Hull Destination

Hull is the one place to collect, transform, enrich, filter, search and segment customer data in all your tools.

It helps you creates a single actionable profile and uniform segments that sync to all your tools and make cross-channel, end-to-end personalization easy.

Getting Started

Hull receives data from Segment using the Segment Ship. Here’s how to install it:

Install the Segment Ship on your organization. If you just installed Hull, click on “Add a ship” on the overview page.

Pick the Segment Ship from the list.

Enter the Segment ship Settings, Copy the API Key

Paste it into your destinations page. Alternatively, just click the “Enable with Segment” button.

Tracking Data from anonymous users and Leads

Enable Guest Users in your Dashboard’s Settings > User Authentication > Login Options. This will create users for each identify call, even those without a User ID which is useful to track Leads.

This is disabled by default because it can greatly increase the number of users in your database. When enabled, users will be tracked from their very first visit and action, allowing you to build segments based on complete customer journeys.

Publishing data back to Segment

If you enter your Segment Write Key in the Ship’s settings, then Hull will send customer data to Segment. When a user enters or leaves a Hull segment, a new identify call with be sent with the following traits :

analytics.identify(userId, {
  "hull_segments": ["all","matching","segment","names"],
  "custom_1": "value_1",
  "custom_2": "value_2",
},{
  "groupId": "user's group Id if he has one"
})

In the Ship settings, you can choose which traits are sent to Segment.com. This lets you send any trait that has been computed or collected from enrichment steps to other tools.

You can also filter in the Ship Settings the customer segments will be sent back to Segment.com to those matching one or more of your Hull segments.

Features

Hull supports the identify, page, screen, track, and group methods.

Hull stores customer properties and events and makes them available for segmentation in the Dashboard.

From there you can create and save audiences, transform and enrich customer data with Ships.

Identify

Every user identified on Segment with a userId will be created as a User on Hull. Segment’s userId will be mapped to Hull’s external_id field.

The following traits will be stored as first level fields on the User object

• address
• created_at
• description
• email
• first_name
• image
• last_name
• name
• phone
• picture
• username

All other attributes from the identify call will be stored as custom traits on Hull.

Track

Every track in Segment will create a new Event on Hull with "source":"segment".

Screen

Every screen in Segment will create a new Event on Hull with "source":"segment" and "event":"screen".

Page

Every page in Segment will create a new Event on Hull with "source":"segment" and "event":"page".

Group

Group calls in Segment will apply the group’s traits as traits on the users that belong to the group.

For instance:

analytics.group("123", { name: "Wonderful", city: "Paris" });

will add the following traits on all users that belong to the group :

{
  "group": {
    "id": "123",
    "name": "Wonderful",
    "city": "Paris"
  }
}

Internally, we flatten objects and use ‘/’ as a separator. They’re really stored as traits_group/name. Our sources handle nesting for you when you receive data coming from Hull

Note: This feature is optional and not enabled by default. You should only enable it if your users can only belong to one group.

Personas

You can send computed traits and audiences generated through Segment Personas to this destination as a user property. To learn more about Personas, reach out for a demo.

For user-property destinations, an identify call will be sent to the destination for each user being added and removed. The property name will be the snake_cased version of the audience name you provide with a true/false value. For example, when a user first completes an order in the last 30 days, we will send an identify call with the property order_completed_last_30days: true, and when this user no longer satisfies we will set that value to false.

When the audience is first created an identify call is sent for every user in the audience. Subsequent syncs will only send updates for those users which were added or removed since the last sync.

Supported Sources and Connection Modes

The first step is to make sure Hull supports the source type and connection mode you’ve chosen to implement. You can learn more about what dictates the connection modes we support here.

To learn more about about Connection Modes and what dictates which we support, see here.

Segment offers an optional Device-based Connection Mode for Mobile data with Hull. If you’d like to use those features that require client-based functionality, follow the steps above to ensure you have packaged the Hull SDK with Segment’s.

Settings

Segment lets you change these destination settings from your Segment dashboard without having to touch any code.

API Key

Get your API key from the Segment Ship settings in your Hull Account