Airship Destination

Airship gives brands the data, channels, orchestration and services they need to deliver push notifications, emails, SMS, in-app messages, and more to the right person at the right moment — building trust, boosting engagement, driving action, and growing value.

Airship Cloud-mode Destination integration enables users to set Airship tags, attributes, and custom events through Segment’s identify, track, and group API calls.

Segment track API calls are received by Airship as Custom Events. The traits of the Segments identify API call are interpreted as either tags or attributes. Tags are all traits that contains a boolean value (either true or false). A trait which contains a non-boolean value – and is known to Airship – becomes an attribute.

Segment group API calls associate a named user with a group. Similar to identify API calls, group calls contain a set of traits that Airship uses as tags and attributes.

This destination is maintained by Airship. For any issues contact the Airship Support team.

Getting Started

Follow these steps to configure the integration

1. Log in to your Segment workspace
2. Go to the Catalog and click the Destinations tab.
3. Find the Airship destination (under SMS & Push Notifications), click the Airship tile and then click the Configure Airship button.
4. In the Select Source dialog, select a source and click Confirm Source.
5. Toggle on Airship EU Data Center if you are implemented in Airship’s European Data Center (if you are not sure which data center you are on please contact the Airship support team).
6. Enter the App Key and Access Token that you copied when setting up the Real-Data Streaming integration in Airship. See Airship documentation for steps to create an Access Token.
7. For identify events, first set up a tag group within Airship.
8. For attributes, first predefine them in Airship.

Requirements

To use the Segment Destination integration, you must implement Named Users in Airship. The Segment UserID must match the Named User ID in Airship. If your named_user_id and UserID do not match, Airship will not be able to associate identify, track, or group events to the proper user in Airship. You will not be able to issue automated messages or to attach user attributes from Segment within Airship.

See Tags and Named Users or the Named Users API for more information about configuring named users.

Identify

To understand the Identify API call, review the Segment Identify spec. An example call looks like:

analytics.identify('jill', {
  new_customer: true,
  order_completed_last_60days: false,
});

The identify API calls are sent to Airship as identify events. When an identify event is received, Airship will use the userId to set attributes or tags for named users. To take advantage of attributes, you must first predefine them in Airship individually. To take advantage of identify features, in Airship you must set up a tag group called segment-integration and a named user must exist for the userId. The value of the property name will be either true or false.

Segment Identify Events to Airship Attributes

Airship attributes are used for profile enrichment, message personalization, segment building, and user analytics.

Segment Identify Events to Airship Tags

Airship tags are used for profile enrichment, message triggering, segment building, and user analytics.

Example use cases in Airship:

• An identify event sets a tag to mark the user as liking a specific product category
• An identify event sets an attribute on a user who registers for an account

Track

Use this destination to send track events to Airship for message triggering and analytics.

For more information about the Track API call review the Segment Track spec. An example call looks like:

analytics.track('Product Clicked', {
  name: 'Air Jordans',
  brand: 'Nike ',
  price: 200,
  quantity: 1,
  variant: 'Red'
});

The track API calls are sent to Airship as track events. As soon as a track event is received, Airship will create a custom event. The properties of the the track event are automatically added as properties on the custom event. If revenue is present for the track event, then it is set as the value of the custom event.

Segment Track Events to Airship Custom Events

Airship custom events are used to trigger automated messages for Mobile App, Web Notifications, Email, and SMS messages.

Example use cases:

• The track event triggers an Airship custom event on a user who has abandoned a cart and an Airship message is triggered for reengagement
• The track event triggers an Airship custom event on a user who has uninstalled the app to trigger an SMS, Email, or Web Notification

Custom events and tags sent from Segment are automatically populated within Airship Performance Analytics reporting dashboards.

Group

For more information about the Group API call review the Segment Group spec.

When you call group, the integration sets either Airship tags or attributes for corresponding Segment traits. A named user must exist in Airship for the corresponding value of userID in Segment.

UserID in Segment group API call

{
...
"userId": "test-user-69w86c"
...
}

Named user in the corresponding Airship payload

{
"audience": {
	"named_user_id": "test_user-69w86c"
},
...
}

Airship tags are set for those Segment traits that contain a boolean value (either true or false). All tags from group API calls are added to the segment-integration-group tag group.

A Segment group call with boolean traits

...
"traits:" {
	"hiring": true,
	"has-remote-employees": false,
	...
}
...

Setting the corresponding Airship tags

...
"add": {
	"segment-integration-group": ["hiring"]
},
"remove": {
	"segment-integration-group": ["has-remote-employees"]
}
...

For Segment traits that contain values of other types, such as numeric or text, Airship sets custom attributes. The integration maps the Segment group trait name to the Airship predefined attribute company. All other traits are prefixed with airship_segment_group_. Names of nested traits also include their parent traits delimited by underscore (_).

A Segment group call with non-boolean traits

...
"traits": {
	"name": "Initech",
	"industry": "Technology",
	"employees": 329,
	"address": {
		"city": "Portland",
		...
	}
}
...

Setting the corresponding Airship attributes

...
"attributes": [
{
	"action": "set",
	"key": "company",
	"value": "Initech",
	...
},
{
	"action": "set",
	"key": "airship_segment_group_industry",
	"value": "Technology",
	...
},
{
	"action": "set",
	"key": "airship_segment_group_employees",
	"value": 329,
	...
},
{
	"action": "set",
	"key": "airship_segment_group_address_city",
	"value": "Portland",
	...
}
...

Leverage this data in Airship

The following guides further explain the different ways of leveraging this data with Airship.

• Cloud-mode Custom Events vs Audience Tags
• Message Targeting with Tags
• Creating a Segment with Tags
• Message Automation with Event Triggering
• Message Personalization with Attributes

Engage

You can send computed traits and audiences generated using Engage to this destination as a user property. To learn more about Engage, schedule a demo.

For user-property destinations, an identify call is sent to the destination for each user being added and removed. The property name is the snake_cased version of the audience name, with a true/false value to indicate membership. For example, when a user first completes an order in the last 30 days, Engage sends an Identify call with the property order_completed_last_30days: true. When the user no longer satisfies this condition (for example, it’s been more than 30 days since their last order), Engage sets that value to false.

When you first create an audience, Engage sends an Identify call for every user in that audience. Later audience syncs only send updates for users whose membership has changed since the last sync.

Settings

Segment lets you change these destination settings from the Segment app without having to touch any code.