Overview

Event Ingestion API environments

There are three different API endpoints you can send events to. The event references below use the dev environment.

Use these different endpoints to integrate with Simon based on the environments you deploy to.

All request payloads sent to Simon's Event Ingestion API will have the following:

If you do not know your partner ID, contact your account manager.

The optional context attributes:

Sending clickstream data to Simon Data

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Exceptions and debug mode

If you're unsure about whether your event is correctly formatted, you can use the debug mode. Exceptions will be silent unless the debug mode is active. Check out the details below.

The identify command

This is an example of an identify call:

{
    "partnerId": "804f98b48491143c2e4f2ffea854eb372a41bbfd",
    "clientId": "92adbc3c-c22b-49bf-a9ae-11d9e8b3e6b4",
    "context": {
        "version": "1.0.0",
        "name": "simon.js",
        "debug": true,
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36",
        "page": {
            "url": "http://localhost:9000/index.html"
        }
    },
    "partnerSecret": "1294b7e58f37568396b31ce481cf8edc1e6cfcb5",
    "sentAt": 1524776691259,
    "ipAddress": "127.0.0.1",
    "timezone": 240,
    "type": "identify",
    "userId": "97980cfea0067",
    "traits": {
        "name": "test",
        "email": "[email protected]",
        "firstName": "Joe",
        "lastName": "Smith",
        "userId": "97980cfea0067",
        "username": "joesmith",
        "properties": {
            "campaignId": "12345"
        }
    }
}

A call to identify establishes the identity associated with a userId. The variable userId is a user identifier that you specify. identify can be called to pass information when a source of identity is recognized, such as an authenticated login, an click from an email with an identity URL parameter, and signup for newsletter subscription. Different types of identifiers can be passed on.

Calling identify does not automatically establish identity for all subsequent track events. Include traits within the track calls to accomplish this.

When a user registers with you for the first time, you should call identify and also make a separate call to registration.

Valid values for the traits dictionary are as follows.

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Next-Gen Identity

If your organization is on Next-Gen Identity, you can use any native identifier present in your organization's account. Email address is no longer required.

Next-Gen Identity is currently in a Limited Beta. Most accounts are currently on Legacy Identity unless told otherwise. Contact your account manager for more detail.

A note about identify and AWS SNS. The following fields should be set in your identify call for Simon to properly keep track of SNS identities:

• userId: Set this to the internal user id for the user
• context.device.type: Set this to the device type of the device to be synced with SNS. The value can be ios,android,kindle, or windows
• traits.ARN: Set this to the AWS SNS ARN of the user's device

The track command

A track command may be invoked to pass user-interaction data to Simon Data. These user-interactions are captured by specific events that are documented in this API and are explained in more detail below. Each event has an Event Type specifying the name of the event and an associated Event Object which contains additional metadata about the event.

An example track command for a page_view event:

{
    "partnerId": "804f98b48491143c2e4f2ffea854eb372a41bbfd",
    "clientId": "92adbc3c-c22b-49bf-a9ae-11d9e8b3e6b4",
    "context": {
        "version": "1.0.0",
        "name": "simon.js",
        "debug": true,
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36",
        "page": {
            "url": "http://localhost:9000/index.html"
        }
    },
    "partnerSecret": "1294b7e58f37568396b31ce481cf8edc1e6cfcb5",
    "sentAt": 1524776691259,
    "ipAddress": "timezone": 240,
    "type": "track",
    "properties": {
        "title": "SimonJS Test Page",
        "language": "en-US"
    },
    "event": "page_view"
}

Note that this looks much like the identify call above with the exceptions that the type is track, instead of traits we have properties, and we have an extra parameter called event.

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Establishing identity within a 'track' call

Use traits containing userId and email parameters in the payload as a method to establish the identity associated with the track event, as in the below example.

{
    "partnerId": "804f98b48491143c2e4f2ffea854eb372a41bbfd",
    "clientId": "92adbc3c-c22b-49bf-a9ae-11d9e8b3e6b4",
    "context": {
        "version": "1.0.0",
        "name": "simon.js",
        "debug": true,
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36",
        "page": {
            "url": "http://localhost:9000/index.html"
        }
    },
    "partnerSecret": "1294b7e58f37568396b31ce481cf8edc1e6cfcb5",
    "sentAt": 1524776691259,
    "ipAddress": "127.0.0.1",
    "timezone": 240,
    "type": "track",
    "properties": {
        "title": "SimonJS Test Page",
        "language": "en-US"
    },
    "event": "page_view",
    "userId": "97980cfea0067",
    "traits": {
        "name": "test",
        "email": "[email protected]",
        "firstName": "Joe",
        "lastName": "Smith",
        "userId": "97980cfea0067",
        "username": "joesmith",
        "properties": {
            "campaignId": "12345"
        }
    }
}

Parameters

The properties that can be specified within the properties object literal vary depending on the event type.

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Using custom properties

The event schema is enforced and events that are missing required properties or include unrecognized properties will be rejected during processing. Using the debug mode during your integration set-up will let you know that this is happening. However, all event types support custom properties within the properties.properties part of the payload (see an example for product view events). The API also supports custom events if there is not a pre-existing matching event type, but make sure to adhere to the schema for those events, too.