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 weeks. The Appcues JavaScript Destination is open-source. You can browse the code on GitHub.

Getting Started

1. From the Segment web app, click Catalog.
2. Search for “Appcues” in the Catalog, select it, and choose the source you’ll connect to the destination.
3. In the destination settings, enter your Account ID (for client-side integration functionality) and/or your API Key (for server-side integration functionality) from the Appcues account page.

Server

As an alternative to a traditional JavaScript implementation, Appcues offers a server-side destination with Segment.

You may find the server-side destination useful if you’d like to send user profile or event data to Appcues from another Segment partner service. You can use the server-side destination alongside the JavaScript destination, which you may find preferable to routing all data through the JavaScript destination.

As with the JavaScript destination, you can segment and target user profile and event data received through the Appcues server-side Segment destination.

For example, using the server-side destination, you can direct customer profile and event data from a CRM tool into Appcues. You can then use the directed data for content targeting and user segmentation in the Appcues content editor, alongside data from Segment’s analytics.js destination.

Page

Refer to the Segment Spec for information about the Page method. The following represents an example page call:

analytics.page();

Each time the page changes, Appcues checks to see if a user qualifies for an experience. 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

Refer to the Segment Spec for information about the Identify method. The following represents an example identify call:

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

When you call identify with Analytics.js, Segment calls Appcues.identify. This is the preferred method of using and targeting on user properties.

To get the most out of Appcues, you should send as much user data as possible in the identify call. Properties personalize content and target experiences to specific users. Most Appcues customers send properties that fall into one of the following 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

Group

Refer to the Segment Spec for information about the Group method. The following represents an example group call:

analytics.group("0e8c78ea9d97a7b8185e8632", {
  name: "Initech",
  industry: "Technology",
  employees: 329,
  plan: "enterprise",
  "total billed": 830
});

When you call group with Analytics.js, Segment calls Appcues.group. This is the preferred method of using and targeting on account-level properties.

Track

Refer to the Segment Spec for information about the Track method. The following represents an example track call:

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

Calls to analytics.track also invoke Appcues.track. As a result, the call sends event data to Appcues, where you can use it for future content triggering.

Sending Appcues events to other Segment partner services

Appcues supports sending events to other tools on the Segment platform. This capability allows you to read Appcues events in your third-party analytics or marketing automation tools.

These events are sent as track calls to the other destinations you’ve turned on. The following shows a partial list of trackable Appcues content lifecycle events:

• 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.

After you activate the Segment integration, Appcues forwards these events to your Segment workspace. The events will appear in the same Source Debugger.

Whitelisted Domains

By default, Appcues targets based on the URL’s path.

For example, if you create an Appcues experience and target it to /integrations, it appears wherever the embed script is installed with that URL path, like appcues.com/integrations and my.appcues.com/integrations.

If you’ve installed the Analytics.js script on multiple domains (like a marketing site and your web app), you should use Appcues-whitelisted domains when targeting your experience.

Delete

When you trigger a user deletion using Segment’s Privacy features, Segment forwards an actionable delete notification to Appcues. Refer to the Appcues documentation for information on how Appcues handles deletion requests.

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.