Best way to track events our contacts take in our app
Hi,
I’m a developer who is in the process of setting up integration between my company’s app and our hubspot account. The main goal is to be able to track certain events our users are taking within our app and allow the sales team to segment users in hubspot based on what actions users have taken.
Going through the list of API’s it seems that there are two main ways to do this. First would be the Events API. Second would be the timeline API.
The timeline API seems like the way to go but it also seems like it’s overkill for our particular use case. There is no easy interface to set up events and we also would have to set up oauth integration w. hubspot. This is in contrast to other products where you’d normally get a token. Likewise there doesn’t seem to be an official library/framework we can use to make these timeline calls - we’ll have to implement that ourselves.
The Events API seems simpler but is also limited to Enterprise customers. It also seems to be somewhat more constrained.
Before I started working on the Timeline API integration I wanted to make sure I haven’t missed anything and that I’m understanding this correctly. Is there a simpler way for me to achieve what I’m trying to do - namely to get events showing up/associated to our contacts and then do smart lists/segment our users based on those events.
Best way to track events our contacts take in our app
@bgraner and @WebGordon great conversation, I know i’m totally late to the party but I wanted to share what I did in case this could be helpful to someone else. I was building a mobile app for a client that was on HubSpot as well. Our goal was to create contacts in HubSpot from our mobile app users. Our idea turned into a full fledged product called AppLink.io.
AppLink.io puts app user data right in your HubSpot CRM, allowing them to see app activity associated with that user. You can even trigger workflows based on their activity. We built our own proprietary SDK along with a HubSpot integration that leverages the Timeline and Workflows API.
Best way to track events our contacts take in our app
Hi @bgraner - great questions. I think you’re on the right track about the differences between events and the timeline API. They are similar, but the Timeline API affords a bit more flexibility with the ability to define custom fields for the timeline events themselves (e.g. device type, app version, etc.).
If you’re looking for a simple solution to get your team moving, you might also consider just using the Contacts API. If there are a set of actions that are most important to track (e.g. Created Profile, Activated Feature X, Added Payment Method, etc.) then you could pre-define those actions as date contact properties. This way you would be able to segment contacts who have completed Action X, and also contacts who have completed Action X in the last week. Let me know what you think, or if you have any questions!
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