File-based Events

Overview

As part of your Extole programs, you are leveraging your customers to become engaged participants who promote your brand. Throughout the customer journey, participants will typically make conversions of some type, such as a purchase, account opening, and so on. When a conversion event is completed through your online channel, the most common way to notify Extole of the event is to place tags on your confirmation page. For more details, check out our JavaScript SDK.

If your business starts online, but completes key events over the phone or in person, then it makes more sense to use Extole tags for signup or application events on your site and then use files to send purchase or account opening events to Extole.

A common example is when a friend follows a link to a website and enters a lead form into a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The conversion is then completed by a sales agent. In this case, it makes sense to have the CRM send a list of these purchase events into the Extole system. These events become conversion events in Extole and go through all the standard event approval methods and incentive configurations.

As part of launch, your Extole team will provide you with a custom program design document with a flow that illustrates how your program is set up.

Example Events for Different Advocation Programs

File Naming Conventions

The file should be uploaded to the Extole SFTP system at: <your email>@sftp.extole.io:/events.

There are two ways to tell Extole the type of Event your file contains. Name the file with the syntax $EVENT-$ANYTHING (e.g., reviews-20201015.csv) or pass the event name through as part of a key-value pair in a row of your file (e.g., event_name: reviews). If both the title of the file and event_name are present, the value of event_name will take higher precedence. If none are present, the event will be labeled unspecified.

For details on using SFTP and the Extole SFTP Server, check out our article on Using Extole's SFTP Server.

You can also access the interface in My Extole to view file processing in the Tech Center. This interface will allow you to upload, download, and view files and subscribe to failure alerts.

Event File Records

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Advocate Recognition

You should provide all transactions to Extole and the transactions will be run through the Extole advocate recognition process to find referrals based on coupon code, friend email address, partner user ID, partner conversion ID.

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Configurable and Renameable Fields

There are no "standard events" with Extole, only your specified business events. In other words, it's possible to send any event to Extole.

All of the names of data elements for events can be renamed and additional data fields can be passed to be used for targeting, personalization, quality, and reward rules.

Input File Example

Filename: /events/2147483647_purchase_20130619000000.csv

event_name,email,coupon_code,event_time,order_id,cart_value
purchase,[email protected],AAA123,2013-06-19T10:12:53-0700,00540000001PULM,20.34
purchase,[email protected],AAA124,2013-06-19T11:42:51-0700,00540000001O1fi,100.28
purchase,[email protected],AAA125,2013-06-19T12:16:12-0700,0064000000QP7SN,99.99