

An audience is a dynamic group of user profiles that is computed based on the given criteria. Once an audience has been saved, its type cannot be changed.

Parameters

  • Type - Does the order of events matter, than choose Funnel else Events.
  • Name - A name for the audience.
  • Description - We suggest to describe your audience, so that others understand the idea behind it.
  • Include anonymouse profiles - You can in- or exclude profiles, that have not received an identify call.
  • Audience definition - Add one or more events with conditions, custom or computed traits.

Actions

An action is an instruction pushed to the end user's device to

  • show a specific piece of content
  • call for an interaction
  • modify the user's UI
  • ask for information
  • and many more.

Actions are building blocks to optimize the overall user experience. They only contain the content and meta information but no UI elements or styling. It is up to the frontend to define the appearance of an action.

But actions are not pushed to all users but instead are carefully targeted based on the given definitions.

An action implies a reaction. These are events which are triggered on the users device and help to measure if an action was successful or not. They are also used with the capping feature to prevent an action to be shown multiple times to the same user if he has declined it.

Actions

  • Analyze specific action
  • Set action to active, inactive or staging
  • Edit action
  • Delete action
  • Duplicate action

Defining an action

An action has metadata and detailled configuration options as shown below.

Parameters

  • Name - A name for your action.
  • Type - The type is used to signal the client that receives an action, how to display or handle the action properly. This should be in camelCase.
  • Tags - Tags are used to offer the client a possibility to request actions based on specific criteria. Tags can also be used to test different variants of an action.
  • State - Specifies if the action is active, inactive or in a staging state, which is used for testing.

An action is composed of different parts which are explained below:

Properties

Properties can be used to supply content or configuration to the corresponding UI element, which renders the action on the user's device. You can see them as parameters, which are customizable and/or can contain placeholders.

Different properties can also be shown on different channels. This is very useful to display an action differently on various devices. Maybe your text should be shorter on mobile and more explanative on desktop. Just specify the same property name with different values for different channels.

Properties can either be static text, or you can access custom or computed traits from the current user.

Targeting

To select which user should get which action, you can use targeting. The different targeting options work like filters put over each other. The more targeting options you sepcify, the more selective your targeting is.

The simplest form of targeting is to select one or more channels, your actions should be pushed to. To further restrict the number of affected users you can select an existing audience that contains a list of users.

If your action should only be active in a certain time range, start or end on a specific date, you can configure this using the time range option.

Last but not least you can filter users by their custom oder computed traits or the context, that is provided to the request.

Capping

Instead of spamming users with the same action over and over again, you can set a specific limit on the number of shows, hides, declines and accepts. You can also specify a time window to consider only the last X days.

Capping can also be used to define a number of limits not on a per user basis, but for all users in total. This is very useful to offer a specific number of coupons and not exceed that number.

You can also specify different quotas for different channels. This is especially helpful if you want to separte web and mobile as web users are more likely to ignore some information dialogs compared to mobile users.

Hooks

Hooks offer the possibility to attach external webhooks to actions. These are called once the selected reaction has been received from the user. An example would be, when the user accepts a coupon, the device will send the accept reaction to Attractify and Attractify will call the configured webhook which can redeem the coupon.

You can also specify to create an event once a reaction has been received. This is useful if you want to add users later which have reacted to a specific action to an audience.

Testusers

To be able to test an action in production, you can add a test user for this action. When an action is set to staging, you will still be able to test that action with the configured test user. Other users won't get that action pushed to their devices.

If you enable skip targeting, the action will be testable, regardless of the filters that are configured under targeting.

Reactions

Reactions are events, which are triggerd after a user has interacted with an action. This is used to measure the acceptance and popularity of an action and helps to further optimize that action.

Types of reactions

  • Delivered - Attractify has delivered an action to the user.
  • Shown - The action has been shown on the users device.
  • Hidden - The user has hidden the action.
  • Declined - The user has declined the action (stronger than hidden).
  • Accepted - The user has accepted the action.

Actions

  • Show reaction
  • Delete reaction

Analyze

To find out, if an action performed as anticipated, you can use the analyze feature. After selecting an action and optionally a date range and resulution, you see a drilldown of the reactions.

Events

Events is a simple summary how often a single event type has been tracked for the given action. As events drip from top to bottom, you see, at which step the action stopped performing well.

Rates

Rates expresses a ratio between the last and the current event. Maybe your action has been shown 10 times but is only accepted 5 times. Then you have a ratio of 2:1 and a conversion drop of 50 percent. This could be an indicator to optimize your action.

Reach

Reach is a per channel summary which event has been tracked how often. It helps you to see, which is the dominant channel for that action.

API Access

If you want to interact with Attractify you have multiple possibilities to do so.

Auth tokens for client integrations

To enable access to your clients (website, app, ...) you need to create an auth token. Each channel must use a spearate auth token. This is necessary to assign incoming requests to the corresponding channel.

Webhook signature key

Outgoing webhook requests for actions are signed. To verify the signature you need to obtain the webhook signature key, encoded as hex. The signature is an HMACSHA256(body) over the request's body with the given key.

Platform API access

To access APIs of the Attractify platform, which is the admin interface you are currently viewing, you need a JWT token. If you press Generate token we will generate a new token for you to use in your API client.

User Management

You can invite additional users or delete current ones. If you invite users, they'll receive an invitation email and can then sign up.

Parameters

  • Email - The user's email that should be invited.
  • Role - The role the user should have.

Roles

  • Admin - Has access to all features.
  • Marketeer - Can access everything except user management and organizational settings.

Your Organization

Here you can modify your organization's settings. Adjusting the timezone has an impact on incoming events, as they are stored in the selected timezone.

Parameters

  • Name - Your organization's name.
  • Timezone - The timezone your organization is operating in. This is used to store trackings under this timezone.

GDPR / DSGVO

The Attractify privacy features help you to comply with the GDPR or DSGVO.

You have the following options:

  • Export all stored data for a user.
  • Delete all stored data for a user.
  • Lock a user's identity to prevent further tracking.

Parameters

  • User ID - If you want to lock a user, simply enter the user's ID and further trackings for this ID will be blocked.

Your personal settings

Here you can either update your name or email address or change your password. If you want to change your password, make sure it is at least 8 chars long. We recommend a longer password (> 20 chars) with a combination of numbers (upper- and lowercase), letters and special chars.