Segment makes it easy to send your data to Appcues (and lots of other destinations). Once you've tracked your data through our open source libraries we'll translate and route your data to Appcues in the format they understand. Learn more about how to use Appcues with Segment.

Our Appcues destination code is open-source on GitHub if you want to check it out.

Getting Started

To install Appcues via Segment, add your Appcues ID and API key (found on your Appcues account page) to your Segment destinations settings.

JS and Server-side Destinations

Appcues provides two Segment destinations.

The first, our JavaScript destination with Segment’s analytics.js, is the traditional way to use Appcues as part of the Segment platform. Calls to analytics.identify are used to indicate user properties, and analytics.page or analytics.track will send events to the Appcues API.

Separately, Appcues 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. (Note that this is different from Segment Sources, which allows you to bring multiple sources of Segment data together in your own data warehouse.)

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.

JavaScript API

Identify

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

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.

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.

Appcues Features

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.

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.

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

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

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.

If you have any questions, or see anywhere we can improve our documentation, please let us know!