Appcues Destination

Appcues adds an experience layer to your product, so you can build user onboarding, NPS surveys, or feature announcements in minutes instead of in weeks. The Appcues JavaScript Destination is open-source. You can browse the code on GitHub.

This document was last updated on November 08, 2018. If you notice any gaps, outdated information or simply want to leave some feedback to help us improve our documentation, please let us know!

Use Cases

Getting Started

The first step is to make sure Appcues 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.

	Web	Mobile	Server
📱 Device-based	✅
☁️ Cloud-based		✅	✅

From your Segment UI’s Destinations page click on “Add Destination”.
Search for “Appcues” within the Destinations Catalog and confirm the Source you’d like to connect to.
Drop in your Appcues Id (for client-side integration functionality) and/or your API Key (for server-side integration functionality) from the Appcues account page.

Server

Although our JavaScript destination is the traditional way to use Appcues as part of the Segment platform, Appcues also offers a server-side destination with Segment, which is useful if you’d like to send user profile or event data to Appcues from another Segment partner service. The server-side destination may be used simultaneously with the JS destination. In many cases, this is preferable to routing all data through the JS destination.

The user profile and event data received through Appcues’ server-side Segment destination can be used to segment and target Appcues flows, just like data received from the JS destination.

For example, using the server-side destination, customer profile and event data could be directed from a CRM tool into the Appcues platform. This data could then be used for content targeting and user segmentation in the Appcues content editor, alongside data from our analytics.js destination.

Page

If you haven’t had a chance to review our spec, please take a look to understand what the Page method does. An example call would look like:

analytics.page();

Appcues will check to see if a user qualifies for an experience every time the page changes. When you first call page using analytics.js, Appcues.start checks if there are any current flows for the user and loads them if necessary.

Identify

If you haven’t had a chance to review our spec, please take a look to understand what the Identify method does. An example call would look like:

analytics.identify('12091906-01011992', {
  name: 'John Joe',
  email: 'john.doe@example.com'
});

When you identify on analytics.js, we call Appcues.identify. This is the preferred method of using and targeting on user properties.

To get the most out of Appcues, you’ll want to send as much user data as possible in the identify call. Properties are used to target experiences to specific users and personalize content. Most Appcues customers send properties that fall into a few groups:

Properties to target based on broad classifications such as role or userType
Properties to personalize Appcues content such as name, firstName or company
Properties to target based on user lifecycle such as createdAt (date) or usage metrics such as numTasksComplete

Track

If you haven’t had a chance to review our spec, please take a look to understand what the Track method does. An example call would look like:

analytics.track("step_activated", {
  property: "test"
});

Calls to analytics.track invoke Appcues.track as well. This will send event data to the Appcues platform, where it can be used for future content triggering.

Sending Appcues events to other Segment partner services

Want to read Appcues events in your 3rd party analytics or marketing automation tool? Appcues supports sending events to other tools on the Segment platform. These events will be sent as track calls to the other destinations you’ve turned on. A partial list of Appcues content lifecycle events that can be tracked:

flow_shown
flow_skipped
flow_finished
flow_form_submission
form_field_submission
step_activated
hotspots_shown
hotspots_skipped
hotspots_completed
hotspot_activated
coachmarks_shown
coachmarks_completed

To enable this feature, go to the Integrations Settings in Appcues and click “Activate” under the Segment integration.

Whitelisted Domains

By default, Appcues will target based on the path of the URL. So if we created an Appcues experience and targeted it to /integrations, it would appear wherever the embed script is installed with that URL path, like appcues.com/integrations and my.appcues.com/integrations. If your analytics.js script is installed on multiple domains (e.g. your marketing site and your web app), you’ll want to use Appcues whitelisted domains when targeting your experience.

Delete

When you trigger a user deletion via our Privacy features, we will forward a delete notification to Appcues, who will act on the notification. You can read more about how Appcues handles deletion requests in their docs here.

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.

Settings

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

API Key

Required for server-side integration functionality. You can find your API Key in your Appcues account page.

Appcues Id

Required for client-side integration functionality. You can find your Appcues ID in your Appcues account page.